Napoléon (1927)
Directed by Abel Gance

Film Review

It was after seeing D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) in 1921 that Abel Gance was inspired to make his magnum opus, a series of six films recounting the life and career of his personal hero, Napoleon Bonaparte. By the time he got round to undertaking this monumental project he was already one of France's most prominent cineastes, a leading figure of the Parisian avant-garde with not only a number of commercially successful melodramas to his name but also two groundbreaking chefs-d'oeuvres that had brought him international renown - J'Accuse (1919) and La Roue (1923).  Gance was thirty-five years old when he undertook what was to be the most ambitious film of his career, and it was with a mad man's zeal that he threw himself into it, completely carried away in a creative frenzy that would drive the art of cinema to its technological limits.

The film would not have been possible if Gance did not have a passionate involvement with its subject.  He idolised Bonaparte, seeing him not just as a great military commander but also the saviour of the Revolution, the man who effectively created the modern French state.  (Those other notable figures of the Revolution - Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Desmoulins, Saint-Just - are portrayed by Gance as blood-thirsty egoists). Gance's planned series of films was to be a fitting tribute to the man he regarded as the most important personage in French history, a man whose military exploits were motivated (the director argues, from his naive pacifistic perspective) by a desire to build a single, united Europe that would safeguard the continent from any future conflict.   It is somewhat ironic that just as Gance was about to undertake this grand vision events were unfolding in neighbouring Germany that would result in the emergence of another power-crazed dictator with a similar ambition.

Convinced that he would complete his daring enterprise with the backing of the German financier Hugo Stinnes, Abel Gance began filming Napoléon in January 1925.  Originally, he had wanted the esteemed Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine - the star of Viktor Tourjansky's Michel Strogoff (1926) - to play Bonaparte, but the actor refused and instead Gance cast the far less well-known Albert Dieudonné.  The latter had featured in some of Gance's previous films, including his totally unhinged experimental short La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915).  Dieudonné had filmmaking aspirations of his own, but these bit the dust after the catastrophic failure of a feature he co-directed with Jean Renoir, Une vie sans joie (1924).  Bonaparte is the only role for which Dieudonné is remembered today, but his portrait as the younger Napoleon, eyes blazing with a manic intensity beneath the famous bicorne, has become one of cinema's most iconic images.

Disaster struck barely six months into the filming schedule when Stinnes filed for bankruptcy.  The project was put on hold for several months whilst Gance sought another willing backer.  This he found in the Société Générale de Films, but it was by now apparent that Gance would have to abandon his original plans and content himself with making just one epic film.  Shooting recommenced in January 1926 and ended in June of the same year.  It took over a year for Gance to edit the half a million metres of footage that he had shot.  Napoléon vu par Abel Gance premiered at the Opéra Garnier in Paris on 7th April 1927, in a massively cut-down version that ran to just over four hours, with a score composed by Arthur Honegger.  This included the famous triptych finale described in more detail below. 

The most complete version of the film was screened on two days in May 1927, at the Apollo Theatre in Paris.  This had a runtime of nine hours and 22 minutes, but did not include the triptych finale, the side portions of the three-screen sequence being omitted for practical reasons. Subsequent releases of the film seen in Europe and the United States varied in length from two to seven hours, usually with Gance having no input into the abridgement of his original work.  Rarely was the film shown with its triptych ending, as few cinemas had the space or the resources to project the film as Gance had intended.   Whilst the film was well-received by the critics and added to its director's reputation as a giant of his profession, it failed to recoup all but a fraction of its massive production cost.

The failure of Gance's next film, La Fin du monde (1931), was to bring a decisive end to his career as an independent film auteur.  For the rest of his career Gance was mostly confined to directing commercial films - a depressing mix of uninspired melodramas and fairly routine historical pieces.  Gance reused some of the footage of his silent epic in two later sound films - Napoléon Bonaparte (1935) and Bonaparte et la révolution (1972).  One of his last films, Austerlitz (1960), allowed Gance to recount another episode in Napoleon's  life, but by this stage the director had all but exhausted his creative flair and the film received mixed reviews.

