Talk about high drama: Under threat, Eve Dinant has just murdered Vara, sister of the evil Fred Ryce. A year later, Eve marries the famous composer Enric Damor, but her dark past resurfaces when her stepdaughter Claire Damor introduces her to her suitor. Enric thinks he can thus discover a new, murky facet of the woman with whom he is madly in love, and the torment inspires him to write a sublime piece of music. Eve must yield one last time to the grip of her blackmailer.
The beginnings of silent cinema offered a new generation of artists another way of telling stories where everything had to be invented. Beyond the mainstream of the other arts, from Art Nouveau to the Roaring Twenties, the forms and techniques of film evolved with unparalleled freedom and creativity, encompassing increasingly elaborate editing, greater realism in acting and sets, and more refined lighting. Like Eisenstein, Chaplin, Vidor, Delluc, and Dreyer, Abel Gance was a filmmaker who appropriated this visual language in a highly personal way, constantly enriching his art to describe the expression of his ideas and obsessions. Gance achieved this very early on with ingenious inventiveness, to the point of excess and with breathtakingly effusive momentum. He made several films before La Roue and Napoléon, certainly more understated but already heralding the genius and power of his cinema.
After about 15 films, Gance shot La Dixième symphonie in 1917 (just after Mater Dolorosa and La Zone de la mort), in the middle of the First World War. He had at his side his trusted director of photography, Léonce-Henri Burel, whose sublime effects are based on carefully placed light sources, creating backlighting and silhouettes. His regular actors are there too, including Emmy Lynn, who plays a woman crushed between distress and courage; Jean Toulout, the embodiment of tyrannical, manipulative evil; and Séverin-Mars as a composer who draws inspiration from deep melancholy. After La Dixième symphonie these three names entered the history of cinema.
We should also note the presence of Ariane Hugon of the Paris Opéra in a few dreamlike shots tinted, mordant toned, and framed with stencil-coloured friezes. These are certainly the only moving images of this enchanting dancer, whose superimposed silhouette recalls that of Isadora Duncan.
La Dixième symphonie is a singular and captivating work. It has a double plot: a traditional storybook romantic drama, and a more troubling, unhealthy, and manipulative one. The relationships between the characters darken as they tear each other apart to protect themselves and come together to hurt one another. While the two plots intertwine with narrative skill and suspense, the subject of the film is more profound. Gance addresses the concept of creation through the inevitably challenging romantic idea that great works are born out of suffering, basing himself on the words of Berlioz and on Beethoven’s lost score for a tenth symphony.
Gance treats the subject through images, but more surprisingly through music, and in order to evoke this musicality – indicated in the very title of the film – he composes with a rich palette of visual instruments. What might have been limited to an approximative approach soon takes the form of Baudelairian correspondences, in which “fragrances, colours, and sounds resonate with each other”. Drawing his musical motifs from paintings by Balestrieri, Botticelli, and Puvis de Chavannes, Gance pays special attention to the colouring of different sequences. The orchestration is accompanied by subtle nuances combining tinting, toning, mordant toning, and stencil-colouring. The predominance of music is stated right from the titles, with a composer credited on the same level as the cinematographer – a first in the history of cinema. Defending original scores in Le Film (15.09.1919), Michel-Maurice Lévy wrote that “to be moved, we need totally new music in perfect synchrony with the film – this is indisputable, and the future will prove it”.
The 4K restoration was carried out with the support of the CNC by the Cinémathèque française, from a period nitrate copy in its collections. A fragment from a copy in the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique enabled the completion of one shot. Digital colour correction carried out by L’Image Retrouvée carefully sought to restore subtle colour nuances (tinting, toning, and stencil-colouring). Transfer to 35mm was also achieved using the Desmet Color process to reproduce tinting and toning effects.

Hervé Pichard, Mehdi Taibi