“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).
All of this supercharged my excitement when I took my seat this past June in the balcony of the Cinema Modernissimo in Bologna—a subterranean theater itself recently restored to its art-nouveau splendor—to watch part one of the Cinematheque Française’s new restoration of Napoléon. The film is now as legendary among cinephiles as its self-mythologizing subject, so even a screening of the first half was a major event, and a centerpiece of this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, the annual feast of restorations and rediscoveries that turns the medieval city of Bologna into a cinematic time machine”.

Ricordando l’ultima edizione del festival Il Cinema Ritrovato… leggi l’articolo realizzato da Imogen Sara Smith per Criterion.com