02/09/2024
"The first time I saw Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (1927) was on a boxy old television via a VHS tape. Even then, the extravagance of Gance’s ambition to put on-screen the surging tides of history and the flicker of thought in a human eye, all through what the director called “the music of light,” set a high-water mark for my idea of what cinema can be. I had yearned ever since to see it again, while following the never-ending saga of restorations and disputed screenings of the mangled epic (now clocking in at 562 minutes).
