37: Napoleon

 FR  333m  Dir: Abel Gance  Key Cast: Albert Dieudonne

Original Screenplay (Based on real events)

At five and a half hours, this is a very long film. It actually only follows Napoleon from his school days in 1780 through to his successful Italian campaign of 1796. Abel Gance had planned a further five films showing the rest of Napoleon's life but realised after completing this one that the costs involved would mean the production would be impossible.

Gance was an innovator and does some incredible things here which make the film really stand up rather well. Most famous is his use of "polyvision" for the final reel- he expanded the frame by putting three cameras next to each other but realised this created a seam between the images and so at times he simply opted to use three different shots. 

He did lots of smaller things which were arguably more clever. He strapped cameramen to horses and even mounted a camera to a guillotine. My personal highlight though is a sequence where Napoleon, having fled Corsica, is on a small boat battered by a huge storm. This is already hugely impressive, using what I can only assume was model work to great effect. But Gance doesn't stop there, he intercuts these scenes with a crowd singing "La Marseilles" in Paris and swings a camera above the set, replicating the stormy sea. It's so inventive and is really effective. 

Napoleon (played by Albert Dieudonne) is depicted as a national hero in this film. It feels very much like propaganda and doesn't really delve into the psychology of the man. For Gance, he was simply great and the events that followed were destined to happen. Whilst I know a little about Napoleon he is not someone I've ever studied and I'd always had him in my mind as a sort of less evil Hitler. Whilst watching the film I was drawn into the narrative that he was a French hero and since finishing it I've reflected that he was a far more complicated man than I'd given him credit for. 

The length means this is not the most accessible of films and it's a shame some millionaire didn't give Gance all the money he needed to tell the rest of Napoleon's life story. What we have though is one of the most epic and incredible pieces of filmmaking of all time by one of cinema's greatest innovators.