Red, red!… Red of the burning night, red of bloody war
Gaumont Palace program, February 16, 1923

In the second half of 1919, glowing with the success of J’accuse, Abel Gance started work on La Roue, “une tragédie des temps modernes”, which would become the longest, most expensive and last of his projects for Pathé. Filming began in November at the Saint-Roch train station where the crew could use a Pacific locomotive and build a set with a house among train tracks. The troupe then moved to Chamonix and Arcachon.
The prologue, the accident, is one of the few chapters of Pierre Hamp’s novel Le Rail (1912) that Gance kept. Gance gave the train a starring role, and its world takes shape with visual effects and surprisingly rich and fast-paced editing, creating a lyricism that would make a deep impact on his contemporaries.
On February 16, 1923 the film was released in ten theaters in Paris, with over ten thousand meters of footage (about eight hours) divided in a prologue and four acts. At Gaumont Palace it was accompanied by the score written by Arthur Honegger and Paul Fosse, who was the conductor at the Palace at that time. Choosing contemporary composers was a considerably bold decision. The originality of this complex restoration is using the music to reconstruct what was most likely the original 1923 version. In the absence of editing notes, the music can help explain the order of the scenes and identify which ones were cut. For example, the score composed by Honegger for the opening credits includes precise indications about the order of the shots.
Gance reworked La Roue until the end of the 1920s, thus some of his edits only exist in one print. As a result, different versions came one after another (four acts, six acts, the shortened version of 1924, etc.), but none ever established itself as the definitive version.

François Ede, Stéphanie Salmon