Stuffed eagle
Seitz, Michael H.
MOVIES Stuffed eagle Michael H. Seitz It was the cinematic event of the decade: the triumphant presentation of French filmmaker Abel Gance's long-lost 1927 "masterpiece," Napoleon. Presented by...
...To express such reservations is not to deny that Napoleon's formal pyrotechnics are indeed quite impressive...
...A storm comes up, and shots of the boat tossed by the sea are intercut with shots of the gathering political storm in the Convention in Paris...
...Gance has done for Napoleon what Leni Riefenstahl, in Triumph of the Will, did for Hitler: Both directors exploit the most powerful technical resources of cinema to create a compelling but malign myth of power, embodied in a heroic national leader of indomitable will and superhuman energy...
...His camera movement is both daring and resourceful...
...Gance invented the process thirty years before the advent of Cinerama...
...This kid, it is clear, is already a tactical genius, and possesses a will of iron...
...And I wonder if Gance's much vaunted Polyvision triptych is not, as critic David Thomson suggests, "irrelevant to real cinema...
...After a hastily arranged marriage and a conversation with the ghosts of the Revolution in the now empty Convention Hall, Napoleon sets off to take command of the Army of the Alps...
...Gance makes electrifying use of parallel and accelerated editing...
...The years in which Gance was making Napoleon (1925-1927) also saw the release of The Gold Rush (Chaplin), The General (Keaton), Seventh Heaven (Borzage), Sunrise (Murnau), The Merry Widow and The Wedding March (Von Stroheim), The Big Parade (Vidor), Underworld (Von Sternberg), Metropolis (Lang), The Joyless Streets (Pabst)—as well as Pudovkin's Mother, and Eisenstein's Potemkin and October...
...but the storm abates, and Napoleon is rescued...
...Leon Moussinac, the respected film critic for Humanite, called Gance's Napoleon "a Bonaparte for apprentice fascists...
...In the Corsican episode a camera was lashed to a galloping horse during the chase, and for the "Marseillaise" sequence Gance strapped a camera to Alexandre Roubitsky's chest to capture the rhythm of the song...
...A hand-held "subjective" camera in the snowball fight sequence produces an extraordinary sensation of viewer participation in the melee...
...As the music began to swell for the film's final sequence, and the huge Music Hall organ thundered, the curtains surrounding the screen were opened to the full, and the Napoleonic Army entered Italy in super wide-screen Polyvision, a synchronized three-camera process producing either multiple-image trip-tychs or sweeping panoramas...
...This would seem to be the case of the frantically edited Bai des Victimes sequence, into which Gance again introduces overhead pendulum shots...
...His version is still not complete (there were apparently four Polyvision sequences in the original), but it is coherent and is probably the best reconstruction possible...
...While such practices are often appropriate and expressive, I have the feeling just about as often that Gance is being indiscriminately inventive...
...The sixty-piece American Symphony Orchestra played a musical score specially composed by Carmine Coppola, Francis's father, and performed live under his direction...
...And what is equally worrisome, they reveal a profound mistrust of the viewer's own ability to perceive and judge...
...Napoleon's suppression of a royalist insurrection, and an orgiastic Bai des Victimes where Napoleon meets and becomes smitten with Josephine (Gina Manes...
...The film begins at the military school of Brienne where, in a long snowball fight sequence filled with exciting flash cuts and superimposed images, the young Napoleon (Vladimir Roudenko) leads his student troops in a rout of opposing forces...
...Many of those with whom I've discussed Napoleon seem to feel, despite some reservations, that the creation of such a technically impressive work as long ago as 1927 is nothing short of a marvel...
...Yet the end of the silent era was not a period of primitivism but of extraordinary cinematic sophistication...
...The audience went wild, and then even wilder as the orchestra took up the strains of the "Marseillaise," and the blue, white, and red of the French Tricolor tinted the triple-screen image...
...Their films seek to awe and enthrall, but in achieving these ends they tend, inevitably, to distort or falsify the reality which they claim to depict...
...But it is also rather silly (Napoleon repeatedly overcomes his opponents just by staring them down), enamored of the most simplistic allegory (the Spirit of the Revolution is twice represented by intercut tableaux of Liberty on the Barricades, a la Delacroix, and the eagle of Napoleon's imperial destiny follows him about wherever he goes, like some huge avian house pet), outrageously unhistorical (Gance subscribes uncritically to the cult of Napoleon in its most naive, romantic form), emotionally and intellectually shallow—and perhaps also, in away, pernicious...
