At over five hours, Abel Gance’s silent tour de force Napoleon, about the early life of the French military leader, is staggering in its ambition. Released in 1927, and rarely seen since as its director intended, the film is total cinema: complex, breathtakingly assured and, with its colour tinted composition, beautiful to behold.
This new version of the film, which will be screened at Leeds Town Hall on Sunday, as part of the Leeds International Film Festival, has been painstakingly restored, the culmination of a fifty-year long labour of love by the noted silent film historian Kevin Brownlow. It looks incredible and is being heralded as the most complete version available – key scenes, savagely cut from the film upon its initial release and which were thought lost, have been reinserted. The rerelease also features a newly commissioned, and suitably magisterial, score from composer Carl Davis.
Gance intended Napoleon as a series of films depicting the life of Bonaparte, but the sheer enormity of the project defeated him. Audiences will have to content themselves with the first – and only – instalment of his life’s work, but they will not be disappointed.
Gance’s innovations on Napoleon are heady and intoxicating. The sheer scale and inventiveness of his ideas – the film’s celebrated fluid cinematography, the split-screen composition which threatens to burst beyond the confines of the screen itself; Gance’s bravura handling of elliptical narrative, jump cuts and rapid fire editing: all years ahead of their time – put lie to the tired claim that silent films are static and pedestrian. Some of the most radical, daring and downright entertaining movies were produced before the widespread introduction of sound, in fact.
Napoleon is hugely enjoyable, an engaging and richly rewarding experience: it is a genuine masterpiece worth giving up your Sunday afternoon for.
Napoleon is screening as part of LIFF30 on Sunday 13th November at 11.15 at Leeds Town Hall – Victoria Hall.
For more information visit leedsfilm.com
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