This is not about morals, or politics, but art.

Abel Gance

The new restoration’s frame rate has been fully re-established at 18 frames per second, previously only the case for the Brienne episodes. This gives the film a new fluidity. The effect on the audience of the singing of La Marseillaise in sync with the actors’ lips at long last remains to be seen. Moreover, while the new restoration’s extra 90 minutes provide the merest hint of new, rediscovered sequences, they exist nonetheless; beginning with the powerful images of civil war that open the siege of Toulon sequence and conclude the first part of the film, a rigorous and painstaking piece of reconstruction. The restoration also made every effort to respect the experimental dimension that Abel Gance wanted to give his work, and this shines through in many iconic sequences (Brienne, La Marseillaise at the Cordeliers, the “double tempest,” the shadows at the National Convention, the famous triple-screen of the Italian army’s departure…). As the first entirely digital restoration, this new version strove to overcome many difficulties previously considered unsolvable, working with photochemical technology alone: colours chart, aspect ratio, authentic reproduction of the original tinting etc. The combination of all these elements is sufficient to guarantee audiences a film that is very different from the one they may remember.
But what is it that engenders the emotion of film, or in other words, poetry on the screen? What the extended version of Napoléon offers visually takes viewers far beyond anecdotal narrative and plunges them into the mystery of what Gance called his “music of light,” and his friend Epstein “the idea between the images.” In his great works of the preceding years, such as J’accuse! and La Roue, Gance works in his themes and motifs in the form of overlays, juxtaposing rather than combining them. In Napoléon – especially in the “Apollo” version – in full mastery of his art, he reaches new heights of dazzling virtuosity. Nothing escapes Gance and he’s indifferent to nothing. Right up to the eleventh hour, he adjusts the editing of any given scene.
Conceived as a gigantic visual symphony, Napoléon exposes, juxtaposes, combines and interweaves themes and instruments – in the form of his camera operators, actors, extras, landscapes and sets – right down to his title cards… He applied the same scientific method, the same combinatory genius, to his characters and to emotions. There isn’t one sequence in Napoléon that isn’t woven through with drama mixed with comedy, shot through with sense of rhythm – a kind of music, if you will – propelling the viewer out of the diegetic time of the action into a sublime visual symphony, further enhanced by the new score.
Over the top or inspired, the triptychs assured the film its triumph at l’Opéra de Paris, but only the second one, featuring the Italian army, has survived; the “double tempest” triptych surviving only in its single-screen version. Like a Renaissance altarpiece, the three-screen extravaganza of symbolist dramaturgy, combining the horizontal (the conquest of Italy) and the vertical (multiple superimpositions of images of Bonaparte, Josephine, the yet-to-be-imperial eagle, the world on a globe and the “beggars of glory”) form the obligatory epilogue of the extended version, even if it wasn’t shown at the Apollo in May 1927. In his “proclamation” of 4 June 1924, addressed to all his contemporary and future collaborators, Abel Gance concluded: “Today it is for the public to tell us whether we achieved our goal.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves!

Joël Daire