Ever since the film was first seen, Gance's Napoléon has been hailed as one of the landmarks in cinema history, a film of breathtaking vision and extraordinary cinematographic bravura.  The impressionistic tropes that Gance had employed on earlier films are used to their fullest effect to create a cinema experience that was unrivalled in its day and still packs an almighty punch today.  Superimposition and camera motion are used with wild artistic abandon, filling the screen with some of the weirdest and most wonderful images ever committed to celluloid.  With this film, Gance makes history come to life, in a way that few filmmakers have achieved, before or since.

The schoolboy snowball exchange in which Bonaparte first demonstrates his military prowess,  the dormitory pillow fight which Jean Vigo would 'borrow' for his Zéro de conduite (1933), the startling battle scenes that convey not just the ferocity of war but also its terrible human cost, the horrifyingly cold assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday (reproducing almost exactly  Jacques-Louis David's famous painting of 1793) and Bonaparte affectionately kissing an image of his beloved Joséphine superimposed on a globe of the world...  You could fill a book just by listing the memorable sequences the film has to offer. 

One of the highlights occurs near the start of the film, where a meeting of the revolutionaries at the Club of the Cordeliers is overtaken by the arrival of the Marseillaise.  Alexandre Koubitzky, an accomplished singer, was given the role of Danton partly so that he could lead the assembled throng's rapturous rendition of the defiant hymn that would become France's national anthem.  It is a scene of unashamed patriotic fervour that no one born on French soil could fail to respond to - Gance clearly intended his audience to join in the singing of the hymne nationale as it was being played out on the screen.

The strains of the Marseillaise are still echoing around our heads when Bonaparte returns to his home in Corsica to catch up with family gossip and local politics.  On hearing that the island's leader intends selling out to the English, Napoleon starts shooting his mouth off and soon becomes Public Enemy Number One.  And so begins Bonaparte's career as a fugitive, rebel-rouser and enemy of the establishment.  He's bound to end up a despot.  Meanwhile, the Revolution is going from bad to worse, with rival factions splitting the unity of the cause and ushering in a nationwide blood-letting, helped by a nifty little invention called the guillotine.

Revolutionary France's descent into chaos and confusion is palpably conveyed by an astonishing sequence in which an outbreak of virtual anarchy in the National Assembly is dramatically intercut with shots of Bonaparte coping with a sea storm after fleeing from Corsica in a dinghy. The destinies of Bonaparte and the Revolution are visibly welded together at this point and Gance states with one striking use of metaphorical montage what most of his contemporaries would have struggled to say with a dozen inter-titles: Napoleon is the man who will save the Revolution and bring national unity, once the murderous backbiters have all been swept away in the whirlwind they have created.  Bonaparte's role as the custodian of the Revolution is driven home in a later sequence in which, on the eve of his Italian campaign, he visits the Convention Chamber alone and is confronted by the ghosts of the now deceased architects of the Revolution.  It is reminiscent of the scene in Gance's previous J'Accuse, where the ghosts of fallen soldiers return to haunt those who have forgotten their sacrifice.

Before the film's spectacular finale, there is a gentler interlude in which Bonaparte makes his most personal conquest by winning the hand in matrimony of Joséphine de Beauharnais.  It's a (mercifully) brief return to the slightly cloying sentimentality of Gance's earlier melodramas, albeit with a pleasing undercurrent of dry humour.  Bonaparte is such a busy man (he has allowed himself no more than three months to conquer Italy) that he can't afford to fritter away precious minutes on his courtship and wedding.  These superfluities of a military leader's life are rushed through as quickly as possible, leaving poor Joséphine looking distinctly nonplussed.  "He worries me," she opines as her new husband dashes out to build a new world order.  Still, the thoughtful future emperor somehow finds the time to knock off the odd love letter or two as he sets about conquering Europe.

And this brings us to the film's pièce de résistance - Gance's attempt to invent widescreen cinema four decades before it became a practical proposition.  Gance had already experimented with widescreen with the ballet sequence in his earlier La Dixième symphonie (1918), but this simply involved masking the top and bottom parts of a conventional image and can hardly be called a great cinematic innovation.  For Napoléon, the director opted for a far more radical solution, later dubbed 'Polyvision', which involved projecting the images from three synchronised projectors onto three adjacent screens.  For the panoramic battle sequences, three sections of a single widescreen image were shot using three cameras placed in a line near to each other, allowing Gance to effectively create the illusion of a single shot with an aspect ratio of 4:1.  Whilst the effect is impressive it is marred by the obvious seams between the three separate images, which are most noticeable when figures move from one screen in the triptych to another.

