Megalomania as Art (and Vice-Versa): Thoughts on Abel Gance's Napoleon

I'm not a sucker for marketing—at least, I like to think I'm not—but when I saw a notice that Abel Gance's Napoleon was coming to the East Bay, complete with a live orchestra, the near hyperbolic amount of excitement ("you can say 'I was there!'") seemed like truth in advertising. Napoleon, Gance's 1927 cinema-biography of the French general, is one of the great epics of the silent era, and due to its length (over 5 hours) and the technical considerations of putting it on, also one of the rarest. It's unavailable on DVD in America, and given the niche appeal and cost of scoring and remastering it all, it's likely to remain that way. The last time it played in the US was 1981. Now, a new restoration had come to the States, and in the entire country, it was playing only in Oakland, for four days.

Each screening was something of a marathon: five and a half hours of film, two intermissions, and a two-hour dinner break, so the musicians (and the audience) could catch their breath.  All together, everyone arrives around 1 PM and leaves at 9:40. Word about these screenings spread, and some people I know even flew in from out of town just to attend. And so, though I hadn't given Napoleon the man a moment's thought in my adult life, Napoleon the film quickly became the cinematic event of the year.

The setting for this gargantuan enterprise was the Paramount Theater, the kind of classy art-deco palace that seats several thousand and sells wine at the concession stand. This was, by ambition and execution, not just a major undertaking but an international one as well. Pushing through the crowded lobby, I could hear excited smatterings of various languages and accents, and I would catch chatter about the film on the streets of Oakland and on BART. The best ticket I could secure/afford was in the back row, but that only meant a quicker path to the restroom during intermissions.

The final years of the silent era are considered to be its most dextrous, the time when directors had figured out how to make a silent film but before they had to learn how to integrate sound. Thus, in the late 20s, you can see the pinnacle of silent filmmaking as its own art form. Napoleon is famous not only for bringing together so many of the silent era's most advanced techniques, but also for pioneering several (including a prodigious amount of handheld camerawork) that wouldn't become commonplace for decades.

The most famous of its experiments was what the director called "Polyvision." For the grand finale of the film, Gance mounted three cameras side by side by side, with all of them rolling at once. Most of the film is presented in a single full frame, like any silent film, but for the final twenty minutes, the curtains pull back, and two additional screens appear. In some cases, Gance uses the extra space to create a single panoramic composition, like CinemaScope twenty-five years before the fact. In others, he creates split-screen imagery—a simultaneous montage—that shows different events, or the same event from different angles. There's nothing else like it in early cinema, and seeing it on the big screen is part of the collective movie buff bucket list.

Imagine this, but bigger. Much, much bigger.

Indeed, film historian Kevin Brownlow, who made restoring the film his life's work, argued that Napoleon was more virtuosic and innovative than even Citizen Kane—only nobody knew, because it was rarely shown.  (At the time, its American release was cut to just 90 minutes, jettisoning the Polyvision). Such an unapologetically grand film lends itself well to such unapologetically grand statements, but whatever its place in film history may be, as a behemoth that somehow slipped through the cracks, the film itself still comes alive as a fascinating display of scope and ambition.

At the start of the shoot, and three years before the film was done, Gance gave this speech to his cast and crew, and the loftiness of it is truly something else. Drink it in:

"This is a film which must—and let no one underestimate the profundity of what I'm saying—a film which must allow us to enter the Temple of Art through the gates of History. An inexpressible anguish grips me at the thought that my will and my vital gift are as nothing if you do not bring me your unremitting devotion.

...

Fast, foolish, furious, gigantic, raucous, Homeric, punctuated by organ-pauses which will make the dreadful silences resound all the more—that is what will be dragged out of you by the runaway horse of the Revolution.

...

The world's screens await you, my friends. From all of you, whatever your role or rank, leading actors, supporting actors, cameramen...and especially you, the unsung extras who have to rediscover the spirit of your ancestors...I ask, no, I demand, that you abandon petty, personal considerations and give me your total devotion."

It's worth taking stock of this speech—the Grand Themes, the invocation of ancestors, the appeal for hierarchical unity behind one man—because there's a decidedly Napoleonic spirit in the movie itself. In fact, Gance had originally planned six films chronicling the man's entire life, but ran out of money and energy after the first. So he starts with Napoleon's childhood, and gets him as far as invading Italy. The film leaves him there in a thundering climax, making Napoleon one of the largest films of all time and, in its own way, an incomplete one: a warning about dreaming too big.

