WILTON – It’s a two-day cinematic event.

A critically acclaimed French silent drama that runs nearly 4½ hours long will be shown in two parts at the Town Hall Theatre over the weekend of April 27-28.

“La Roue” (French for “The Wheel”), a sprawling family drama about a railroad engineer and his children, will be screened with live music by silent film accompanist Jeff Rapsis.

The film will be broken into two parts, roughly equal in length. The first installment will screen on at 4:30 p.m. on April 27, while the second will screen at 4:30 p.m. on April 28.

Admission is free; a donation of $5 per person at each screening is suggested to help defray expenses.

“This is a rare chance to see one of the most influential films of early cinema on the big screen, and with live music, as it was intended to be shown,” said Rapsis, who provides music for the Town Hall Theatre’s monthly silent film series.

“La Roue” was directed by visionary French filmmaker Abel Gance. Released in 1923, it set the stage for Gance’s later “Napoleon” in its use of innovative cinematic devices, particularly rapid cutting.

“La Roue” opens with Sisif, a widowed railway engineer, rescuing an infant girl from a spectacular train crash.

Sisif adopts the girl, knowing only that her name is Norma, and raises her with his son.

This sets in motion a family drama that unfolds over the ensuing decades, leading to tragedy in far-flung locations.

The current version of “La Roue” is a partial reconstruction of the original 1923 release, which ran an astonishing nine hours and which Gance intended to be shown over three days.

Gance later cut the film to two hours so it could fit into one evening, with much of the original version lost in the process.

In 2008, restorers gathered material from ‘La Roue’ from archives worldwide and pieced together the 4½-hour version being shown at the Town Hall Theatre.

“Early filmmakers such as Abel Gance or Germany’s Fritz Lang would push the limits of the medium with tremendously ambitious projects,” Rapsis said.

“So once in awhile, it’s worth putting these pictures back on the big screen as they were intended to be shown, just as it’s worth going to Paris to see the real Mona Lisa instead of just looking at a picture in an art book.”

The Town Hall Theatre’s long-running silent film series has proven a worthy forum for the occasional multi-day vintage blockbuster.

“Last year at the Town Hall Theatre, we ran Fritz Lang’s massive two-part silent film version of ‘The Nibelungen’ mythic tales,” Rapsis said. “Reaction was strong enough for us to try another two-day event this season.”

Critics today regard ‘La Roue’ highly for Gance’s visual innovations.

In 2008, David Kehr of the N.Y. Times wrote that “La Roue” “…still fascinates as a grab bag of experimental techniques…which clearly dazzled audiences of the time with the formal possibilities of this still relatively new medium. Circular forms, drawn from the title image, appear with maddening regularity: in the charging wheels of Sisif’s locomotive, the faces of ominously ticking clocks, the ring dance of a band of happy peasants.”

Jason Sandors of Fandor.com described “La Roue” as an “epic romance of forbidden love and doom, shot with no expense spared amidst the chaotic railways of Nice and the high-elevation peaks of Mont Blanc. One of the most influential films of the silent era, its editing style of rapid, rhythmic cuts had never been seen before. ‘La Roue’ heralded an entirely new approach to filmmaking that inspired Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko (among many others).”