France, 1927
Directed by Abel Gance
With Albert Dieudonné (Napoléon Bonaparte), Vladimir Rovdenkov (Napoléon Bonaparte at 11), Gina Manes (Joséphine de Beauharnais), Nicolas Koline (Tristan Fleury), Annabella (Violine Fleury), Edmond Van Daele (Maximilien Robespierre), Antonin Artaud (Jean-Paul Marat), Alexandre Koubitzky (Georges-Jacques Danton), Acho Chakatouny (Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo), Philippe Hériat (Antonio Salicetti)
After an excruciating and exhausting shooting marred by incidents and a conflict with his main producer, Charles Pathé, forcing him to seek fresh funds in a Germany still viewed with distrust in his native France and a Russia turned communist in the wake of the 1917 revolution, director Abel Gance delivered two different editing for what was supposed to be the first two parts of a wider six-part biopic about the French Emperor. One ran 3 hours and 27 minutes, a short version for the first screening catering to an audience while a far longer version of 9 hours and40 minutes was presented to the media and the professionals a bit later. After these two screenings, Gance decided to edit again his film: this new version lasted 7 hours and 5 minutes now and was sold to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio for a worldwide release – and it is this version which is considered the authoritative one, even if Gance kept tweaking his work for years (some reckon there might be up to 22 versions of the biopic).
Gance’s film was a commercial failure and the reels were put aside, scattered, and forgotten. In 2007 the Cinémathèque Française asked director Georges Mourier to retrieve all the reels available and to put back together the 7-hour film. Set for six months the assignment ended up lasting more than 15 years. When at long last the editing was wrapped up to the best of the knowledge of the team tasked with the restoration, composer Simon Cloquet-Lafollye wrote a score boldly created by blending of many musical works spanning the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. And in July 2024, Gance’s film was released again in France.
It could have been title like the Giuseppe Verdi opera, “La forza del destino”, “The Power of Fate”. In the prologue, set in Brienne where the 11-year old Corsican was a student in a military academy, Napoléon Bonaparte is not only already behaving as a reckless but brilliant strategist, he is also faced with intriguing signs that portends his future life. He is first shot while commanding a small group of fellow students in a makeshift fortress trying to resist the assault of a far greater group, putting up a fierce and clever resistance and then daring a confrontation that ends up with a resounding victory: a great strategist he is, and duly noticed and praised by the teachers. That is an obvious nod to the future though the main point is simply to demonstrate how stubborn, resolute, aggressive, above all proud the boy is, setting him apart from the other students, as if his origins and his accent were not enough to make him an outlier.
But the film goes further with a lesson of geography given by an ineffectual and mocked teacher, describing various kinds of islands, with the expected disparaging comments on Corsica getting under the boy’s skin, and then last-minute remarks by the bumbling teacher about a small island called Saint Helene – a name and a place that instantly puzzle the young Napoléon Bonaparte: the adult one would bitterly experience what the isle is. The prologue’s last part keeps overemphasizing the idea of a fate already in the making, with the boy petting fondly a bird that would be associated with the political regime he would later set up and often crop up in later scenes of the epic film, an eagle. You cannot say you have not been forewarned.
The prologue does not only set the intellectual agenda of the film: it also introduces key stylistic and plot elements. Looming over the snow battle the amazingly intense and sullen face of actor Vladimir Rovdenkov is deftly superimposed, carefully set right at the center of the frame, staring fiercely at the audience, both magnetic and forbidding. This is going to be an essential motif, the audience getting regularly confronted by the impatient, imperious, not yet imperial though, face of Napoléon Bonaparte – or should it rather be said haunted by his towering presence? But this stylistic device would also extent to other faces and also, in later times, reflect the lead character’s own obsessions, the superimposed faces addressing the character as he is haunted by the beloved or the historical models.
