Title: Napoléon
Release Date: April 7, 1927
Director: Abel Gance
Production Company: Gaumont
Summary/Review:
Napoléon may have been more accurately titled Young Napoléon since it was intended to be the first of six movies about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. This is the evident in the sheer amount of time spent depicting Napoleon as a child at a military school leading his classmates in a snowball fight. The film also depicts Napoleon escaping from Corsica during an uprising there and his rising up the ranks of the French revolutionary army. I do not know a lot of detail about Napoleon’s life, but this movie feels more like hagiography than biography and can get very cheesy in its patriotic set pieces. There are certainly far too many scenes of Napoleon just sitting and brooding for a silent film to handle.
Stylistically, the movie lives up to its epic protagonist. Like Intolerance, filmmaker Abel Gance had the budget for a cast of thousands and made sure to use them whenever possible. The use of lighter cameras also allowed for fluid camera movement used to great effect much like in Sunrise, made the same year. It also reminds me of Man With A Movie Camera since Gance used a lot of experimental techniques such as fast cutting, multiple exposures, and split screen images. Parts of the movie were filmed on location and the title cards are proud to let us know they were filmed on the actual historic sights. Most famously, the movie employed an early widescreen approach by having the final reel projected from three projectors onto three side-by-side screen, an effect many cinemas couldn’t support on time and is pretty much lost on me viewing the movie on an iPad.
Unless you’re a film buff or particularly interested in French history, I don’t think many people are going to be up to watching this long, silent, epic. Nevertheless, it does deserve credit for its place in film history and innovations that would not become commonplace for decades after its release.
Rating: ***1/2
Panorama of the Mountains 