...Then, as the moving picture industry became preoccupied with the transformation into sound, Napoleon all but disappeared...
...Galloping across the countryside with his cape flying behind him, he looks, intact, like a Franco-Corsican Zorro...
...Because of the size of the project and the inevitable financial difficulties, only the first segment tracing Napoleon's life from his youth to the beginning of the Italian campaign was produced...
...But, as the program notes put it, "his piercing personality dazzles the officers: his reputation rouses the soldiers...
...The Terror begins...
...But is it one of the world's greatest films...
...The device," in Thomson's view, "abandons the thread of cinema: the need to select one image at a time, and to relate one to another in a sequence...
...When they begin the March into Italy, "the eagle of Napoleon's imperial destiny [spread across the triple Polyvision screen] hovers over them...
...He is at the Club des Cordeliers when Danton (Alexandre Koubitsky) presents Rouget de Lisle to the masses, and the "Marseillaise" is sung for the first time...
...Subsequent sequences depict Napoleon's first military victory, the raising of the siege of Toulon...
...Marat (Antonin Artaud) stabbed in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday—a scene staged to look like the famous David painting...
...I think not...
...The print now being shown, with in-tertitles reshot in English, was painstakingly reconstituted by British filmmaker-critic Keven Brownlow, who spent years collecting bits and pieces of the original work from film archives around the world...
...Gance's grandiloquent Napoleon may have greater appeal as spectacle, but I do not think it is superior as a work of art to any of these...
...He finds a group of mutinous, contemptuous officers and hungry, ill-clad troops...
...I can think of no film, moreover, which makes such frequent and complex use of su-perimposition ("In certain shots of Napoleon," Gance has revealed, "I superimposed up to sixteen images...
...Napoleon, so presented, is something more than a movie: It is a stupenMichael H. Seitz teaches film at Rutgers University and reviews films regularly for The Progressive...
...Audiences outside of New York will have a chance to judge for themselves: Napoleon with live orchestra is being booked into other major American cities, although movie goers elsewhere will have to settle for a sound track of Coppola's score...
...The premiere was held on April 7, 1927, at the Paris Opera, to the accompaniment of a score composed by Arthur Honegger.This more or less complete version of the film was shown in only eight European cities...
...We next see Napoleon (Albert Dieudonne) as a young lieutenant in Paris at the time of the Revolution...
...And in a sequence right out of an American Western, he makes an escape on horseback, pursued by mounted troops...
...Cance's film is undeniably a work of great power and extraordinary epic sweep—a monster of a movie, packed with vibrant spectacle, and enhanced by some of the most dynamic editing in motion picture history and by most imaginative use of a moving camera...
...The cinema of exaltation thus becomes, as well, the cinema of ideological manipulation...
...I think there is more than a little truth in this judgment...
...As his pursuers watch helplessly from the shore, Napoleon puts to sea in a small open boat, raising to the mast a large Tricolor in place of the missing sail...
...Paris under the terror...
...Both directors are proponents of what might be termed the cinema of exaltation...
...dous, multifaceted theatrical expe^ rience—an epic super-spectacle designed to sweep the spectator away on a flow of picture and sound...
...Presented by Francis Ford Coppola—who is fast becoming the P.T...
...One might add that while the projection of multiple images is awesome, its effect is to dissipate, rather than focus, the viewer's attention...
...When he returns to spread the revolution in his native Corsica, Napoleon is condemned to death by his nationalist compatriots...
...To suggest the vertigo-inducing storm in the Convention, he swung the camera from a large overhead pendulum...
...A severely abridged eighty-minute version— without the sequences in Polyvision— was released in America by MGM...
...Gance had originally intended to represent Bonaparte's life in a series of six separate films...
...the changing political tides of Thermidor...
...Barnum of motion pictures—the more than four-hour long extravaganza was booked into the cavernous, 6,000-seat New York Radio City Music Hall, its own elegant art deco interior also recently restored, and all of the nine reserved-seat performances were sellouts, at a whopping $10 to $25 per ticket...
Vol. 45 • April 1981 • No. 4