It is not only superimposed images that are so striking and awesome to watch in this prologue and set to be repeated over the running time. There is also the terrific dynamics of a frenetically mobile camera, lunging into the melee of students fighting around the snow-made fortress, going deep into the confusion and the violence and consequently delivering breathtakingly vivid images. This may still be 1927 but whatever constraints the technology had were sidestepped by a highly motivated and deeply skilled director who was steadfast in his desire to create narration techniques as energetic and bold as the narrative topic, that superlative military and political leader he admired so strongly. The camera moves as lively and forcefully as the bodies it shoots even as they are engaged in the most passionate or brutal activity – especially because they are engaged in such a way. And it gets more and more complex and frenetic as the events to be shot become sweeping and terrible, from the commotion of an assembly to a battlefront.
The prologue also introduces a supporting character, Tristan Fleury, a cook who is fond of the obstreperous Corsican. He is set to reappear often, in the company of a daughter, Violine Fleury, the distant and always enthusiastic witness of the rise of Napoléon Bonaparte, getting involved unwittingly in the political chaos, another viewpoint on the recorded history, widening the scope, embodying the kind of loyalty and admiration the future emperor could cause, with the daughter expressing love and devotion (and arguably those characters may well be reflecting the feelings experienced by the director about his film’s hero).
Once the prologue is over, the film chooses to stop focusing on Napoléon Bonaparte and instead to picture the wider context developing a few years later: so the first part begins in Paris in 1792, as the constitutional monarchy the rebels of 1789 imposed is teetering. The deputies are restless and vociferous while the three most important leaders of the assembly, the so-called three gods of the revolution as it stands, Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat, and Georges-Jacques Danton argue in a room. But the big event to be shot by a camera eager to roam inside the assembly and to circle around the leaders using as many angles as possible is not political: it is the request of a man to sing a song written on a distant battlefront. This is the birth of the national anthem “La Marseillaise” treated in a wonderful lyrical, even mythical manner, a visual tour de force enhanced by the yellow-tinted shots brightly underlining how momentous and emotional this moment and more broadly the context of Napoléon Bonaparte’s rise are. And it is once the audience can take stock of what they have just watched that, as a shadowy figure, the lead sneaks into the frame. Now the film can come back to the original topic.
After noting how hardscrabble his life in Paris is, and how he reacts to the uprising of August 10, when the crowd forces the king to leave the premises of Versailles and settle in the capital, a day and a night of rage that red-tinted images filled with sinister shadows powerfully convey, Gance’s peripatetic camera follows Napoléon Bonaparte as he travels back to his native isle. He becomes right away the nemesis of a local political figure, Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, who champions an alliance between the rebellious island and the United Kingdom while the former Brienne student wants Corsica to stay within France. The fight casts Napoléon Bonaparte as an impassioned leader able to stir a crowd while taking incredible physical risks. He is eventually forced to flee but once again his life is readily likened to a bigger fate: a dazzling crosscut editing blends the dramatic images of his little ship battered by a stormy sea with hectic scenes from the assembly, the battle for his survival resonating with a crucial change in alliance and government. The so-called Terror begins and so does the career of Napoléon Bonaparte in the new regime’s army.
Breaking the English-led siege of the port of Toulon is a challenge the French army struggles to rise to, if only by incompetence, but it is the opportunity Napoléon Bonaparte needs to seize to move forward. And he does seize it, especially once he wins the trust of a new commander, despite the hostility of a political leader who happens to be also from Corsican descent, Antonio Salicetti. Undaunted by the bad weather, a difficult terrain, and his many enemies, Napoléon Bonaparte starts an epic battle that is swiftly threatened to end up as a miserable failure till his boldness and his troops’ fierceness prevail – and so does prevail the awesome power of that daredevil of a camera that Gance brilliantly wields and rushes. For 1927, and even decades later, his red-tinted, graphic, close view of the battle is an impressive show of what cinema can do.
The second part of the biopic begins like the first, the narrative following the rough and tumble of politics, depicting vividly the ruthless crackdown of the Terror government against nearly everybody, as everybody, including Napoléon Bonaparte, can easily be faulted and considered an enemy of the revolution, with jails as quickly filled as the capital punishment is carried out, till the government’s leaders end up getting accused and eliminated. The Directoire regime is born but unrest soon threatens it, prompting it to rely on the army in 1795: Napoléon Bonaparte emerges as a key player in politics and the military at last. When the regime chooses to conquer neighboring countries to promote the tenets of the 1789 revolution and to get rid of hostile foreign governments, it is Napoléon Bonaparte who is chosen to perform the ambitious task, starting with a campaign in Italy.
