Until now, one incomplete version and some prints with very modest chromatic qualities of Mater Dolorosa were known. The restoration work has permitted, not only to reconstruct the entire work and the great beauty of its colourings, but also to identify the different versions realised between 1917 and 1926.

Mater Dolorosa’s restoration becomes then examplar for those who retain that different editions of one film can exist: each one of them deserves a profound study as well as its reconstruction.

Thanks to La Cinémathèque Royale Belge and to the other archives which have taken part in the project, it will be possible to see the 1926 version with its velvety black and white photography, and then the 1917 version which corresponds to Gance’s primitive desires and uses complexe combinations of tinting and toning.

La Cinémathèque Royale Belge, coordinator of the restoration project of Mater Dolorosa, has undertook in the beginning of 1993 a compared study of the film survived prints.

The work was done from three prints, conserved by La Cinémathèque Royale Belge, Gosfilmofond of Moscow and La Cinémathèque Française.

The film had been conceived as a drama for three, a “triangle” tragedy with three leading characters – the woman, the man and the lover. The film was presented in 1917 by La Société Générale de la Cinématographie, owned by Pathé. In the advertising of that time, we can already notice that, opposite to the scenario, Marthe’s lover is not the husband’s brother, but just a friend.

Mater Dolorosa was reedited in 1918 and, then, in 1923. The fundamental structure did not change that much, but the importance of the protagonist’s maternity seems to vary in time, according to the articles of the time.

The film is released once more in 1926 by Film Triomphe. The lover is still a friend of the husband, but now the maternity has lost its importance in the time chronicles.

Abel Gance will realise finally a new sound version of Mater Dolorosa in 1932.

From the results of the compared study of the different prints, it appears that they profoundly differ in the colouring, the editing, the lenght of some scenes and the titles text.

In the Moscow print, the husband and the lover are brothers; in the others, just friends. The attention varies from time to time on the adultere case and on the illegitimate maternity. According to the major or minor importance attributed to the events, the names and the relationships of the protagonists change.

The recent acquisition by Le Département des Arts du Spectacle de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris of the manuscripts and the work materials about Mater Dolorosa have permitted to understand the reasons of these differences between the prints. In 1917, Able Gance writes the scenario of Mater Dolorosa: a drama that describes the interior journey of a woman divided between maternal love, conjugal duty in front of a husband completely dedicated to his work as doctor and her attraction towards his brother, a successful writer. In the version released in 1918, apart from the “Russian” one, the doctor and the writer are not brothers but just intimate friends.

The film has been subject to many reedition during the silent period. On each occasion, with the intervention and the authorisation of Gance, it has been modified as if it was a book of which the author “reviews and corrects” some passages for a new reedition.

It seems that the Gosfilmofond print is the closest to Gance’s original intentions (according to the 1917 scenario) while the Belgian version comes approximatively from the beginning of the twenties. This one corresponds to an intermediate state of the film “internal history”. The other materials (intertitles and editing) would have been used for the new edition presented by Film triomphe in 1926.

Mater Dolorosa, apart from the author’s other works, constitutes probably Gance’s first “big project”, one of the most ambitious. As La roue and Napoléon, it has undertook many modifications in its tumultuous history.

In the version of Mater Dolorosa realised by Gance in 1932, the two leading roles have been played by Line Noro (Marthe Berliac) and Jean Galland (Gilles Berliac); Antonin Artaud had a secondary part. In this version, as for putting an end to the indecision around the relationship between the lover and the husband, Gance takes back the original idea of the 1917 scenario: two elements in the centre of the story, the birth of the baby and the passion of a woman for her husband’s brother. Once more, there is a new variation: the baby, whose grave illness is one of the culminant point in the drama, is not anymore a boy, but a little girl called Claudine.

(Synthesis of the study of Edouard Arnoldy published in Cinegrafie n.7)