Nelly Kaplan: ‘The history of film is the history of Abel Gance. No other French director has larded his career with so many technical and aesthetic inventions as has opened so many horizons in a profession where people still work – albeit unconsciously – with the tools he created. He made about fifty films, several plays, a curious book, Prisme (1931), in which he unfolded the most breathtaking scientific intuitions that are now being confirmed. And not to forget the three- screen, polyvision, the pictograph, the pictoscope… These are just a few facets of the man described by Maeterlinck as “the greatest seer of the Seventh Art”. That is what my film tries to evoke.’
