End of the World (La fin du monde)
Gaumont has done right by this orphaned opus from France’s silent film genius Abel Gance’s — his follow-up to Napoléon is a supremely hubristic science fiction epic that’s half social hysteria and half mystical insanity. Gance casts himself as a Christ figure who reunites the world in the face of an impending astral collision; his producers put his bizarre three-hour cut through an editorial shredder. The disastrous early sound epic veers between incompetent dramatics and highly-effective special effects sequences. It’s a 2021 restoration, slightly longer than earlier versions and in much better shape, picture and sound.
End of the World
Blu-ray
Kino Classics
1931 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 96 92, 54 min. / Street Date July 19, 2023 / La fin du monde, vue, entendue, interprétée d’apres un théme de Camille Flamarion par Abel Gance / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Abel Gance, Victor Francen, Colette Darfeuil, Sylvie Grenade (Gance), Samson Fainsilber, Jean d’Yd, Georges Colin.
Cinematography: Maurice Forster, Roger Hubert, Jules Kruger, Nikolas Roudakoff
Art Directors: César Lacca, Lazare Meerson, Jean Perrier, Walter Ruttman
Film Editors: Mme. Bruyere, Marguerite Renoir
Matte Painter: W. Percy Day
Original Music: Arthur Honegger, Maurice Marthenot, Michel Levine, R. Siohan, Vladimir Zederbaum
Written by Jean Boyer, H.S. Kraft, Abel Gance from a story by Camillle Flammarion
Produced by K. Ivanoff
Directed by Abel Gance
One of the biggest disasters in French cinema history, Abel Gance’s La fin du monde (End of the World) has been restored and reissued by Gaumont. Once again we can thank the Kino Lorber organization for resurrecting an exotic science fiction classic, the kind previously remembered only in reference books: Woman in the Moon, Gold, F.P. 1 Doesn’t Answer, Deluge.
The Daily Variety review from February 11, 1931 judged La fin du monde a complete artistic and commercial catastrophe, placing the blame squarely at the feet of its ‘overreaching’ director. The movie was in production for almost two years and cost five million francs. It became the first all-talking French feature film. Gance spent a fortune on an unworkable stereophonic sound system; his plan was to use the three-screen ‘tryptych’ technique from his masterpiece Napoléon. His producers eventually pulled the film from his hands.
The experts say that Gance’s cut of La fin du monde approached three hours, before the producers interceded. Its premiere length was reported as 105 minutess. The only version released in the United States was a 54-minute 1934 mishmosh that eliminates Gance’s story, and makes little sense whatsoever. *
The Mad Filmmaker.
La fin du monde was the Heaven’s Gate of its place and time, except that no effort has yet been made to rescue its reputation. Variety reported that its financiers released their own shortened version because they thought Gance was an irresponsible megalomaniac. The image of Gance as an egotistical loose cannon is borne out by the film’s original French title, which translates as
The End of the World, Seen, Heard and Rendered from an Idea by Camille Flammarion, by Abel Gance.
It’s not the most humble title one could imagine, but Gance does acknowledge a source author behind his work of genius. We must remember, in 1930, the story of a Comet striking Earth was not an everyday filmmaking idea. ←
Gance was convinced that he was an unequalled film artist; he believed that his cinematic mission was to save the world from a political and moral apocalypse. The investors must have been shocked to see Gance cast himself in the role of a modern prophet pointing the way to humanity’s salvation. The film initially lets us believe that the director is playing Christ, until the camera pulls back to reveal that he’s an actor in a Passion Play. It’s been suggested that apocalyptic Science Fiction films relate to resurgences of Christian revivalism that accompanied the introduction of radio and television. La fin du monde provides fuel for that theory, and aids in understanding the religious-political hysteria behind later films like Red Planet Mars.
We first saw clips from La fin du monde in Kevin Brownlow’s documentary on Silent European Cinema, Cinema Europe: interesting special effects of a bright heavenly body approaching Paris, and highlights of a wild orgy scene. Savant first wrote about La fin du monde in a 1999 web article called Those Astral Collision Movies. We’ve seen several incomplete versions, and an earlier Gaumont DVD that ran at PAL speed. This NTSC Blu-ray may be a minute or two longer.
The Comet LEXELL spells doom for the Earth.
