Trivia

Akira Kurosawa stated this was the film that made the greatest impression on him before he began working in the film industry.

Abel Gance came up with the idea for this film the day his fiancee, Ida Danis, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Gance completed editing on the 32-reel film on 9 April 1924, hours after Danis died. Gance then married her sister, Marguerite Gance.

Gance insisted on authenticity which meant sets were built on location. Railroad yards for the first half of the film, and on Mount Blanc in the French Alps for the second half, though the decision to shoot in the Alps has been attributed to Ida's (his wife, diagnosed as tuberculosis) need for alpine air.

The Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation launched a 4K restoration of the film between 2016 and 2019 by the L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory from a nitrate negative and positives belonging to the Cinémathèque Française and copies from the Swiss and Toulouse Cinémathèques, the Czech Film Archive and Lobster Films. Using the cue list established by composer Arthur Honegger and sound effects technician Paul Fosse for the film's original release at the Gaumont-Palace cinema, the film was returned to its initial nearly seven hour length and its initial soundtrack for the first time in decades.

This film was originally released with a running time of 8 hours, 32 minutes. It was edited down to just over five hours for general release.