the rebirth of Abel Gance’s breathtaking “Napoleon”, a monument of world cinema

“I had the feeling that my father was next to me.” These are the words that Clarisse Gance, the daughter of Abel Gance, said a few moments after the end of the event screening of the first part of the almost century-old film Napoleon seen by Abel Gance (this is indeed the exhaustive title of the work), Tuesday May 14, 2024, as part of Cannes Classics. A historic presentation in many ways. A silent film as the pre-opening of the Cannes festival is frankly not common. But this film, which relates the life of Napoleon Bonaparte from the military school of Brienne to the Italian campaign, is totally extraordinary. Avant-garde, impressionist, full of technical and cinematographic discoveries. A legendary masterpiece of world cinema which had undergone five restorations in the past, and of which there have been more than twenty-two versions… The Cinémathèque française has finally delivered the “Grande version”, considered to be the most close to the vision of its author. A reconstituted, reconstructed and restored version under the direction of researcher and director Georges Mourier, the great architect of this spectacular resurrection.

The first part of Napoleon seen by Abel Gance, presented in Cannes, reveals to us a child Napoleon (magnificent Vladimir Roudenko), a precocious military strategist at the Brienne school, mistreated by his fellow students. Then a young adult Napoleon (fascinating Albert Dieudonné) penniless in a Paris where the Revolution is brewing. In the meantime, Rouget de Lisle presents its Marseillaise to a Danton conquered under the tormental gaze of Robespierre and Marat (the latter being played by a more than disturbing Antonin Artaud). Then, Napoleon returned to his native Corsica where he found his family and enjoyed short-lived happiness… Forced to flee to sea because of his political positions, he faced a terrifying storm. The young officer will find a position in the French army and will distinguish himself at the siege of Toulon.

Abel Gance films each of these episodes like paintings, frescoes of stunning beauty and poetry, which strike us right in the heart. He takes all the time necessary to depict these initiatory moments, these states of mind, these torments, these exaltations – those of a man alongside those of a changing people. Gance had planned to produce several sections leading Napoleon to the end of his destiny in Saint Helena. Due to lack of budget, he was never able to go beyond the Italian campaign of 1796. But the Bonaparte of his younger years, observed through the claimed subjectivity of Gance as an author in his own right, is no less essential. in cinema and art.

Concerning the historical value of the film, as Costa-Gavras, president of the Cinémathèque française, pointed out just before the screening, “It’s not a biography. It’s a kind of poem.” A poem of crazy lyricism, which comes from afar.

The seven-hour film carried by the Cinémathèque française, nicknamed the “Grande Version”, is different from the 3h47 film screened in April 1927 at the Paris Opera (short format known by film buffs as the “Opera version”), but also the one at 9:40 a.m. presented to professionals in May 1927 at the Apollo (the “Apollo” test screening). But this “Grande Version”, used at the same time as the “Opera version”, has experienced many vicissitudes and outrages. Over the decades, Abel Gance’s film found itself literally cut into pieces, scattered like a puzzle on various continents, the filmmaker himself having contributed to this chaos by re-editing his film to make talking versions, first in 1935, then in 1971 for a version produced by Claude Lelouch.

From 2008, it took the expertise, investigations, intuition and perseverance of Georges Mourier, who carried out a vast archaeological investigation at the head of the Éclair Classics/L’Image Retrouvée laboratory teams with the support of the CNC, to unravel the thousand and one mysteries of the missing, scattered and found reels, films and negatives (half a million images, or more than 1000 boxes appraised!) of the Napoleon. Then, it was necessary to design specific tools to carry out the reconstruction and homogenization of this dense and complex cinematographic material which, before Mourier, had misled the most acute experts. A work of fourteen years. The very last stage of the reconstruction, which lasted two years, was the setting of music for the film, designed from existing works by the composer and arranger Simon Cloquet-Lafollye, and recorded by the two orchestras and the choirs of Radio France .

The result of the restoration is astonishing. It allows you to fully savor, sequence by sequence, shot by shot, the genius, crazy creativity and modernity of Gance. A surreal snowball fight of little budding soldiers, multiplied faces – and sometimes scenes – in superimposition, a breathtaking horse chase with a camera fixed on the mount, a dizzying system of pendulums to recreate the fury of a sea unleashed – alternating with another storm in progress in Paris (this is the famous double storm, one of the most mind-blowing scenes in the entire history of cinema), a blood-red, chilling Battle of Toulon… A thousand discoveries, a thousand effects, not to mention the final triple-screen scene which was a landmark and which will be recreated on July 5 at the Seine Musicale during a sold-out screening… When we remember that the film was shot in 1925, almost a century ago, we can only bow. Abel Gance, it is still Georges Mourier who talks about it best: “On the staging as on the processing of the image, its Napoleon constitutes the apotheosis of Gance’s vision of the seventh art, for which cinema is the music of light.'”