Napoleon vu par Abel Gance
Silent movies and rapturousness
When I was younger, what I wanted the most from art — from movies, music, theatre especially — was rapturousness. I wanted to feel overwhelmed, exalted, swept away. And I gravitated to things that delivered that experience: opera, especially, but also silent movies. Both of them, in their romantic heights, embraced artificial theatricality in the pursuit of maximum emotional intensity, and for me it was this artificiality, this creation of a kind of otherworldly dream state, that made them so fascinating.
Edmonton, Alberta had a cinephile video store called Sneak Preview, with an impressive collection of silent movies. One summer I went there every single week and took home a silent from their collection, and eventually worked my way through most of their offerings. Napoleon vu par Abel Gance (1927) was one of them. And, perhaps because loving opera had trained me to sit through things that were four hours long and emotionally overblown, I absolutely imprinted on it in a way that profoundly shaped my taste.
Napoleon belongs to that short, doomed late generation of silent films where directors were able to get powerfully bold and expressive with visual effects before the introduction of sound (and its rigid technical requirements) boxed them in again. To echo a famous line from Sunset Boulevard, those movies were also fascinated with faces — and in particular, faces with the kind of striking, uncanny features that we also see in pre-Raphaelite paintings. Napoleon is famous for its technical tricks: Gance found novel ways to move the camera (swinging it from pendulums, etc) but he also used rapid sequences of cutting, superimposition, and other tactics to dazzle the viewer as much as possible. From Nelly Kaplan’s book on the film:
His ambition, for the film to leave an indelible memory in its wake, is for the images to be chainted together not only vertically but also horizontally, linked together in the same fraction of a second, with a view to achieving a synthesis in which every particle would play a coherent role. He insists on the simple fact that, whatever the importance of a one-off image, nothing can equal the impact of the image-cluster, for no work of art has ever better demonstrated its omnipotent hold on time and space.
As a rule, I’m not especially interested in the technical aspects of filmmaking, but what interested me about Napoleon was its commitment to producing moments of total dazzlement and rapture, using a combination of movement, imagery, and intense close-ups. It delivers one of these moments early on, in the movie’s first sequence, a school snowball fight that represents a formative battle victory for young Bonaparte. Since the scene can’t be viewed on YouTube, I recorded it on my phone from my television in order to include it here.
In between blurry, chaotic shots of the schoolboys fighting in the snow, Gance repeatedly cuts back to the face of young Napoleon, calmly delivering orders. What are the orders? Doesn’t matter. This is when silent films feel most magical: like opera, the words are of little consequence, only the feeling of them. The moment when young Napoleon realizes he’s winning, allowing himself a tentative smile that later broadens to a grin, always gives me a chill. It’s difficult to explain to myself sometimes why I love this movie, but moments like this are part of it.
Napoleon is almost entirely free of ambivalence, irony, or moral complication — which is a significant omission from anything concerning the French Revolution and its aftermath. It takes a thoroughly positive view of its subject, portraying him as a brilliant man of almost mythical stature, destined for greatness. Partly this is because it depicts only the early years of his life, ending just before his invasion of Italy — before the coup, the Jaffa massacre, the self-crowning, the disaster in Russia, and all the other petty cruelties and blunders of his empire. Napoleon hints at future downfall only in two scenes: first, when schoolboy Napoleon is shown a map of St. Helena in class, and second, when the floating ghost heads of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre urge Directoire-era Napoleon not to betray the ideals of the revolution… or else. But I have a feeling the later chapters of Gance’s planned series (he originally envisioned six films) wouldn’t have taken an especially nuanced view. The movie’s glorification of its capital-R-Romantic hero led some critics to argue, upon its 1927 release, that it looked a little too uncomfortably like fascist propaganda.
It’s the hyper-emotional rapturousness — the crowds, the lingering close-ups, the glitter and the movement — that makes it look that way. It’s the rapturousness that made me love it. Such are the perils of Romanticism. My youthful viewings made me feel ready to ride into battle for the glory of France. Napoleon still makes me feel that way, although it kicked off an enduring interest in the man himself that now allows me to watch it now with a much more critical eye.
For tedious technical and legal reasons involving the Coppolas, Napoleon vu par Abel Gance has been mostly unavailable to view on DVD, streaming, or in the theatre for quite some time (the VHS I saw back in Edmonton was of the 1980 Coppola version). For the same reason, clips are scarce on YouTube. A long time passed between when I first admired Napoleon as a teenager and when I saw it again as an adult a couple of years ago. But in the meantime, I was a superfan — I bought an LP of the soundtrack (Coppola’s), and Nelly Kaplan’s book about the production. When it was finally digitized and made available on Blu-Ray in the UK, I ordered a copy and bought a Blu-Ray player with region-switching capabilities specifically to watch it. In an earlier piece for this newsletter, I wondered whether I ever would have had the patience for it if I were seeing it for the first time today. I’ll express a few heretical views: first, that it could stand some cutting (the Corsica sequence is interminable), and that the Coppola soundtrack actually fits it better than the Carl Davis one approved by Kevin Brownlow, which mostly strings together some greatest hits from Mozart, Prokofiev, and others. But possibly those opinions are just traces of nostalgia for the Napoleon I knew, back in Edmonton.
If you ever get the chance to see it in a theater, do go. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival screens it once in a while. I promise that the Napoleonic hours are worth it.
If you’re interested in Napoleon, I also wrote this: