Napoléon (1927)

Directed by Abel Gance. Starring Albert Dieudonné, Edmond Van Daële, Antonin Artaud, Gina Manès, Alexandre Koubitzky, Marguerite Gance, Philippe Hériat, Abel Gance, Vladimir Roudenko, Annabella, Yvette Dieudonné, Nicolas Koline, Max Maxudian, Maurice Schutz, Suzy Vernon, Francine Mussey.

Immense silent epic sees director Gance pull out all the stops in telling the story of the legendary French political and military leader, tracing his path from military school as a youth to his triumphant first campaign against Italy in 1797. The daunting length practically begs for breaks—being presented in four separate parts makes it easy to pick the moments—and it still drags during a few less fruitful intervals that pull focus too far from the central storyline (to say nothing for the artiste statements made through heavy-handed symbolism). But it’s still an astonishing achievement that employs a lot of advanced camera tricks, post-production compositing (particularly multiple exposure effects), and breathlessly-edited sequences that heighten the drama and break up the traditional wide-to-close shot transitions that made so many early cinematic sagas so static. Numerous highlights across its five-and-a-half hour runtime, with the juxtaposition between the swinging camera inside the assembly hall during a political uproar and a ship being tossed by waves on the stormy sea being one of the most visually electrifying sequences of its era, but the two most memorable scenes arguably come near the very beginning (the snowball fight, handheld camera pursuing its maneuvering combatants) and the end (the extended and pioneering Cinerama-esque widescreen triptych sequence). Gance had planned on making five (!) more films about Napoléon to cover the rest of the historical figure’s life, but they proved impossible to finance. Restored and re-released at varying lengths about two dozen times over the last 90+ years; this review refers to the long-awaited DVD/Blu-Ray release painstakingly assembled by film historian Kevin Brownlow, with a Carl Davis score.

88/100