Abel Gance can be credited with having successfully offered up an actor object to the public. […] This new element is presented to us through an infinite variety of means, from all viewpoints: close-ups, mechanical fragment either still or in movement, projected at an accelerated, simultaneous pace that crushes the human object, eliminating it, reducing its interest, pulverizing it. This mechanical element, that we watch disappear with a heavy heart, that we impatiently await, appears discretely; like a series of blows of the projector within an enormous, long, and anguishing drama, within a realism that makes no concessions. The plastic event is right there, nowhere else, desired, carefully framed, chosen, heavy with consequences both in itself and for the future. This film is extremely interesting also because it assigns a place, within the plastic order, to an art that until now has remained primarily descriptive, sentimental and documentary. Fragmenting of the object, the object as a plastic value in itself and its pictorial rendering have belonged for a long time now to the modern arts. With La Roue, Abel Gance raised cinematographic art to the level of the plastic arts.

Fernad Léger, Fonctions de la peinture, Paris, Gonthier, 1965

By openly praising Abel Gance for his success in revealing the soul of things, we are not paying him a banal compliment. […] He shows us how to see, not so much the soul of things, as their true face. He reeducates our eyes. He reveals to us the beauty that surrounds us, accenting and glorifying it without however misshaping it. The most beautiful, most moving and definitely the newest part of his film is no doubt his study of the mechanical miracle, of steam traction, and the description of the supernatural charm of the snow-covered terrain. Gance was able to analyze the hallucinatory beauty of speed, the rapture of the intelligent wheel workings, the steel and the cogs, the deep exciting voice of organisms made of iron, copper and steel.

Emile Vuillermoz, Cinémagazine, 2 March 1923