The Many Lives of Napoleon

From the January-February 1981 Issue

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The Many Lives of Napoleon By William K. Everson

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Gance’s films have always been “difficult” in theme, and difficult to “handle” by U.S. distributors because of their often inordinate length. Gance admirers outside of France, and especially those in the United States, have had few opportunities to see any of his films intact. In France, where American filmmakers of far slighter stature are revered and honored, Gance is curiously ignored; and little attempt has been made to preserve his whole body of work, let alone in fully complete prints.

For years, thanks to the incomplete prints we have seen, many of us—and I must include myself among the guilty—have grown up regarding Gance as an erratic genius, whose films are full of magnificent bravura sequences linked by long passages of tedium. We even regarded Gance himself as a bit of a crank when he complained that a minute or two was missing from Beethoven. Films, he said, and most especially his films, were created like music: just as you can’t slice chunks out of the Pathetique without causing untold damage, you can’t edit slices out of his films without destroying their rhythm.

In some ways, Gance lost a great deal of credibility, and despite the soundness of that argument, by his own virtual self-destruction of Napoleon. So obsessed was he with the man (rather than with his original film) that he could just never leave it alone. In the early Thirties, he reissued the film with newly-shot sound sequences and dialogue added to the silent material—a feat that worked with surprising smoothness, technically, since in his zeal for history he had had many of his silent players read long passages of the actual speeches, and (in some cases) the same actors were brought back to read the lines again, with adroit lip-synching. Then in the 1971, Gance brought out Bonaparte and the Revolution, extended still further by a rather rambling documentary prologue, by the insertion of yet more new footage, ingeniously designed to provide cutaways and punctuation—but done so economically that the contrast with the size and majesty of the old footage gave the game away immediately. It was also substantially edited, so that the whole period of Napoleon’s childhood, including the magnificent snow-fight sequence, was eliminated. To anyone who had seen the original, this new version was a desecration— though Gance self-confidently justifies its “editing” by regarding it as a totally new entity that merely uses the old film as a base.

There is a curious element attached to Gance’s films which apply to no one else’s, certainly not to D.W. Griffith’s. His films work when they are cut drastically, even savagely; and of course they work best of all in their full-length versions. But they don’t work when there are interim trims designed to quicken pace, or “tidy up” exposition. An interesting case in point is his 1937 J’Accuse, a reworking of themes and ideas from his World War I film of the same name, but aimed now as a passionate outcry against the growing threat of World War II. It was released in the U.S. late in 1940, not because it was a work of art (which it certainly was and is) but because it was uniquely topical. Its two-hour running time was slashed down to seventy minutes. Almost half the picture was gone, and certainly all the complexities of motivation and interrelationships.

But J’Accuse was still a stunning picture: Gance’s theme was cut to the bare bone, and possibly with some of the mysticism and sub-plotting removed, made even more hard-hitting. If some of the rhythm was gone, then it was replaced by an increased sense of power, as though all the major movements of Beethoven were highlighted, without the odd bars of repose in between. The full version was equally good but in a different way: the power was slightly diluted through protraction, but of course there was an added subtlety. For film students, the shortened version today has an added bonus in that it brings closer together the purely visual bravura sequences, and thus emphasizes the film’s influences on later filmmakers—which range from Stanley Kubrick (both Paths of Glory and 2001 show echoes from this film) down to George Romero. But interim versions, designed merely to speed-up and shorten the film, don’t work at all.

This parallel certainly extends to Napoleon as well. Through the years, I have seen many versions of Napoleon, and the ones that worked best have been the shortest (about seventy minutes) and the longest (approximately five-and-a-half hours) with all the intermediate versions (usually around four hours) somehow confirming that initial impression of moments of sheer genius surrounded by ponderous tedium. Yet when I finally saw the full version (or as full as is humanly possible) at Telluride two years ago, for the first time the film seemed whole—and alive.

It should be noted that, in order to show the film with its three-screen elements, Napoleon had to be screened out of doors; the regular theaters in town were just too small. That meant waiting until 9 p.m., and finishing at three in the morning. When the sun went down, the temperature went down with it. We huddled in blankets through the night, waiting for a sequence with which we were particularly familiar so that we could sneak off for a moment to a local Chinese restaurant and come back with bowls of hot soup to see us through the Italian campaign. We didn’t even have the benefit of music, since the mechanism of the organ froze and, when a pianist was brought in, his hands froze, and he was only able to rouse himself periodically to render an approximation of La Marseillaise for a minute or so.

Regardless of the problems involved (and every time I see any of Napoleon now, it is always accompanied by a subliminal feeling of cold), it was the most exciting film presentation I’d seen since a 35mm tinted print of Intolerance, backed by a live orchestra, took my breath away at the age of 14. Not once did Napoleon bore or dawdle; sequences that in earlier versions had seemed to be merely padding now took on full significance when fitted into the jigsaw of the whole. And the already overwhelming sequence of the storm at sea, intercut with the “storm” in the French Senate, became even more mind-boggling with the restoration of the hitherto missing sequence wherein Napoleon pauses in his flight from Corsica to steal the flag of France from unworthy custodians. Then when he puts to sea, and uses that flag as a sail, the complex mosaic of that sequence is woven into a complete tapestry.

When the film finished, we all felt we had witnessed the work of three heroes: Napoleon, who inspired it; Gance, who created it; and Kevin Brownlow, who spent the best part of his life restoring it.

I first met Brownlow when he was still in his teens. We met in the Lyons’ Corner House in Piccadilly, which I mention only because it was the Napoleon of London restaurants—a now defunct collection of restaurants that were models of good food, taste, and British respectability. The outer shell exists, but the interior has been gutted to make a complex of boutiques, gaming parlors, and video cassette stores. It awaits some restaurant-architecture historian of Brownlow’s stature to restore it to its former glories, and perhaps in so doing symbolize some kind of return to British traditions and prestige.

In any event, the teen-aged Brownlow, still at school, was already as obsessed by Napoleon the film as Gance had been by Napoleon the man. Since then, in between some outstanding books and an equally outstanding television series on movie history, Brownlow has devoted his life to tracking down and piecing together the original Napoleon, with the gradual (and, in some cases, grudging) cooperation of European archives, and with the collaboration of Gance himself. Although the search for additional fragments may take the rest of his life, it was the substantially complete version of Napoleon that he was able to present at Telluride, and that was also shown, to resounding success, in London late in 1980—with a full live orchestra. And not at sub-zero temperatures!

Approximately fifteen minutes of the film are being cut for its showing at the Radio City Music Hall, with the approval of Kevin Brownlow and suggestions from Gance himself. It can only be hoped that these cuts (made partly to alleviate overtime at the Hall) and the projection of the film at sound speed will not endanger the integrity of Gance’s work or reduce the extraordinary impact of what promises to be the archival highlight of 1981.