It has been over ten years since I first wrote about the restoration of Abel Gance’s 1927 silent epic Napoleon. The occasion then was the release of the DVD of the American version which ran at sound speed and lasted about three and a half hours, with a score by Carmine Coppola. Also, the book by British film historian Kevin Brownlow describing the making of the film and his own crucial role in the restoration had been recently published. As I wrote at the time, this was one of the great romances of film scholarship. A young film collector finds…