Napoleon (1927) ★★★★★

Length:  235 minutes.  MPAA Rating:  G.  USCCB Rating:  A-II.  Silent.  Director:  Abel Gance.  Black-and-white with hand-tinted footage.  The version referred to here (there are multiple versions) is the print housed in the British Film Institute and shown in London in 2004 and in Oakland, California in 2012 with Carl Davis conducting his own score with a live symphony orchestra.

Made back in 1927 as part of a projected six-part series on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte and painstakingly restored in the 1980’s, Napoleon covers only a tiny portion of the conqueror’s life, concluding only with his first entrance into northern Italy.  The other films were never made, but this is an amazing achievement, with camera moves and radical editing techniques that were way ahead of their time, including hand-held camera, multiple exposures, rapid-fire editing, smash cuts, multiple images, tracking shots, and so much more. Features passionate directing and acting.   For the final scene, Gance uses a primitive form of Cinemascope, taking three movie cameras and synchronizing them together.  A showing at a theater features the curtains parting at the final scene, revealing an extra wide screen, at which time three projectors roar to life, showing either a single enormous panorama shot or three separate shots rapidly edited together.  The result is quite mesmerizing and one of the most visually inventive sequences in all film history. It also came at a price – the young editor spent weeks in her bed after having suffered a nervous breakdown editing this opus. 

Loud and enthusiastic standing ovations greet the film on the rare occasions when it is shown (due to the enormous expense of showing it, the film is rarely presented).  Technically even more advanced than Citizen Kane, Abel Gance’s Napoleon is a film like none other, and whenever shown is quite literally the motion picture event of a lifetime.  I was fortunate enough to be at the 2012 Oakland showing (even though I lived in Boston at the time) and it was most certainly worth flying clear across the country to see this extraordinary cinematic achievement.

Despite the clear technical and artistic brilliance of this work, this film must be placed below such other classics as Jesus of Nazareth and The Passion of Joan of Arc.  Why?  First off, there are so many versions of this film (well over twenty by now) that it is impossible to say which one is truly the director’s original vision as opposed to being a modernized embellishment. Also, for all its daring do, the subject matter of Napoleon is quite problematic.  It canonizes and sometimes even divinizes this tyrant, often suggesting that Napoleon the man was a leader much like Moses, or a divine presence much like Jesus, sometimes literally striking people silent with his glowing and ethereal appearance.  The gorgeous cinematography and sweeping camera movements only accentuate the lie, and sequences (restored more recently) showing a young woman constructing a small Napoleon “shrine” in her bedroom so she can swoon over his image elicits mostly laughter from the audience.  This takes away from the brilliance of a work that is still a joy to watch and appreciate.