Napoleon (1927)
A film review by Race Mathews
Copyright 1996 Race Mathews
Kevin Brownlow's restoration of the 1927 Abel Gance "Napoleon" should be more widely available in its most recent up-dated and expanded version. "Napoleon" is an authentic cinematic masterpiece. Its restoration has been perhaps the single most important film restoration project so far undertaken. Film-making can offer few more poignant cameos than that of Gance as a very old man watching from his hotel room window an outdoor screening of Brownlow's work-in-progress print at the Telluride Film Festival in 1979. Thanks largely to the vision and enthusiasm of Frances Ford Coppola and the Zoetrope Studio, screenings in London and New York in the early nineteen-eighties enabled "Napoleon" to receive the public acclaim it so richly merited. Coppola also had a laser disc edition of the film in a shortened form - four hours as opposed to the five hours and thirteen minutes of footage than available - produced. Twenty and more years later, it is an injustice to both Gance and Brownlow that most of the world's film lovers have no opportunity to see "Napoleon" in the more extended and closely reflective of Gance's intentions version which has now been retrieved.
Gance originally intended to cover the life of Napoleon in a series of six ninety-minute films. What eventuated was a single film of six hours and twenty-eight minutes, taking Napoleon to the opening of his Italian campaign. Technologically, "Napoleon" was before its time, at key points anticipating the introduction of Cinemascope thirty years later through the use of three projectors to produce a composite triptytch image. Moments such as when Rouget de Lisle teaches the "Marseillaise" to the crowd gathered in the Club des Cordeliers, when the ghosts of the leaders of the Revolution confront Napoleon in the deserted Assembly Hall prior to his departure to take over the army in Italy or when Napoleon's eagle hovers over the army in the final triptytch are unforgettable. Gance's inspired cutting drives the action forward at an often blistering pace. He has even been lucky with his composers. Each of the three scores - the original by Honegger, the Carl Davis version used in London and, perhaps most of all, the version by Carmine Coppola used for the world tour - has been closely attuned to the imagery. The feel of the film - its pulsating energy - cannot be better conveyed than by the final paragraphs of the scenario. The passage reads: "'While the Beggars of Glory, their stomachs empty, but their heads filled with songs, leave history to pass into legend' ... The ragged troops are interrupted in their rhythm by the sight of a shadow on the road before them. The eagle! It stretches its wings across all three screens, and the great advance picks up its impetus. As the images become faster and faster the triptych becomes one gigantic tricolor flag, and the Chant du depart is succeeded by the Marseillaise. 'A maelstrom fills all three screens. The whole Revolution, swept on at a delerious speed towards the heart of Europe, is now one huge tricolor, quivering with all that has been inscribed upon it, and it takes on the appearance of a Apocalyptic, tricolor torrent, innundating, enflaming and transfiguring, all at one and the same time'". So eloquent a passage cannot be experienced without emotion or fail to recall the no less moving evocation of Napoleon at a very different point in his life which concludes Hilaire Belloc's masterly biography of Danton and may well have been familiar to Gance. Belloc wrote: "There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that passed away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him move along their snows through the long mysterious twilights of the northern autumn in silence, with head bent and the reins in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching towards an ancient solitude and repose. They say it was Napoleon. After him there trailed for days the shadows of soldiery, vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It was as though the cannon-smoke of Waterloo, borne on the light west wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years of combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of the year over the endless plains. But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the Guard and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the army was of ghosts and was defeated. They passed in the silence which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they sleep in bivouc round the most splendid of human swords".
In the event, the distributors in some cases forced Gance to make shortened versions of the film, or in others shortened it themselves without reference to him. The versions exhibited in particular in Britain and the United States were travesties of what he intended, mutilated to the point of being incomprehensible. A perplexed cinema-going public stayed away in droves, the picture was a financial flop, and the sequels Gance had envisaged were never made. Had it not been for the accident which introduced the young Kevin Brownlow to some random footage, and so triggered the restoration in which he continues to be engaged, the world would never have known how great a treasure had been allowed to go missing. Brownlow writes in his introduction to the first English-language edition of the script of "Napoleon" in 1990 that a yet more impressive version of the film over and above the version of twenty years ago is now needed "not only to restore it to even greater glory on the screen but to make sure it is shown, at least once a year, for ever".
------------- Race Mathews is a Senior Research Fellow in the Graduate School of Government at Monash University. He has served previously as an MP in the Australian Parliament, a State Minister and a municipal councillor. His "Australia's First Fabians: Middle-Class Radicals, Labour Activists and the Early Labour Movement" was published by Cambridge University Press in 1994, and he is currently writing about the Distributist and Co-operative Movements. -------------
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