Abel Gance's 4 1/2 hour epic has a shot selection with an incredible emotional range, montage as savvy as the Soviets, and a goat in cuffs drinking wine. Jean Cocteau had stated that "There is the cinema before and after La Roue as there is painting before and after Picasso," and Akira Kurosawa was known to have said "The first film that really impressed me was La Roue."
From AllMovie:
"Between 1919 and 1921, Gance shot millions of meters of film, all on location, on his next project, La Roue. This was a highly convoluted mixture of the Oedipus and Sisyphus myths, centering on a love triangle between an aging railroad engineer, his young son, and the secretly adopted daughter/sister who grew up within their family. Just as Gance got started cutting La Roue, his own young wife died of tuberculosis. Much to the shock of Gance's silent partner, producer Charles Pathé, Gance promptly got up and walked away from the film, leaving it behind in a rough cut some eight hours in length. Gance then traveled to America, basking in the attention surrounding J'accuse!, paying a visit to his idol, D.W. Griffith, and briefly entertaining the idea of working at United Artists. After four months, Gance returned to France to his furious producer.
Reports vary as to how long La Roue finally ran upon its appearance in 1922, but the "restored" 1980 version of 303 minutes seems close to the mark; it is most commonly seen today in the 1924 general-release version of 130 minutes. This version contains most of the essentials of this historically important film -- Gance's radical overlaying of moving images such as railroad tracks, rapid cutting, and mental/visual associations. In one scene in the instant before a character falls to his death from a cliff, his life flashes before his eyes (and the viewer's) in single frames. Gance had discovered "Russian editing" before the Russians did. The immediate impact and immense popularity of La Roue was unprecedented for a film made in France."