Author, actor, poet & prophet Jean Novalic (Abel Gance) plays Jesus Christ in a church passion play. Socialite Isabelle Bolin (Sylvie Grenade) attends with her sweetheart, stock promoter Schomburg (Samson Fainsilber), who is entranced by the blonde actress playing Mary Magdalene, Geneviève de Murcie (Colette Darfeuil). Geneviève defies her scientist father Monsieur de Murcie (Jean d’Yd) to propose marriage to the impoverished actor-poet Jean. He he says they cannot marry because his destiny is to suffer for the redemption of mankind. Jean’s wealthy brother Martial Novalic (Victor Francen) is a famous astronomer and Nobel Prizewinner. He urges Jean to abandon his self-martyrdom and marry Geneviève, to no avail. Geneviève’s father is also an astronomer, and is jealous of Martial’s Nobel Prize fame. He accepts money from Schomburg to build a observatory better than Novalic’s. The always transactional Schomburg then announces his intention to court de Murcie’s daughter.
The apocalypse is heralded by the violation of women, one real and one not. Coming to the aid of a young woman being abused by her parents, the meek Jean is accused of rape, mobbed and critically wounded by a blow to the head. To Isabelle’s displeasure, Schomburg accompanies Geneviève to a fancy party, takes her back to her apartment and rapes her. In his observatory high atop Pic du Midi, Martial detects Lexell’s Comet in the constellation Gemini and computes that it is on a collision course with the Earth. The world will soon end.
Jean has already prophesized the coming apocalypse, which he says has arrived to ‘save the hearts of men.’ Doves alight on Jean’s bed as he asks Martial to swear to keep Lexell a secret, and to use the opportunity to teach men to love one another.
Martial confides to his colleagues that the Comet will strike in 114 days. They confirm his findings and honor his pledge of secrecy. After Jean is taken to an asylum, Martial and a despondent Geneviève listen to the phonograph recording he has left behind. Jean’s voice instructs them to become the shepherd and shepherdess of humanity. Geneviève must abandon her worldly life and help Martial inaugurate a new World Government. Geneviève sees a vision of Jean as Christ.
With 92 days left, a major war scare develops. Schomburg invests heavily in armaments. Martial informs his millionaire friend Werster (Georges Colin) about the coming cataclysm and enlists him to aid in a gigantic scheme to neutralize the influence of Schomburg and properly prepare humanity for a spiritual rebirth. Werster’s fortune allows Martial to buy a newspaper and a broadcast station. Geneviève helps to organize ‘Radio Novalic’s’ pacifist broadcasts, which jam conventional radio news declaring that war mobilization is imminent. When Radio Novalic announces the coming End of the World, stock markets plunge around the globe. Schomburg continues to buy, determined to quash Martial’s propaganda.
732 hours to go. Exhausted, Geneviève wishes she were back with Schomburg. De Murcie and Schomburg accuse Novalic of kidnapping Geneviève and using the Comet as a hoax to destroy the economy. A government minister orders Martial and Werster detained, but Martial’s agents learn of the arrest warrant via a hidden microphone, and escape. Their rebel newspaper and radio station are destroyed.
Backing the pro-war Schomburg, government media now suppresses the truth. The stock market rebounds. Schomburg chooses the night Martial claims the Comet will become visible to throw a huge party. Geneviève has returned to her father and joins Schomburg at the party. The war profiteer tells a group of gangsters that he’ll pay a million Francs if Martial and Werster are found dead before morning. The jealous Isabelle has overheard, and runs to warn Martial Novalic. At the party, everyone sees the Comet!
Thanks to Isabelle, Martial escapes an assassination attempt. Learning that full war mobilization will soon be announced, he and Werster rush to destroy the government’s broadcast antenna atop the Eiffel Tower. This time it is Geneviève that warns Martial, alerting him that Schomburg and his killers are ascending in an Eiffel Tower elevator.
With the end approaching, all humanity can now see the Lexell Comet with their own eyes. Radio Novalic resumes broadcasting. Martial calls for the first convention of the General States of the Universe to meet on August 5, the night before the predicted collision. The world prays as the Comet looms larger in the sky — Christians, Muslims, natives in Africa. Extreme weather ensues — blizzards, storms, tidal waves. With 32 hours to go, riots and drunken pandemonium break out. A thousand elite revelers bring musicians into a great hall for a feast and orgy. Monks carrying candles interrupt the orgy and lead the group in prayer.
As the orbits of Lexell and the Earth converge, Martial Novalic addresses the One World Congress, which unanimously agrees (including the U.S.A.) to unite all governments into a single harmonious entity. The Lexell Comet continues to rain destruction down on the Earth . . .
