NAPOLEON Movie Review
Napoleon Vu par Abel Gance
Napoleon Bonaparte
1927 Abel Gance
Judged by any standard, Abel Gance's silent epic is a masterpiece, but the word carries with it images of a dry, high-minded, frowningly serious work, and that is certainly not true of this one. Napoleon is inventive, playful, screwy, and, almost a century after its creation, still surprising. It's also a film that challenges viewers with its length, loose structure, and some less than completely successful innovations.
The opening, which introduces our hero (Vladimir Roudenko) as a child in boarding school, sets a Dickensian tone. It's a snowball fight where Napoleon and his friends are surrounded by vicious attackers. Through sheer will and refusal to surrender, the boy perseveres. The scene itself establishes the strong visuals that Gance finds at every turn for the next four hours. (Different versions of the film, some meant to be viewed in serial installments, run even longer. Others, also edited by Gance, are shorter. The most readily available in America is the 1981 Francis Ford Coppola/Zoetrope edition of the Kevin Brownlow restoration.)
As Napoleon grows, the scene shifts to Paris, with the Revolution approaching its peak. As the city is subjected to incredible political upheaval, Napoleon (now played by Albert Dieudonne) undergoes his own transformations on Corsica, and then leads French forces in a successful battle. In that long central section, it's easy to see why a filmmaker like Coppola would be attracted to the film. Many of the techniques that were used so successfully in The Godfather films appear here. The most obvious is Gance's brilliant use of editing to synthesize disparate events into an emotionally complete whole. In the film's second most famous sequence, the movement of a camera swinging above the revolutionaries gathered at the Paris Convention matches the ocean's effect on a small boat in which Napoleon is escaping.
The influence of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation is most apparent in the chaotic, graphically violent combat scenes. And like Griffith, Gance often includes other historical events—the assassination of Marat, for instance—even though they may be only tangential to his central story. Also, Gance's use of a symbolic eagle will strike modern viewers as intrusively overt.
Discounting differences in cinematic conventions and acting style, this Napoleon remains a fascinating character. As envisioned by Gance and Dieudonne, he's a driven, half-mad genius who's more than a little frightening. Amazingly, they manage to make him believable both as a historical figure and as a human being.
The film ends with the beginning of Napoleon's Italian campaign and Gance's most famous innovation, Polyvision. It's a precursor of Cinerama from the 1960s, with three images projected onto a wide screen, sometimes meant to create one wide panoramic view and sometimes framing a central image with a second mirrored image. To re-create the process on video, the image is suddenly and radically letterboxed and the overall effect is considerably less successful than it would be on a large screen. In fact, it's irritating. When Gance uses the process to layer superimposed images upon each other to reveal strong emotions, he's on firmer footing. Gance's pioneering use of lightweight mobile cameras does much more to involve viewers with the story. One long carriage ride, the rise of the Terror in Paris (where Gance himself plays Saint-Just, “the most awe-inspiring figure of the Terror”), and the “Thermometer of the Guillotine” are indelible moments.
Another important difference clearly separates Gance from Griffith. In looking back at the bloodiest and most violent moments in his country's history, Gance did not let romantic sentimentality color his vision. He doesn't gloss over the horrors of mob rule, and though he presents Napoleon as a heroic figure, he's also a dangerous deeply flawed man, and Dieudonne's performance captures those less-flattering aspects of his personality.
In the end, home video is not the preferred medium to experience Napoleon, but the film is such an important landmark that any serious fan should see it in any form.
Cast: Albert Dieudonne (Napoleon Bonaparte), Antonin Artaud (Jean-Paul Marat), Pierre Batcheff (Gen. Lazare Hoche), Gina Manes (Josephine de Beauhamais), Armand Bernard (Dugommier), Harry Krimer (Rouget de Lisle), Abel Gance (Saint-Just), Georges Cahuzac (Vicomte de Beauharnais), Annabella (Violine Fleuri), Georges Lampin (Joseph Bonaparte), Max Maxudian (Barras), Maurice Schutz (Paoli), Marguerite Gance (Charlotte Corday), Conrad Veidt (Marquis de Sade), Edmond Van Daele (Robespierre), Alexandre Koubitzky (Danton), W. Percy Day (Adm. Hood), Yvette Dieudonne (Elisa Bonaparte), Nicolas Koline (Tristan Fleuri), Vladimir Roudenko (Napoleon as a boy), Suzy Vernon (Mme. Recamier), Robert Vidalin (Camille Desmoulins), Paul Amiot (Fouquet Tinville), Suzanne Bianchetti (Marie Antoinette), Louis Sance (Louis XVI); Written by: Abel Gance; Cinematography by: L.H. Burel, Roger Hubert, Jules Kruger; Music by: Carmine Coppola, Arthur Honegger, Carl Davis. Producer: Abel Gance, Kevin Brownlow, WESTI/Societe Generale de Films. French. Running Time: 235 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV.