Long Live "Napoleon"

I was able to snag tickets when this cinematic wonder played Radio City Music Hall (with full orchestra) while on tour of the US.  That was 1981.  I had read about Abel Gance and this film extensively in film school.  I had no idea Kevin Brownlow was still working to restore the piece.  It was a breathtaking experience and one that would require many viewings to truly "get" all the innovations Gance applied in the making.

Now there is this - 30 years on - it will be shown again at the Silent Film Festival in San Francisco.  From today's NYT:

SOON after Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” had its premiere in Paris in 1927, he wrote a letter to his audience, soliciting open eyes and hearts. “I have made,” he wrote, “a tangible effort toward a somewhat richer and more elevated form of cinema.” He had created a film towering in ambition, scale, cost, narrative and technical innovations, and believed that nothing less than “the future of the cinema” was at stake. His audacity had merit. The origins of the widescreen image can be traced to “Napoleon,” which also featured hand-held camerawork, eye-blink-fast editing, gorgeous tints, densely layered superimpositions and images shot from a pendulum, a sled, a bicycle and a galloping horse.

The film was an astonishment, and it was doomed. One hurdle was its length — his early versions ran from 3 hours to 6 hours 28 minutes (down from 9 hours) — while other difficulties were posed by Gance’s advances, specifically a process later called Polyvision that extended the visual plane into a panorama or three separate images and that required three screens to show it. Partly as a consequence, distributors and exhibitors took harsh liberties: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cut it down to around 70 minutes for the American release, a butchering that seemed to encourage bad reviews. Gance continued to rework the film, adding sound for a 1935 version and, decades later, new material. Yet even as he was taking it apart, others — notably the British historian Kevin Brownlow — were trying to restore “Napoleon” to its original glory.

In truth “Napoleon,” as it was initially hailed, no longer exists, which raises ticklish questions about authorship. In his book on the film, Mr. Brownlow lists 19 versions of “Napoleon” — including those created by distributors, Gance and Mr. Brownlow himself, who for decades has tried to restore the long-lost full version. Mr. Brownlow’s latest restoration (Version 20?), will play four times at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival starting next Saturday. But unlike in 1981 — when an earlier, abridged Brownlow restoration played around the country — no tour is planned. Yet while this may be the last time this particular iteration is screened in the United States, Francis Ford Coppola’s company, American Zoetrope, and the preservationist Robert A. Harris, who own most of the rights, are quietly working with Mr. Brownlow’s company and the Cinémathèque Française on still another restoration.

By the time Gance, who died in 1981 at 92, started on “Napoleon” he had already been anointed a cinematic pioneer, primarily for his touching 1919 romance “J’Accuse,” set against World War I, and his frenzied 1922 tragedy “La Roue,” about desperate desire in a poor railroad family. Both were successes and inspired feverish acclaim. The Cubist painter and future filmmaker Fernand Léger said that with “La Roue” Gance had “elevated the art of film to the plane of the plastic arts.” Jean Cocteau declared that “there is cinema before and after ‘La Roue’ as there is painting before and after Picasso.” Gance answered this praise with the even more ambitious “Napoleon,” calling it “the greatest film of modern times.” 

Read the rest HERE.

More later.

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