Screen

...But the new film created very little stir...

...colin l. westerbeck...

...It's true that what cut short the film's original popularity was only the fact that the coming of sound killed the mobile camera, which was Napoleon's glory...

...And all this is on one day before he's even out of boarding school...

...we do not come to any understanding of their significance...

...If you take away the hero from Napoleon, or rather, the hero worship, there's nothing left...

...Otherwise, the film's boosters claim, it might have had the impact and longevity they believe it deserved...

...And then of course there's the Polyvision finale, where the three images sometimes form a single, wide-screen picture, and at other times show two or three separate scenes simultaneously...

...Only in this afterglow could so romantic a film have been made...

...Even a kitchen scullion who casually cheers him on is to be a figure of fate, turning up later at a crucial moment during the siege of Toulon, and yet again as a clerk of the Reign of Terror who eats Napoleon's dossier in order to save him from the guillotine...

...If there is any film to which Napoleon begs comparison, it is Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, which marked the beginning of the silent screen's brief golden age as decisively as Napoleon marked the end...

...Well, not quite forever...

...Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away...

...westerbeck...

...Gance knew that he might never get to make the other five films...

...The fact is that the Jacobin Republic somehow quelled civil war, repelled foreign invasion, and went on the offensive abroad...

...The night I saw it, anticipation was at such fever pitch that almost no one left before the Polyvisionary ending, and people cheered wildly at every little flourish of technique throughout the film...

...Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, no bourgeois household in France was complete without its little bust of Napoleon presiding on top of the armoire or behind the glass front on the china cabinet...

...He was the original self-made man, the world-beater who* started out in life not as a king, but as "the little corporal.'' The twilight of this sun-god incarnate, as Napoleon was still regarded by many old patres familias in the France of 1927, suffuses Gance's movie...

...At a geography class after recess, Napoleon glowers forebodingly when the lesson turns to an obscure island named St...

...Potemkin also involves us in the action through its expressionism, but every shot in Eisenstein's film gains its real power over us from the contribution it makes to his analysis of history...

...But the film glosses over these matters the better to aggrandize Napoleon himself...

...This is the art of mass hysteria, of film technique used to create fervor and enthusiasm, but not meaning...

...yet he began at the beginning of Napoleon's story anyway, rather than at the climax of his career...

...It moves on guy wires, on dollies, suspended from a pendulum, even on horseback...

...And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains...

...It is, both historically and aesthetically, the film's own atmosphere...

...One young army careerist who was present, Charles de Gaulle, never forgot the experience...

...Since the excitement practically exceeded that of the original premiere, Coppola extended the run...

...That night he is thrown out of his dormitory into the snow for causing a ruckus...

...It was made at the last possible moment, historically, that such a film could be made...

...In the process, it also makes both them and French history hopelessly confusing...

...With its emphasis on the myth of the strong man and its glorification of militarism, the film is an unmistakably right-wing piece of work...

...It paces up and down each scene with the restlessness of someone consumed by ambition...

...Among the superstars in the cast was Antonin Artaud in the role of Marat, and among the plethora of technical innovations was an ending done in a three-camera triptych process Gance called Poly vision, which anticipated Cinerama...

...I don't know which I found more repulsive-the mass adulation Napoleon produced in this audience, or Napoleon itself...

...The film's camera moves ceaselessly...

...If for a moment the camera isn't creating excitement, the editing, with its rapid cuts and frequent superimposi-tions, is...

...Francis Ford Coppola has just revived the film with such success that he filled Radio City Music Hall three nights running at twenty dollars a ticket...

...Napoleon's ceaseless triumphs in battle make his early story a rather tedious one...

...Napoleon's numerous revolutions in film technique also represent a kind of right-wing film art...

...Like the original opening, Coppola's revival was accompanied by a lot of hoopla (there was even a searchlight flashing across the sky outside Radio City the first night), for hoopla is the only atmosphere in which Napoleon can be appreciated...

...Polyvision, Gance thought, would revolutionize the film industry as Napoleon had French society, and this would provide the wherewithal for the other five epic masterpieces Gance had planned...

...Helena...

...It was an audience of culture glommers, the kind of people whose one other movie outing each year is to some Abyssinian film at the Film Festival...

...As he falls asleep on a cannon in the schoolyard, his pet eagle, which the other boys had set free, comes to perch beside him...

...I don't think so, though...

...Only a few years later, no matter where movie technology was, it would have been hard to make any romantic epic about the rise of a dictator, even Napoleon...

...But less than a year after Napoleon's premiere a film called The Jazz Singer opened, with the result that Gance's ultimate silent masterpiece disappeared from view forever...

...Eisenstein was so intent on purifying film art for this purpose that he didn't even permit his film to have a central character, a hero...

...Napoleon was a silent epic over four hours in length...

...It was the last hurrah of the Napoleonic legend, a secular myth which had lasted 100 years, but whose immense power is almost unimaginable now...

...Its revival is the perfect cause to be championed by the scriptwriter of Patton and auteurist of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola...

...Napoleon's appeal was limited not only by technical developments beyond its control, but by the very nature of its own conception...

...Nonetheless, the film draws out the battles as long as possible...

...In Napoleon we are swept up in historical events...

...Napoleon is very much a document of the times in which it was made, a reflection of the period in French history when the Action Francaise was in its prime...

...That was the heritage of the Revolution which Napoleon received...

...In the opening scene, for instance, little Napoleon leads a band of boys to victory in a snowball fight...

...The film is dripping with the kind of premonitions of destiny which typify the silent screen's worst excesses...

...The fact is that Gance did make a shorter version of the film in 1934, inventing stereo in the bargain for the sequence where Rouget de Lisle's ''La Marseillaise" is sung for the first time at the Club des Cordeliers...

...jr.l...

...Napoleon was originally intended by Gance to be only one of six films, all equally spectacular, in which his hero's entire life would be told...

...That the one film he did make covers only Napoleon's rise to power shows that Gance realized he had to appeal to the bourgeois legend, the cult of Napoleon as self-made man...

...Long after his death Napoleon still reigned supreme as the embodiment of the middle-class aspirations which the French Revolution had contained...