Napoleon (1927, Abel Gance) (Patreon)

64/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995 (in a cut that was at least 40 minutes shorter than this one; can't remember whether NYU's Cinema Studies department screened the Coppola version or an earlier Brownlow restoration). Let's get the damning-with-faint-praise part out of the way: For a 5½-hour hagiographic, ultra-nationalist historical biopic, this is remarkably watchable, even discounting its technical glories. Apart from a childhood prologue (arguably the film's finest sequence), Gance sticks to Napoleon's early military successes, depicting only the years 1792-96; while one wouldn't call the narrative tightly crafted, it does at least mostly avoid that enervating sense of one damn thing following another simply because that's the next paragraph of an enyclopedia entry (usually I'd say Wikipedia, but that seems especially goofy w/r/t a silent film) about its subject. Act III does get a bit bogged down with Napster's "courtship" of Josephine, plus a frankly weird subplot involving another young woman's obsessive devotion to him (which at one point sees her practically hump a Napoleonic shadow cast on the wall by a small cardboard figure she's either made or bought), and there's perhaps more French Revolution intrigue—the birth of "La Marseillaise," Marat's assassination, etc.—than is strictly necessary to tell this particular story. Still, we're talking here about a genre that I can't abide, so merely holding my attention over the length of nearly five Detours qualifies as something of a minor miracle. If I'm less enthusiastic than the film's canonical stature demands, it's really just because: ugh, Great Man Biopic.

Again, that's all "even discounting its technical glories," and why would one want to do such a deranged thing? Should I ever teach a course on silent cinema, Napoleon's opening 15-minute snowball fight might well be the first thing I'll show students, just to demonstrate how anti-stodgy early cinema can be; despite incredibly low stakes, it's the Omaha Beach sequence of its day, orchestrating eye-popping chaos while remaining spatially precise at all times (and with the additional burden of introducing young Napoleon as master strategist, a task handily accomplished). Hard to imagine anyone who's not completely closed off to the past experiencing that degree of sustained formal excitement as something less than revelatory. Gance's use of superimposition likewise feels galvanizing, and there are occasional high-speed montages that make Michael Bay look like Béla Tarr, though Gance (who served as his own editor) had the good sense not to combine that approach with directional movement—it's more like the forerunner to what Jodie Mack now does. Even the tinting serves an atypically robust purpose, with the image abruptly turning "gold" in response to sunlight streaming through a stained-glass window and switching from nocturnal blue to bloody red when the Toulon offensive commences. And then of course there's the climactic super-hyper-mega-panoramic 4:1 aspect ratio, which was more thrilling when I saw it projected but still wows as a thin horizontal slice of your TV screen. Oddly enough, it's the intertitles that really sell this effect: Gance confines them to the middle frame most of the time, with black leader or other images on either side, and it's somehow very arresting when the text gets distributed evenly across all three. Oh, hey, I can show you the difference here:

And the intertitles burst the bounds of a single Academy frame! (The justified margins within each frame make it more charming, in my view.) I also rather liked the "(Historical)" annotation, signifying events and dialogue for which a citation could theoretically be made, and would be happy to see it applied to contemporary sound cinema, perhaps just via a symbol (📖) that appears onscreen at such moments. If nothing else, it would serve as a useful reminder that most of what we see in biopics rightfully belongs on the page.  

That's what it boils down to, vis-à-vis Napoleon. Visually, the film's a marvel, and I'm not particularly inclined to argue with those who consider it among the greatest silent films ever made (hence among the greatest films ever made, full stop). Albert Dieudonné (fantastic surname—"Pleased to make your acquaintance, I'm Albert Godgiven") makes him a memorably intense figure, often fairly burning an aggrieved or just morose hole through the screen. In the end, though, this is still, in its compressed-yet-sprawling way, The Napoleon Bonaparte Story, with all of the inherent limitations suggested by those words. I admire the hell out of it, but it just can't frazzle my nervous system like Sunrise and Greed and The Last Laugh and The Wind and so forth. There's a ceiling. 

Also, am I nuts or is Napoleon pitching the EU here?