Abel Gance remembered one scene that was removed by the censors--that of the execution of civilians by soldiers. The camera is used like a bullet, zooming towards one human target, then another, then another. The sequence is lost, although a still photograph does survive.
The snowballs in the snowball fight scene were actually balls of cotton. During shooting one of the child extras threw a real one with a rock in it. It hit Nicolas Roudenko square in the face and broke his nose.
In addition to its pioneering use of widescreen, this film also has a lot of handheld camerawork. The filmmakers experimented extensively with small, handheld, motorized cameras to heighten the dramatic effect of many scenes.
Director Abel Gance was worried that the film's finale wouldn't have the proper impact by being confined to a small screen. He thought of expanding the frame by using three cameras next to each other. For the first time, cinema utilized a rectangular image (with an approximate 4.00:1 aspect ratio). This is probably the most famous of the film's several innovative techniques. Though American filmmakers began experimenting with 70mm widescreen in 1929, widescreen didn't take off until CinemaScope was invented in 1953.
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