Movies: Abel Gance

A biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, tracing the Corsican's career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign) to his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political s...

A stranger called Allan goes to the House of Usher. He is the sole friend of Roderick Usher, who lives in the eerie house with his sick wife Madeleine. When she dies, Roderick does not accept her death, and in the dark night, Madeleine returns....

Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself emperor and fights the English, Austrians and Russians in 1802....

Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Catherine de Médicis, celebrates her wedding with Henri de Navarre. Officially, it's a rapprochement between the League and the Huguenots. In fact, it was an opportunity to bring all the Huguenots to Paris and kill t...

Sisif, a railwayman, saves a young girl named Norma orphaned by a train crash and raises her as his own daughter alongside his son, Elie. As she becomes an adult, Sisif grapples with whether to tell Norma the truth about her parentage....

Duelist and poet Cyrano de Bergerac and musketeer d'Artagnan meet and team up to stop the conspiracy against King Louis XIII of France....

In pre-World Ward I in Paris, a budding artist, Pierre LeBlanc, falls in love and marries Janine, a dressmaker's assistant. Pierre has a flair for designing clothes, and he and his bride live in a blissful paradise, until the war breaks out and he be...

The story of two men, one married, the other the lover of the other's wife, who meet in the trenches of the First World War, and how their tale becomes a microcosm for the horrors of war....

The plot concerns a comet hurling toward Earth on a collision course and the different reactions to people on the impending disaster....

Napoleon at Saint Helena (German: Napoleon auf Sankt Helena) is a 1929 German silent historical film directed by Lupu Pick and starring Werner Krauss, Hanna Ralph and Albert Bassermann. The film depicts the final years of Napoleon between 1815 and 18...

A young noblewoman is unhappy about needing to marry the village ironmaster for financial reasons, but later comes to appreciate her husband....

France, the beginning of the XIV century. Every night, Queen Margaret of Burgundy and her two sisters arrange orgies, to which beautiful nobles are invited. The young men were brought blindfolded, and after a night of love they were killed and their ...

Maxime de Champcey, a bankrupt marquis, is hired by the wealthy Laroque and falls for his daughter Marguerite. She loves him too but rejects him under the belief he's a fortune hunter....

Out of love for an actress, Isabelle, the Baron de Sigognac joins a traveling troop en route to Paris. When an actor dies, he takes over his role: that of Captain Fracasse....

French silent film pioneer Abel Gance directs this 1935 classic about Lucrezia Borgia, her brother, Cesare. and her father, Pope Alexander VI -- one of history's most ruthless and ambitious crime families....

Lyrical biography of the classical composer, depicted as a romantic hero, an accursed artist....

After serving in the trenches of World War I, Jean Diaz recoils with such horror that he renounces love and personal pleasure to immerse himself in scientific research, seeking a machine to prevent war. He thinks he has succeeded, but the government ...

BBC documentary on the long and flamboyant career of French filmmaker Abel Gance....

A scientist develops a powder that he believes will have the effect of distorting reality for those who take it. To test its effect tries it out on his assistant, a dog, himself and two young couples....

What was it about opera diva Grace Moore that attracted the attention of filmdom's top directors? Moore's 1937 American movie vehicle When You're in Love had been directed by Josef Von Sternberg; two years later, her French starrer Louise was helmed ...