But the man has now other feelings stirring him besides ambition and patriotism: love has gripped him. Long ago he noticed a mischievous, pleasant face in the streets of Paris as he was just a poor soldier: it was, once again, fate nodding at him, or rather winking at him. Now, after stumbling across the same face in a ball, he feels love at first sight. The increasingly used stylistic device of superimposed images express now passion, with, at one point, countless images of Joséphine de Beauharnais filling the frame as a tormented lover keeps thinking about her. They get married – in a slapdash fashion scaring the bride but befitting the reckless bridegroom – and the untamed soldier becomes in thrall to someone at last.
The second part ends like the first, observing Napoléon Bonaparte rising to a tough military challenge, with the troops already stationed in Italy looking even more destitute and disheartened that those he dealt with before. But this time, no battle would deliver a stunning climax that would also be a wonderful coda. In parallel rather with the Corsica trip, the film extols the oratory skills of the lead character and his talent to cheer up and lead men. It is more than ever about a man keen to prod and to inspire and apt to overlook the hurdles and to move beyond the limits. So does the film: the frame suddenly expands, delivering a widened vision of a community finding a new balance and a new purpose and moving forward unstopped and undaunted. This is the moment when Gance uses an invention of his own, the so-called polyvision, basically the use of three cameras to deliver complex shots three times bigger than the ordinary ones. The world is on the verge of being upset on a large scale by a man of genius: these tectonic shifts called for a new cinema ready to challenge its own format and rules to grasp this extraordinary stream of men and events making history. The end is not just heroic in the usual cinematic terms: it is truly exalting.
And then perhaps too much. Even in the intellectual and political context of 1927 France, even if you can sympathize with the rash and unbound enthusiasm of a filmmaker for a historical figure that is, granted, an amazing one, the film feels too much of a strident hagiography that the – genuine – artistic and technical prowess barely conceals. When asked by the ineffectual commander of the revolutionary army what could be his plan to break the siege of Toulon, Napoléon Bonaparte is shot unsurprisingly in closeup but his meditation is coarsely translated by naive though gaudy special effects turning his eyes into a festival of flashing images: Gance overplays his hand, his flair lapsing into a grotesque performance before delivering in the battle scenes far better, stronger images, including a pioneering split screen. But whatever he does remains grounded in that deeply felt, passionate, admiration for Napoléon Bonaparte, and even if there are comic moments bringing a lighter, more irreverent tone, the film hardly takes a critical approach.
Stuck in its own obsession to highlight the specific, striking fate of Napoléon Bonaparte, the film can wield symbols and coincidences too conspicuously, the audience being firmly invited to be in awe as they face the destiny of the unruly Corsican student bound to be the new leader of a new France. But then the film is teeming with fascinating ideas, visually appealing and cleverly harping on the theme of fate: think of the pervasive presence of bad weather, from heavy snow to pouring rain, that both test and strengthen the resilience of Napoléon Bonaparte, or these children popping up in the fringe of a scene to play the soldier, or becoming one, late reflections of the lead’s fate, other witnesses of both his glory and the changing times who may be as many reflections of the director’s own admiration or the admiration of the armies and fights many boys felt before growing up into quieter, tame, fellows.
Actually, these 425 minutes are so full-packed with arresting images, underpinned by such an eagerness to embrace a terrific individual and a tumultuous era and by such a desire to make cinema even more creative and stimulating, if only to match the outstanding nature of these individual and era, that it is hard not to feel really dazed, a bit confused, definitely excited, even if you do not have much sympathy for the topic. Challenging, not really a crowd-pleaser, but a cinematic milestone, child of a filmmaker yearning to break the limits and go beyond the confines of what cinema enabled in his lifetime, “Napoléon vu par Abel Gance” would never lose its relevance and importance.