This flaw is less apparent in other shots where the side shots of the triptych are mirror-image reversals of the central image.  The triptych is at its most effective when it comprises three separate images (or the same image repeated) - for example Marianne, the symbol of the Triumph of the French Republic, sandwiched between two shots of Napoleon's army poised for a great military victory.  And of course it allows colour-tinting to be used at its most spectacular, the three panels of the triptych tinted red, white and blue to form the French tricoleur at the film's euphoric climax.

Since it fell into obscurity in the 1930s, various attempts have been made to restore Gance's original Napoléon to its former glory, although, with much of the original footage no longer existing, a complete restoration will always be out of the question.  Henri Langlois and Marie Epstein undertook the first major restoration for the Cinémathèque française in the 1950s.  Then, in the 1970s, the film historian Kevin Brownlow embarked on a similar mission for the British Film Institute.  In the 1990s, two restored versions of the film were released, one with a score by Carl Davis running to five hours, another, four hour version, produced by Francis Ford Coppola and impressively scored by his father Carmine Coppola.  The latter is the only version that is currently available on DVD.

Within the last few years, the Cinémathèque française has undertaken a substantial restoration project which, it is claimed, will result in the most complete version of the film since its Apollo screening  in 1927.  Supplementing the surviving fragments of the Apollo version with additional footage taken from other prints, this version is expected to have a runtime of between six and seven hours, and with significantly improved picture quality.  It is possible that the film will be given a limited theatrical release in 2017 to coincide with the 90th anniversary of the film's first screening, with a DVD release coming not long afterwards.  The long wait to see Napoléon more or less as Abel Gance had intended looks as if it might soon be over.  We look forward to the return of this cinematic Behemoth with baited breath.

Film Synopsis

Napoleon Bonaparte is just 14 years old when his potential as a great military commander first becomes apparent.  In the winter of 1783, whilst attending an elite military school, Brienne College, he gets into a fierce snowball fight with his enemies and scores a prodigious victory.  The bullies get their revenge by releasing the eaglet that Napolean has been secretly keeping as a pet.  The bird responds to the distraught child's appeals and allows the boy to caress him.  Nine years later, the French Revolution is well under way.  At the Club of the Cordeliers, revolutionaries gather in excitement.  Among them are the leading figures of the Revolution - Maximilien Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton and Paul Marat.  At Danton's request, army captain Claude de Lisle sings a song he has just composed - La Marseillaise - and the crowds join in enthusiastically, watched from the sidelines by a young military man - Napoleon Bonaparte.

As the impoverished masses of Paris continues to crush the ancien régime into the mud, bringing to an end centuries of monarchic rule, Napoleon feels his destiny is approaching.  During a visit to his native Corsica, he is disgusted by the news of President Paoli's intention to surrender the island to the British.  The young officer's attempts to galvanise opposition to this end with him driven from the island.  As Bonaparte makes his escape in a small boat and gets caught in a violent sea storm, the opposing factions of the Revolution - the Girondists and Montagnards - come to blows in the National Assembly in Paris.  In the late summer of 1793, Napoleon, now a captain, is proving his mettle in the siege of Toulon.  His inspired initiative allows the French to gain a decisive victory over the English, Spanish and Italian armies, and in reward he is promoted to the rank of brigadier general.  He is still only 24.  Unwilling to serve as Robespierre's lackey, Bonaparte finds himself in prison, along with his future wife Joséphine de Beauharnais.

The carnage of the Revolution continues unabated with the execution of many of its prime instigators, notably Danton.  It is only a matter of time before Robespierre and Saint-Just are sent to the guillotine.  In October 1795, Bonaparte once again distinguishes himself by quashing a royalist uprising, and he finds himself promoted to General-in-Chief.  Napoleon's overriding concern now is an invasion of Italy.  Before embarking on this bold military campaign, he rushes through his marriage to Joséphine and pays a visit to the National Assembly, where he is met by the ghosts of the Revolution.  Within two days of his wedding, Bonaparte is on his way to Nice and, upon his arrival, he is surprised by the lack of morale among his troops.  Despite the scale of the challenge that lies ahead, Napoleon manages to revive the spirits of his men and he is soon leading them to one of the greatest military victories in history...