Napoleon: An Epic out of Exile

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

After 54 years, a classic is triumphantly restored

On April 7, 1927, Charles de Gaulle and his friend, Andre Malraux, saw the Paris premiere of a new movie. At its end, the two great-men-to-be were on their feet, cheering. Malraux remembered De Gaulle waving his long arms and crying, "Bravo, magnifique!" It is said that De Gaulle never forgot the images of glory he found that evening in Abel Gance's epic reconstruction of another young soldier's climb to greatness, Napoleon.

Unfortunately, another movie captivated audiences that year: The Jazz Singer. The first talkie totally obscured the late, great silents like Napoleon. The Gance film was also dauntingly long. Though De Gaulle saw a 2 1/2-hour version, the movie Gance originally intended to release was something like six hours in length.

Though various cuts of the film circulated through the years, it was not until last week, in Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall, that the public got a chance to see a Napoleon that can be regarded as definitive. Close to 4 1/2 hours in length, it is a reconstitution by Kevin Brownlow, a talented English film historian (The Parade's Gone By, Hollywood: the Pioneers), who spent a decade painstakingly collecting bits and pieces of film. It is appropriate, perhaps inevitable, that Brownlow's work should be presented by Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), a modern inheritor of the epic tradition. He has brought a showman's flair to the project, commissioning a score from his composer father, Carmine, who led the American Symphony at last weekend's premiere. It is--as silent film scores always were--full of quotations from the masters and plenty of bombast. (After a few more special evenings in major cities, the film will go into general release.) Anyone interested in the history of the cinema will want to see Napoleon. Even those less devoted to film, or less concerned than Gance was with French national mythology, will find plenty to beguile and dazzle them here. They literally don't make 'em like this any more.

The most vivid element in Brownlow's reconstruction is a concluding 18-minute triptych in which three well-synchronized images are simultaneously projected on a suddenly expanded screen, as Napoleon is preparing to lead his army into Italy and the campaign that made him a world figure. By another name, this is Cinerama, though it is 30 years ahead of that gimmick's invention. It is also crudely stirring, and just about as big a finish as any movie has ever had.

This episode alone is not what makes Napoleon memorable. That quality derives from its shooting and editing. D.W.Griffith demonstrated the limitless scope of the screen's ability to tackle big scenes in Intolerance (1916). Eisenstein, in pictures like Battleship Potemkin (1925), showed how the juxtaposition of disparate images could create, through montage, meanings that were more felt than consciously understood. Gance's great contribution was to set the camera free of the tripod, making it a participant in, as well as an observer of, the action. His tracking shots were unprecedented.

There is wonderful hand-held camera work in an opening sequence where a young Bonaparte first indicates his strategic gifts in a schoolboy snowball fight. But Gance was capable of hanging a camera on anything--a galloping horse, a firing cannon, a storm-tossed boat--thereby forcing emotional involvement with what otherwise might have been mere tableaux. His tour de force is a sequence in which the pitching of Napoleon's boat as he escapes his Corsican political enemies is crosscut with scenes of riotous action in the Paris Assembly in which the camera is made to rock as it does when it is on the ocean. Gance's experiments with quick-cut editing--split-screening, double-printing, creating images that register almost subliminally--prefigure a style that has only now come into fashion.

Napoleon--like all the great silent epics--is a triumph of pure cinematic style over conventional expectations. There is no "characterization" in the usual sense, though in the title role Albert Dieudonne gives a great silent performance of looks, gestures and poses. Mostly, however, people are used as unparticularized symbols. Nor are there many dramatically pointed scenes, only groupings in which it is up to cameraman, editor and director to ferret out (and impose) meaning--to "photograph thought," in Griffith's phrase.

In short, it is purely through the resources of his medium that Gance (now 91, and too ill to attend last week's opening) involves us in large and distant events. His camera makes an audience feel his own sense of the movie's possibilities when the medium--and he--were young and full of heroic ambition. --By Richard Schickel

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