Gance

In the main, it is a familiar portrait, one that Macdonald has assembled using archival and original material, including far too many clips from Abel Gance’s 1927 epic “������DZ�é�Dz�,” a Galliano fixation.

Abel Gance’s 1927 silent movie, long hailed as a masterpiece, was recut and released at different lengths in subsequent years, his supposedly nine-hour original never seen again.

But Cendrars had a Zelig-like omnipresence in modern French arts and letters, collaborating with the artist Fernand Léger, the filmmaker Abel Gance, the composer Darius Milhaud, and just about every other avant-gardist in Paris a century ago.

During his time at Zoetrope, Luddy supervised a revival of Abel Gance’s 1927 epic “Napoleon,” which played around the world, among numerous other projects in support of foreign and archival films.

From the early days through the 1920s, the motion picture camera went from being stationary, approximating the audience’s point of view, to wandering freely in movies like Abel Gance’s “Napoleon,” King Vidor’s “The Crowd” and 1927 Oscar winner “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” by F.W.