The Full Version of Abel Gance’s Napoleon

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 an extraordinary film in a shortened version, makes contact with its then forgotten director, tracks down the missing footage, restores the film, and Gance lives to see his “lost” work acclaimed as a masterpiece.

In Australia we first saw the “American” restoration with a live orchestra at the State Theatre in Sydney in 1982. This was not an unqualified success. Although it was one of the last surviving silent-picture palaces, the proscenium arch of the State was not large enough to accommodate the film’s climactic triptych—originally three enormous panels with different images. What we saw was impressive but it was like watching three splendidly composed miniatures. When the score was recorded on the film we did see Napoleon at the Cremorne Orpheum with the triptych transposed to Panavision 70 which approximated the original effect. This version was shortened for commercial reasons to three and a half hours, and both the restoration and the editing were by Kevin Brownlow. He was never satisfied with the abridged version and two years earlier had persuaded the British Film Institute to screen a five-hour near-complete print at the right speed of twenty frames per second with a score by Carl Davis. Reportedly it was a great success and Brownlow was able to read the glowing reviews to the dying Abel Gance.

However the rediscovery of Napoleon is a continuing story. Just released on DVD is a digital version of yet another cut by Kevin Brownlow. After further research in the film archives it is now nearly five and a half hours long—and there is still missing footage. Until 2015 all these fuller versions had been only screened in the British Isles and France. It was part of a deal with Zoetrope to get a wide release of the film in the US. With the DVD release Australians can at last see the full film, although still not theatrically. So now that a near definitive version is at last available, just how good is this extraordinary work from the silent era?

The short answer is that Napoleon is a masterpiece and Abel Gance is one of the great directors of the last century. However, before settling down to watch the full five and a half hours on DVD viewers have to make a few adjustments if they are not familiar with silent films. Performances are uniformly excellent, but in a slightly grander style than we might see even in a late 1930s movie, and of course the best silent acting is sophisticated mime with which ballet-goers would have no problems. The intimacy that could be achieved with the camera—close-ups, medium shots—discouraged overacting. The great Lillian Gish recalled being told by the director D.W. Griffith, “never let them catch you acting”. But even with Gish a thoughtful viewer needs to be familiar with the acting styles of the period. Above all it is the truthfulness of the playing that is vital. Gance’s performers are always honest. You will probably never again see extras quite as motivated as they are here. As Brownlow shows in his documentary on Gance, “The Charm of Dynamite” (included in the special features) the director would enthuse everyone with his oratory, call for action by firing a revolver and continue shouting encouragement and firing in the air during the takes. Everyone felt part of an extraordinary undertaking, and it shows.

Albert Dieudonné is splendid as the young Napoleon, expertly incorporating gestures suggested in the portraits. Indeed his appearance conforms exactly to contemporary descriptions of the young general when he took command of the Army of Italy, which is portrayed in the film. The boy actor Roudenko was the only one apart from its trainer who could touch the pet eagle Napoleon had been given as a symbol in Gance’s script, and made a wonderfully intense younger incarnation of the hero at military school. Gance himself gives a powerful understated performance as St Just, while Edmund van Daele makes a chilling Robespierre. Antonin Artaud, an innovative playwright and founder of the Theatre of Cruelty, plays Marat. Predictably he is very good. Equally impressive is Koubitzky as a magnificently theatrical Danton.

One visual technique of silent films requires a slight adjustment from a modern viewer. The emotion of the drama is enhanced by tinting the image—red for a night bombardment, or pink for a wedding. A blue tint was often employed for night sequences, although Gance appears to have shot the night battles for Toulon night-for-night in a darkened studio. Those of us familiar with silent cinema adjust automatically, and I’m told Napoleon doesn’t pose any special difficulties when projected at the right speed, as is the case here. The three-and-a-half-hour version was projected at sound speed, twenty-four frames per second, which gives a jerky movement but saves time. Brownlow’s longer versions run at twenty frames per second, the average speed of all the cameras Gance used. This eliminates most of the jerkiness. But what is startling about Napoleon, especially for those familiar with the conventions of silent film, is its modernity. Together with the silent techniques are devices that would be seen as advanced now.

The film opens with the young Napoleon’s head in a cocked hat peeking over a snowbank. It is the famous snowfight sequence. The young Napoleon is at Brienne Military School and is the leader of an outnumbered group of boys throwing snowballs. The sequence could have been shot yesterday, or tomorrow! There are mobile hand-held cameras and subjective shots where a character appears to receive a face full of snow. In “The Charm of Dynamite” there is an excerpt from the film of the making of Napoleon where a cameraman can be seen throwing snow onto the lens of a camera to achieve this effect. The documentary observes that silent cameras were not designed to be hand-held and shows the harnesses that were devised so a camera could be operated off the tripod.

Above all there is the fast cutting employed throughout the film which helps make Napoleon work at this great length. Indeed in the long version the spectacular effects are less of an assault on the viewer’s sensibilities and emerge naturally out of the narrative.