The desire to make the biggest film ever is as old as film itself (much older than James Cameron), and the silent era has its fair share of examples, from D.W. Griffith's Intolerance to Metropolis. But even in that ambitious company, I imagine Gance's film would be proud to stand out.  Its Napoleonic spirit—the elevation of art to ecstatic megalomania—manifests itself throughout the five-plus hours. The film is in love with the mythic proportions of Napoleon's life, and it revels in the myth without any trace of shame. The Napoleon of the film is a superman and a Romantic construct. He almost always wears his iconic hat, even in the scenes of him as a child. His mere presence can quiet a room and change the minds of men. Majestic eagles appear regularly, as though nature itself gives the man its blessing. And, as a character, he has little more to him than an iron will.

And this is where we come to the film's principle and most fascinating drawback. That is, Gance's film is very much an example of leaving a national myth unexamined—or worse, peppering it with enough historical tidbits that the director himself seems half-convinced that this is all what actually happened. American cinema isn't innocent of this either—hell, we practically invented it—and you can see examples everywhere, from Birth of a Nation to Mel Gibson in The Patriot. But it's a tendency that doesn't exactly withstand scrutiny, and it betrays film by revealing that it's so often a purely emotional medium, and not the ideal one for capturing the complexity of history.

(Sidenote: Napoleon would make an instructive, if exhausting, double feature with Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen, another great silent epic, which also retells a national myth but with a more modern eye for irony).

Even the Polyvision finale, which is so stunning that the audience repeatedly erupted into applause, finds its footing on problematic ideological terrain. The grand climax shows Napoleon leading his newly re-moralized troops on an invasion of Italy to spread the spirit of the Revolution. It's full a triumphant music and overpowering imagery: columns of troops march in the left and right frames, Napoleon's face is superimposed over a globe in the center, and the orchestra urges them on. How Italy feels about all this is left discreetly off-camera, and the overall artistic effect is so transcendent that it surprises you to remind yourself that a country is being invaded. The final image shows marching troops in all three frames, only each frame has been color-tinted to create a giant French flag.

The result: the audience cheered the visual display, and then laughed awkwardly in the lobby about what it had actually been saying. I ran into a group of Italians after the show, who were terrific sports about the whole thing and said they overlooked the ending as a product of its time. (The film arrived five years before Hitler, and before early 20th century Nationalism picked up more chilling connotations). And admittedly, if this was to be the first of six films, Napoleon's fall was still to come, so celebratory wars of adventurism weren't necessarily the last word.

But the applause during such a bluntly jingoistic scene, from an audience as unjingoistic as art-savvy San Franciscans, is key, because Napoleon is above all a monument where form takes the last word over content. It's not just the Polyvision. The entire film is a feast, filled with wit and vitality, and Gance uses the run-time to encompass a variety of approaches: from straightforward Romanticism to abstract fragments to Vigo-esque lyricism, and even a bit of slapstick. The number of places he finds to mount his camera is truly awe-inspiring, and the use of silent era tricks (double exposure, superimposition) is masterful, possibly unmatched. In one scene, Napoleon's memories of his wife Josephine are evoked with sudden, split-second flashbacks to earlier moments in the film. And that technique—flash montages to show the flood of memory—was still considered avant-garde when Alain Resnais did it thirty years later.

And that gets into the crux of Napoleon and its enduring appeal. The historical narrative is foggy, and Napoleon the man is ultimately something of a red-herring. Instead, the film lives on today as a celebration of cinema itself. We live at a time when members of the old-guard have dourly wondered aloud if film, as an art form, has already peaked and is on its way out. Napoleon, coming from a time when feature films were less than twenty years old, is a snapshot of cinema as a medium of limitless untapped potential, with new boundaries waiting to be tested and explored. The sheer scope of its vision argues that movies can do anything—even conquer the world. When Napoleon on horseback sweeps quickly across three screens, 40 feet tall, you feel that this is a moment that film was created for. That's the real Revolution on display, and it's why the film continues to be held up as a cinephile Grail.

As a young man in the year 2012, my sense is that we're very suspicious of grand statements. Not that I blame us; we've been burned before. But here is a film so blind and optimistic in its grandiosity, and without a trace of irony, that the audacity of it all puts most of what's come since to shame. Whatever missteps it may make (is it even worth mentioning that the second half of a five-hour film runs long?), it freezes that spirit of inspired, idealistic folly for anyone lucky enough to catch it. It sees cinema on a pedestal and dares to reach.