Eagle-Eyed Cinematic Cathedral

"What's that noise, Monsieur Fouché?"

"It is Bonaparte entering history again, Madame."

This is an experience every film lover should behold. One would be hard-pressed to think of a film more ambitious than Abel Gance's "Napoléon." I would love to see it on a big theatrical screen, or rather three screens in the case of the triptych climax, an early wide-and-split-screen effect Gance later dubbed "Polyvision," and with a grand orchestral score such as the one composed by Carl Davis, to be fully immersed in the historical spectacle full of extras. "To make the otherwise passive spectator an actor," as Gance said. "He would not only look at but participate in the action." Or, as phrased by film historian Paul Cuff ("Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance (1927): The case for enthusiasm"), "to absorb the viewer into the midst of the action, losing their individual identity to become one with the collective drama." Yet, "Napoléon" was even too large, too daring, too cinematic for cinema--an inimitable vision of its artistic potential that dissolved against its commodified wake. It arrived around the time that the industry was transforming to the revolution of synchronized sound, nullifying Gance's and that of fellow filmmakers', especially fellow Impressionist ones, dream of cinema as a universal language. "Napoléon" was too singularly monumental to be as likewise revolutionary as the simplicity and repeatability of the image of Al Jolson's lips moving being matched to hearing him quip in "The Jazz Singer" (1927), "You ain't heard nothin' yet." By contrast, you've never seen anything like this, nor will you again.

I finally saw the BFI home video of Kevin Brownlow's five-and-a-half-hours restoration, having seen the sped-up, four-hours "Coppola" version of Brownlow's work on VHS years ago (and Francis Ford Coppola and company's lawsuit threats being the source of the unavailability for years of Brownlow's subsequent restoration improvements). As daunting as those runtimes seem, one shouldn't feel obliged to complete the picture in one sitting. Indeed, the four-disc BFI set includes two intermissions, and Gance didn't originally intend one to do so. This was but the first entry of a planned six-part historical reenactment, and alone it was imagined to be distributed in serial installments. Gance, however, struggled to get even this first part financed, and the failure to distribute it in any coherent manner doomed hopes for the subsequent five films. If Stanley Kubrick's ill-fated plans to make a Napoleon picture is "the greatest movie never made," then Gance's may be the greatest one to always remain incomplete.

Perhaps, no other cinematic masterpiece has so oft been mutilated and transformed throughout the years. It makes the seven versions of "Blade Runner" (1982) a paltry number by comparison to how many different times this late-silent-era epic has been altered. Wikipedia lists 30 different screened versions, and it was reported, although I'm unsure of the state now of the project, that Netflix (seemingly out to outdo the achievement of completing Orson Welles' "The Other Side of the Wind" (2019)) is financing another by the Cinémathèque Française, to restore the "Opera" (a little over four hours) and "Apollo" (over nine hours) cuts, so-called for the two venues where "Napoléon" first premiered, the former with the triptych climax and the latter not. Granted, a dozen of the 30 listed editions are variations of Kevin Brownlow's restoration efforts over the years, from his purchasing a 9.5mm two-reel fragment as a teenager in the 1950s to his collaboration with the BFI and the 2k digitization for DVD and Blu-ray with Davis's colossus, Beethoven-infused orchestral score. Even before Brownlow entered the picture, though, Gance and various studios had already chopped up and added bits over the years, including a talkie re-issue (and discarded color and 3D film attempts).

There are so many spectacular scenes throughout, I'll just list some of the highlights before examining the whole.

* The opening snowball fight. Besides beginning the heavy foreshadowing of what schoolboy Napoleon will grow up to be, the sequence establishes the paroxysms central to the picture's exuberance and lyricism, full of panoramic and subjective camerawork--symbolic superimpositions, translucent camera masking, whip pans, shots achieved via mirrors, flowing tracking shots and shaky handheld camerawork, to the point that it's as though the camera becomes a snowball to be tossed around--and rapid montage that folds the space and time of the various angles together until they overlap, including shots lasting only a single frame.

* A subsequent pillow fight. The symbolic connection between Napoleon and the eagle are established by another exhilarating sequence between quarrelling boys, with more dolly and proto-steadicam movements, frantic cutting, and a nine-shots-in-one composition to top it off.

* Napoleon's window to the violent turn of the Revolution as Plato's Cave. An adult Napoleon sitting in his room sees a man lynched on his balcony amidst the revolutionary mob, and he grapples with whether to try to prevent it, as the film moves and cuts back and forth between the hanging and an ironic view of "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" hanging on Napoleon's wall. Further disillusioning scenes outside, including Danton's vivid speechifying of the Revolution as a furnace or forge, becomes a play of light flickering upon Bonaparte's cave.

* Corsican chase on horseback, including the camera being on horseback.

* The Double Tempest, of the sirocco one for Napoleon's escape from Corsica with the French flag as his sail, intercut with the metaphorical storm (reportedly a visualization of a Victor Hugo quotation) of the Convention initiating the Reign of Terror. Rollicking camerawork, including the apparatus swinging back and forth as a pendulum over the crowd, and rapid juxtapositions make it appear that the Convention is the more likely to be tipped over into the depths of the sea. Crosscutting, silhouettes, night tinting and superimposed guillotines abound. And all of the above is just from before the intermission. Less than half the movie has passed.

* The nighttime, rain-soaked, mud-engulfed Siege of Toulon, with inserted flashbacks to the snowball fight, occasional bouncing and musical camerawork, shots of outstretched hands of soldiers engulfed in the murky ground, and culminating in heroic imagery of Napoleon sleeping, high on a mound, surrounded by flags, the sun rising in the background and the eagle flying down to perch above him, which would be entirely laughably pompous if it didn't look magnificent and serve the picture's visual motifs.