Until Brownlow began publishing his research on Napoleon it was thought Gance’s fast cutting was emulating Soviet cinema. In fact it was the other way round. S.M. Eisenstein, for one, was a great admirer of Gance’s earlier work where the style originated, in films like Le Rou. In Napoleon Gance also seems to have anticipated Eisenstein’s use of what the Russian director called typage. This was where an actor was cast because they seemed to represent a class or someone in a particular occupation. It was not that the individual performer had to be of that class or position—he or she only had to appear to be. Gance’s close-ups in the crowd scenes, or where he shows the Army of Italy or the revolutionary mobs, seemed so realistic to the young Kevin Brownlow that it was almost as though he was watching a documentary. Nevertheless Gance was not making a faithful reconstruction but a poetic interpretation of a leader who was at this stage of his career to become a national hero.

The narrative moves from a sensitive but, as we have seen, rather hectic portrait of the lonely Corsican at military school, to his adventures in Corsica where he and the Bonaparte clan support the French against the Nationalist Paoli. Giving him the pet eagle strains credibility but it works throughout the film as a powerful symbol whenever Napoleon is fulfilling his destiny. Did Gance perhaps intend that in a later film the bird would die at Waterloo; or was it to accompany him to St Helena? We may never know, but Gance did plan six films.

The sequences in Corsica are treated like a swashbuckler with spectacular chases and narrow escapes, all shot on location, and all enjoyably outrageous. Napoleon seizes the tricolour flag from the government—they are not worthy—and escapes in a dinghy using the flag for a sail. Again gloriously preposterous, but it works as swashbuckling adventure and symbolism. The storm sequence that follows is intercut with the “storm” in the Convention when the Girondins are expelled and sent to mass execution. The movements of the waves crashing on the boat, believably staged in the studio, are mirrored by overhead cameras tracking above the Convention. Unlike Eisenstein and Pudovkin, who glossed over the excesses of the Russian Revolution, Gance does not try to explain away the Reign of Terror. There is a powerful scene where Napoleon is writing in his lodgings while the mob, shown as shadows on the far wall, is rioting outside. As an additional horror a head on a pike appears at the window. There is a powerful recreation of Danton’s execution. Double exposures and split screens are employed with great panache to increase the spectator’s awareness of a range of events affecting the main protagonist.

Napoleon is not a military epic. Gance did make a film about the Battle of Austerlitz in the 1960s but it was not a success; and reportedly you didn’t see much of the battle. The subtitle—in fact the title of some versions of Napoleon—is Napoleon and the Revolution, and the film recreates impressions most of the main events. There is even a sequence showing Marat being stabbed in his bath, the composition based on the portrait by Jean Louis David. Like David, Gance does not show Marat’s skin disease. With the portrayal of the lifting of the Siege of Toulon the film is more like a documentary. The details of the tactics are shown and the night fighting is as graphic as could be included at the time.

Throughout there is a curious doubleness about the treatment of Napoleon the military hero. Gance clearly wants to celebrate the man who nearly came to rule Europe, but the Great War soldier the director had been only eight years before is only too aware of the price. Not that the film is without lighter touches. Gance has a lot of fun with Napoleon’s awkward wooing of Josephine and the decadence of the Directory. It is not certain how much of the semi-nude dancing got past the censors in 1927 but it was based on fact.

Napoleon is celebrated for the magnificent triptych when he takes command of the Army of Italy, culminating in the three panels tinted into the red, white and blue colours of the tricolour. These are reproduced on the DVD, and if you sit close to the screen you can appreciate the complexity and richness of Gance’s achievement. Included in the special features is the single-panel conclusion Gance devised for theatres where extra screens were unavailable. Surprisingly it works very well. Ideally we should be able to view this version on three screens theatrically but such is the state of exhibition in Australia I fear we will have to wait a long time.

One advantage of this DVD release is that we get to hear all the music Carl Davis selected and composed for Kevin Brownlow’s fuller versions. There is also a long interview in which the veteran composer explains how he did it. The great revelation is the extent to which Davis’s score expands our appreciation of the film. Davis decided not to use any music composed after 1810 and concentrated on Beethoven’s Eroica, which was originally dedicated to Napoleon until he crowned himself Emperor and Beethoven crossed out the dedication. Davis also incorporated selections from similar music by Mozart and Haydn. He also composed some leitmotifs himself including a splendid joint theme for the eagle and Napoleon.

Working within the world of the film this way intensifies the work’s subjectivity. For much of the film Gance is trying to use his visuals to get into his hero’s mind, and employing music which many of the characters would know adds a further dimension of meaning.

By way of contrast, Carmine Coppola’s music for the shorter version is the kind of score someone like Max Steiner would have written for a similar film in the 1930s. It borrows happily from nineteenth-century music and is true to the time when Napoleon was first screened. I prefer Carl Davis’s score, but now both are on DVD we can enjoy them both.