Even at its full 1931 release length, La fin du monde is a delirious misfire. On the technical level, it has all the flaws of a first talkie effort. Most dialogue scenes are one or two-take static setups interrupted by mismatched cutaways. Gance’s experimental audio process reportedly didn’t work properly, suggesting that the talking setups may have been hasty retakes. The attempt at a complex audio mix is a complete failure.
The real failure is Gance’s direction, his entire approach to filming. The action direction has the feel of silent serials, with too many chases, and the hero Martial Novalic repeatedly saved in the nick of time. Continuity is terrible: the key action sequence at the Eiffel Tower is barely comprehensible. Gance bombards the screen with crazy poetic effects, but neglects basic storytelling and character logic.
A big surprise is the film’s reasonable scientific banter. The tech-talk shared by Martial Novalic and his fellow astronomers (in several languages) is more convincing than that in George Pal’s When Worlds Collide. All of the special effects directly relating to the Comet are quite good. Matte expert Percy Day may be responsible for the scores of excellent illusions showing Lexell visible in broad daylight.
Drastic producer re-cutting is evident from the start. The title music cuts off rudely and is replaced by another cue just as the first scene begins. Several poetic montages appear to be chopped off after just a few shots, but elaborate, lengthy montages of stock market upheavals are retained. With Schomburg taking advantage of the panic selling, the connection between economic chaos and war mobilization feels influenced by France’s Stavisky scandals. Schomburg’s use of ‘Big Lies’ parallels America’s present-day political divide — Schomburg claims that Geneviève was kidnapped by Martial and Werster, that the Comet is a hoax in Novalic’s plot to take over the world.
The fierce storms and crazy weather that mark the approach of the Comet are accomplished with acceptable miniature effects, but they have been severely edited as well. Two scenes use the signature ‘flutter-cutting’ technique seen in other Abel Gance silent films, like 1923’s La roue. Gance also confects scores of images with multiple superimpositions, some more effective than others. Audiences of 1931 would likely be confused by Gance’s outdated silent movie techniques. Geneviève is working feverishly for Novalic, but Gance superimposes Schomburg’s face over her image. Underneath her dedication to Martial’s cause, does she really want sex with her rapist again?
The most creative special effect arrives with the close passing of the Comet, during the final World Government meeting. Gance distorts the images weirdly, an expressionist gimmick that feels like a subjective hallucination, Gance’s ‘paroxysm’ of tension. Is our vision literally being affected by the Comet’s gravitational-psychic influence? (top image ↑ )
It’s a new style — Everything but the Kitchen Sink.
Abel Gance’s basic directorial approach is all over the place, as if he had no plan at all. Standard locked-down coverage is intercut with dynamic angles, screwy non-compositions, and chaotic panning shots that look like an early version of Shaky-Cam. The jumbled continuity is likely worsened by the producers’ haphazard cut-down. Some scenes end very abruptly, as if chopped in half. Others are just orphaned bits, remnants of a previous cut thrown into a blendor.
The real crime is Gance’s overbearing, melodramatic sense. He rushes from one sensational or miraculous scene without the slightest sense of dramatic credibility. The heavy-breathing overstatement is ludicrous, like something from a 1912 tent show. The male characters are absurdly simplified — Schomburg is a sneering villain, and Martial is a righteous zealot, always barking out orders and scowling like Bela Lugosi. Jean’s beatified Christian saint is also too much of an exaggeration. Gance fumbles his own intentions in his opening Passion Play scene. We’re meant to be struck by Jean Novalic’s spiritual purity, but the focus shifts to Schomburg’s lustful attraction to the actress playing Mary Magdalene.
The female characters are even more thoughtlessly imagined. The men act out of intellectual and moral conviction, but the women are creatures of erratic, uncontrollable emotion. The raven-haired Isabelle and her friend ‘the princess’ are mindless playgirls that moon over Schomburg, the richest man they know. Both Isabelle and Geneviève are absurdly inconsistent — Isabelle warns Martial in fit of jealousy, while Geneviève goes from mooning over Jean Novalic, to her rape by Schomburg, to dedicating herself to Jean’s deathbed instructions to aid Martial. After rejecting Martial’s gestures of tenderness — “There’s no time for that now!”, she rushes back to Schomburg, proclaiming that she’s ‘just a weak woman’ and ‘only wants to laugh and live and love!’ Gance disparaged his directing contemporaries as commercial hacks — Clair, Duvivier, etc. — yet could learn a lot from them about basic rational characterization.
