In 2022, on a lark, I accepted a friend’s invitation to go see Abel Gance’s Napoléon for the first time. He had just ordered an imported Blu-ray, only available from the British Film Institute, which featured the fullest version of the film to date and is unavailable for purchase from American distributors due to a rights dispute with Francis Ford Coppola.
Though I had heard something of the film’s reputation as a classic, nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to see. Walking for two miles in the August sun to my friend’s apartment to see the film, hungover from a previous night of heavy drinking, I was not exactly physically ready to watch a five-and-a-half hour (330 minutes!) biological silent epic film which purportedly is a story of the childhood and early adulthood of the titular French general. Instead of a laborious watch, however, I sat down for one of the most transformative experiences I have ever had with film.
The film opens with one of the most famous anecdotes from Napoléon’s childhood, a mythical snowball fight where he first proved his tactical genius and leadership directing the battle against the enemy team. Unlike most films of the time, the entire sequence is shot on location, rather than within the artificial walls of a set. Despite the expense and impracticality of early film cameras, the scene is frequently handheld, lifting the camera off the tripod and getting the audience involved in the middle of the action of children flinging snowballs at one another with reckless abandon. As the fight intensifies, with Napoléon’s enemies putting rocks in their snowballs to hurt him, the sequence begins to fly off the rails even more. At one point, Gance sets the camera on a sled which slides through the snow. No longer interested in capturing clear, objective reality, Abel Gance begins cutting frame-by-frame, layering image after image on top of one another, in such rapid succession that the chaos of battle is no longer even trackable with the human eye but simply pure sense impression, capturing the emotion of a dream without using a sequence of images that feel concretely “realistic”. The scene crescendos with Napoléon’s ultimate victory over his haters, a pattern followed by many scenes in the film.
If the only surviving reel of the film had been of the snowball fight, it would already have a secure place in cinematic history. But the film is nowhere near close to done breaking every cinematic convention it can. In one sequence, Napoléon has returned to his native island of Corsica to drum up support for the French Revolution and ensure the people stay loyal to France instead of her enemies. Drawing the ire of traitors who have allied themselves with the British, Napoléon must escape arrest by fleeing on horseback and sailing away on a meager little boat to France. The sequence combines impressive stunt work with camera placements that would make Michael Bay blush: British-aligned forces pursue him at breakneck speed as the camera not only follows the action from a moving car, but from an improvised rig which was used to mount a camera on a running horse.
Once Napoléon reaches his boat, realistic crashing waves (some of these shots are miniatures, others aren’t, I still don’t know how he filmed them) are interspersed with political chaos back in France. Yet instead of boring coverage of people talking, Gance opts to strap the camera to a pendulum, swinging it back and forth from the roof of the building, making the political turmoil that led to the Reign of Terror not removed, but immediate and present in the DNA of the scene.
The final and greatest triumph of the film is its finale. Napoléon, finally having his genius rewarded by the powers that be, has been promoted to general of the army of Italy. Arriving and witnessing the army in a meager state, he brings them to attention, inspires them, and leads them on to their conquest of the wealthiest country in Europe. Abel Gance wanted to truly capture the enormity of what an entire army of 38,000 men would look like. Limited by how much he could physically capture in the boxy, 4:3 aspect ratio of conventional movie cameras, Gance was undeterred. Taking three cameras and placing them side-by-side, he invented Polyvision, a panoramic aspect ratio so wide it has never been used in a movie again. The result is breathtaking. Synthesizing his intense editing technique with three cameras, Gance alternates between wide, sweeping views of the triumphant army seizing towns on the Italian countryside with split screens that capture their newly found enthusiasm and the inimitable mind of their leader, who sees not only all his past but his glorious destiny in his visions.
If Napoléon does not sound like a particularly complex or balanced portrait of its protagonist, that’s because it isn’t. Imbued with a powerful sense of romanticism, the film takes the idea that he was destined for greatness from the very beginning utterly seriously. Strokes of luck are evidence that a man of such genius was being elevated to higher depths by the Divine itself. What is of interest to me is not that the film’s ideas are true, but that, for 330 minutes, I was so swept up by the magic of the film that I began to believe them.
In the fleeting moments of introspection which visit my mind as I prepare to leave undergraduate studies and enter the “real world”, it has become clear to me the ways in which joining the University Film Society not only expanded and crystalized my appreciation for cinema, but also awakened a latent desire to make films myself. Despite no formal training or qualifications, I have made it my goal on leaving school to do everything that I can to become a filmmaker, doing whatever work I can to join the fabric of an artform I love.
In these moments, Abel Gance has continued to spring up as a source of inspiration. Working from the early 20th century into the sound era before his death in 1981, his legacy is defined largely by his work in the silent era, but especially Napoléon. Despite it being nearly 100 years old, the film is far more than a historical artifact. To even classify it as “ahead of its time” is a disservice to its ambition, which has yet to have been surpassed by any film since its release. In this sense, Napoléon is a living reminder of Gance’s unbounded enthusiasm and desire to innovate.
Filmmaking, more than any other artform, is a kind of problem-solving. Due to the constraints of technology, budget, and physical reality which constrain what can be depicted onscreen, a filmmaker must often improvise around difficulties she finds, or change a scene when conditions aren’t right. What fascinates me about Napoléon is Gance’s near lack of concern with these limitations. When Gance ran into a technical roadblock, his response was never “what will we do now”, but “what if we did it anyways”. This bold, defiant stance before even reality itself is what produces unparalleled masterpieces like Napoléon, and is a stance which, if adopted by filmmakers everywhere, would herald a new Golden Age of Cinema. In today’s world, the technology to make films is cheaper and more available than it has ever been. After watching Napoléon, a friend of mine wrote, “imagine if Abel Gance had a drone”. To me, this is not idle speculation. It is a call to action: to go out into the world and use drones and every other technology available to the filmmaker today to make films as audacious and unhinged as Abel Gance did nearly a century ago.
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