* More large crowd scenes of the Revolution, including at the Convention during the Reign of Terror, as Marat, Danton, Robespierre and Gance himself playing Saint-Just meet their downfalls and as Napoleon rises to power amidst the threat of Royalists seizing Paris and the Convention halls. Ominously, he warns he shan't surrender the sword until safety is secured and winds up proclaiming himself to be the Revolution.

* The Victims' Ball. There's a rapid flashback of prior scenes of Josephine in Napoleon's mind, and tinted in striking purple, the camera becomes a participant in the frivolity on the dance floor, including glimpses of exposed breasts and legs, which are crosscut with Napoleon settling a love triangle over chess and subsequently lustily gazing upon Josephine.

* A smaller scene, but one I especially like, involves Napoleon learning to romance like Romeo from an actor-teacher, with the scene ending with Bonaparte seeing Josephine's face superimposed--a motif of superimposed Josephines that will continue for the rest of the picture--upon a globe, which gives a whole other meaning to sexual conquests.

* Napoleon's double weddings, so to speak, reflect the themes of The Victim's Ball. There's another love triangle, with his marriage to Josephine and the pining from afar for him by Violine. The purple tinting of the wedding night further connects the color with sex, just as blue tints are with night, or red with war. Ultimately, the love triangle is somewhat resolved by proto-horror-film camerawork from the perspective of a figure behind Violine, which turns out to be Josephine, and the two of them share in idolatrous worship of Bonaparte as he sets off for his Italian campaign.

* The triptych finale. If this three-camera, three-screen widescreen effect weren't so spectacular, it would be rather anticlimactic to watch the lengthy film end in soldier formations and marching. But merely watching figures on horseback entering and exiting between the three simultaneous shots is impressive enough for the grand vistas, and three screens only adds to the rapidity and totality of the panoramic montage otherwise. The apotheosis has Napoleon at his highest vantage point in the mountains, as Josephine and conquest imagery return, along with the eagle and, finally, tinting of shots of soldiers marching in the tri-colors of the French flag, the aptly-titled "Strange Conductor in the Sky" from Davis's score playing the film out.

These bullet points aren't even to mention the many smaller snippets of beauty throughout, such as the many musical narrative moments that underscore the picture's visual symphony: the singing of "La Marseillaise," a hurdy-gurdy played during the Reign of Terror cabinet meetings, the drummer boys, or the piano and harp played by the "musical" Josephine, in addition to the aforementioned musicality of a battle and a ball. Some may wrongly argue that the picture is a mixture of brilliant set pieces between whatever complaints they have of the drama, but this is an artistic triumph in totality. Even a glimpse of a mirror shot at the ball, silhouettes here or shadows there, soft-focus imagery especially prominent in the courtship of Josephine, or the reflexivity of doubles, actors-playing-actors and reference to an optical telegraph would be worth remarking on. The most significant flaw, which I find minor and that regardless plays to the picture's variegated nature, is too many title cards purporting "(Historical)" in ahistorical, Griffith-esque fashion.

Yet, to dismiss Gance's "Napoléon" as hagiography, or even "fascist" as some have, is rather both an understatement and misses the point. This Napoleon is largely revered as a messianic figure; indeed, he becomes the subject of idolatrous veneration for the two women who worship him. This isn't so much religious, though, or nationalism as religion, or even a godly portrait of Napoleon, as it is about constructing a "Cathedral of Light," as Gance said--a cinematic cathedral. A picture to absorb those of the pews in rapture, and Napoleon serves that purpose. Little wonder, then, that Gance is oft associated with--perhaps even more so than with fellow French Impressionists--the two great propagandists of the silent film image and its juxtaposition, D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein. This is powerful and dangerous visceral art.

To articulate coherence to the film's "blend of subjectivity and objectivity, historicism and fantasy, narrative and spectacle," which Cuff claims has continued to confound critics, one may look no further than its character of Napoleon, as wonderfully portrayed by Albert Dieudonné. That the totality of the picture concerns seeing from different perspectives and in different ways, exploring "the music of light," as Gance said, and the rhythm of cinematic space and time. Note, then, the brilliance of its narrative sight analogy. The main motif is Napoleon's eagle. By the end, a title card refers to "His eagle eye," as he surveys the Italian campaign atop the mountains. Earlier, he imagines an empty Convention to be filled with superimposed ghosts approving of his assumption of the Revolution. This also makes sense of the gobs of eye shadow sported by Dieudonné, the flickering light upon his eyes in one scene, or that he largely appears to merely stand in observance at the battles he orchestrates or the Revolution he becomes. This is the Revolutionary tactician who sees all the angles, except, perhaps, when it comes to love, as indicated by the blindfolded scene with Josephine, for which her conflation with Napoleon's warmongering aspirations may indicate the direction Gance was going with his planned series. Or, perhaps, that an all-seeing cinematic language was always impossible, always to be outstripped by its ambition, appearing in many forms, but always incomplete.

Note, too, the contrast with the squinted eyes and blinding sunglasses of the leader of the Reign of Terror, Robespierre, or the generals under Napoleon's command before the finale who initially turn their backs to him, obscuring their views. It's his "piercing eyes," as one of them admits, that frighten them--and everyone else throughout the picture--into submission. Of course, the cinematic masterpiece of French Impressionism, one of the crowning achievements of silent cinema, and thus of film history, is primarily focused on the cinematic gaze.