Aiming for Big and Important, the visionary artist Abel Gance only comes up with hysterical pacifist propaganda. He’s attracted to grandiose overstatment — in his earlier J’Accuse!, the dead of WW1 refuse to stay dead because Europe has not taken the proper steps to insure a lasting peace. La fin du monde would appear to be a response to a number of late 1920s phenomena: the resurgence of Christian revivalism on the radio, economic uncertainty, war jitters, and financial corruption scandals in the French government. Jean never mentions Jesus or God, but the message is clear. He is of course a literal Jesus figure, accompanied by doves and preaching the spiritual salvation of mankind in The End of Days.
Gance’s most progressive idea is that mass communication could be the key to the salvation of mankind — yet all we see is the abuse of communication technology. Novalic seizes the airwaves to drown out ‘lies’ with ‘the truth.’ He delays a declaration of war by jamming the government’s radio broadcasts. Novalic and Werster also wiretap a government meeting to outfox their enemies. Technology is now an essential tool of political power.
Frankly, I’d think that many 1931 audiences would have found Gance’s dress-up masquerade as Jesus to be in perfectly lousy taste. A montage of religious services around the world (often echoed in later apocalyptic epics) is marred by a scene of African natives speaking with squeaky ‘Micky Mouse’ voices. Perhaps the producers added that detail? The producers did not excise a scene showing Jean Novalic to be inspired by the teachings of Kropotkin, the theorist who proposed Anarchist Communism as the perfect framework for society.
Others have seen Fascist tendencies in the film, reminding us that Gance’s masterpiece Napoléon champions the emperor as a great Frenchman, negating the anti-nationalist message of J’Accuse. Martial Novalic claims emergency powers. He seizes national leadership with mass propaganda and by silencing the opposition, just as Schomburg accuses. Martial even murders his enemies in broad daylight. His ‘one world’ meeting resembles giant Nazi rallies to come. The strongest message in La fin du monde is that the masses should throw their support behind a strong leader with a righteous cause. Uh-oh.
Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London Paris.
The film’s most famous scene is an enormous orgy. Kevin Brownlow reported that a great many costumed extras were hired, the music and champagne were laid on and the crowd was told to ‘have at it’ while the camera crane moved overhead. The spectacle outdoes the Biblical romps in De Mille epics. One brief shot appears to show dozens of lovers lined up on a mat on the floor. Of course, just as things are getting interesting, hooded monks enter and everyone starts praying instead. Incidentally, this feast and orgy scene was the film debut for an electronic musical instrument called the Ondes Martenot. We see it being played in the foreground, by its inventor.
La fin du monde sees the threatening Comet as the savior of mankind, just as weary diplomats and pundits periodically wish that one issue — or enemy — would appear to unite all peoples. Martial Novalic’s proclamation of a ‘Universal Republic’ appears to be dominated by a federation of European states. That a conference of every nation could convene in Paris as the world crumbles is crazy enough, but even sillier is the notion that such a pact would be honored when the sun rose again the next day.
Gance instead chooses to leave his ending open. The big meeting hall is almost completely destroyed by a Comet fragment (?); we don’t even know if Martial Novalic has survived. We want explanations, but are given a final religious montage (multi-faith). One of the last images is a farm scene, presumably to suggest the cliché that ‘life goes on.’
Gance undertook his first sound project standing at the forefront of French cinema, and came out almost ruined. The film ended Gance’s freewheeling career and turned him back to ‘safe’ projects. It’s considered his worst movie. The silent movie genius was all but dismissed in the sound era. When critic Jean-Luc Godard wrote about French film history and wanted to belittle Gance as an overrated fraud, he simply title-dropped La fin du monde.
Kino Classics’ welcome Blu-ray of End of the World is a gift to fans of apocalyptic Sci-fi and disaster films. Similar stories had been filmed before, but this mix of end-of-days mythmaking and religious hysteria set the tone for future efforts in the genre.
Most previous copies of La fin du monde were in wretched, incomplete condition. Even Gaumont’s earlier non-restored DVD looked dicey. The best elements have been secured for this remastering job, which began with a 4K scan. The result allows us to admire the camerawork of Jules Kruger (Napoléon) and the often-excellent special effects. The audio is obviously carefully restored, too. We’re so accustomed to seeing this picture in such ragged condition, just being to identify all the players is something new. We can see a lot more hanky-panky and incidental nudity in the orgy scene. The previous Gaumont PAL DVD was 89 minutes long, and this new Blu-ray is 96. Although the continuity is improved in places, we can’t tell exactly how much new material has been restored. 96 minutes NTSC is 92 minutes PAL. 2+ additional minutes might help, though.
Restoring the audio must have been a serious problem: so many things sound like mistakes. The primitive sound leaves some dialogue buried behind odd music cues. Other scenes make due with muffled dialogue we’re apparently not meant to hear. The music chosen for some scenes is jarringly inappropriate, as is a lot of the sound effects work. With this chaotic production, rushed to finish by a bankrupt producer, almost every scene is a ragged audio mess. The restorers surely had to resist the temptation to ‘fix’ things.
Gaumont-Kino include an ‘original trailer,’ comprised of a text scroll proclaiming Abel Gance’s masterpiece. We are very happy with the disc’s video piece, a generous 38-minute analytical discussion of La fin du monde with input from several French critics led by Laurent Véray and Serge Bromberg. They’re fascinated by the movie, and its ‘mad genius’ director. It’s a ‘transition to sound’ picture made by a wild artist convinced he can do no wrong. We learn things not reported elsewhere — that Abel Gance bankrupted most of his producers, that he chose an incredibly impractical sound system requiring a separate interlocked audio track.
The experts acknowledge that Gance’s dramatic direction is indefensible – the “Listen, Geneviève” references almost turn into a joke. But they also point out Gance’s bold technical experiments, along with his attempt to continue with his silent cinematic signature style. We learn that after Napoléon, Gance wanted to do more movies about the greatest men of history, especially religious figures. This may account for the imposition of a Jesus figure onto Camille Flammarion’s tale of astral collision.
The discussion’s emphasis is on La fin du monde’s place in Abel Gance’s career, with no discussion of genre per se. The film appears to have directly influenced Wylie and Balmer’s novel When Worlds Collide. ‘Radio revivalism’ was a big thing in the late 1920s, and fits in well with the movie’s use of mass communication to bend public perceptions.
Footnotes.
Guy Maddin’s six-minute short The Heart of the World (2000) is a stylistic celebration of silent Soviet agit-prop cinema, but its theme and story are borrowed from La fin du monde. Two brothers, one a surrogate Christ figure, love an Aelita– like woman whose inverted telescope can see the ‘heart of the world, ‘ a literal beating heart at the center of the Earth. Realizing that it is dying, she flies into action to save humanity. The super-woman takes the place of the failing heart and becomes a new Madonna, glowing with love that makes the world rejoice. The raw energy that fuels the Heart of the World is KINO … cinema.
* Back in 2007 correspondent Kevin Pyrtle investigated the ragged cuts of La fin du monde then available on line, and also the 1934 American version of the movie, entitled End of the World and reportedly also Paris After Dark, as odd as that seems. → This version has been released on DVD; I saw yet another inferior web encoding.
Most of the descriptions of this pastiche are accurate. It begins with a dubious astronomy lecture on the heavens by astronomer Dr. Clyde Fisher: “There is nothing unchangeable except eternal unchangeableness!” Jean Novalic has no presence in this cut, and the few dialogue scenes with Martial Novalic look like a third generation dupe, partly left in French language. To tell what remains of the ‘story,’ dozens of barely grammatical inter-titles show up.
Kevin Pyrtle and I decided that most of this bogus ’34 cut is composed of minimally-edited outtake scenes pulled from the French cut of La fin — it’s as if every fifteen or twenty- second montage of extreme weather and stock market chaos in the final film, continued with a much longer montage. We got this idea by looking at an Italian version, in which a scene ended with just a couple of frames of a mob scene on a street. One lengthy montage in the ’34 cut began with the exact same shot, suggesting that the entire montage could be dropped back by recombining the two cuts.
The ’34 cut goes on with endless sequences of crashing waves, billowing smoke and fiery pyrotechnics, all accomplished with miniatures and trick lenses; there seemed to be endless footage of close-ups of water spouts, etc.. All are edited in Gance’s silent editorial style and accompanied by the same crazy-quilt cacaphony of discordant sound effects as heard in the official French original version.
Another daydream editorial project would be to put it back together . . . but how could we resist trying to fix the rest of the movie?
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
End of the World
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Weird
Video: Excellent
Sound: an Excellent rendering of the original audio track, a train wreck
Supplements:
On the Trail of a Dream: Interviews About the Film with Laurent Véray, Serge Bromberg, Christophe Gauthier and Léon Rousseau
Original Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing Impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: July 8, 2023
(6957fin)
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