Gance’s monumental film takes the breath away, packed with innovation, invention and drama

Director: Abel Gance

Cast: Albert Dieudonné (Napoléon Bonaparte), Edmond Van Daële (Maximilien Robespierre), Alexandre Koubitzky (Georges Danton), Antonin Artaud (Jean-Paul Marat), Abel Gance (Louis de Saint-Just), Gina Manès (Joséphine de Beauharnais), Vladimir Roudenko (Young Napoléon), Marguerite Gance (Charlotte Corday), Yvette Dieudonné (Élisa Bonaparte), Philippe Hériat (Antoine Saliceti), Max Maxudian (Barras), Annabella (Violine Fleuri), Nicolas Koline (Tristan Fleuri)

There is a marvellous quote from Victor Hugo when he wrote about the young life of the most famous Frenchmen who ever lived: Déjà Napoléon perçait sous Bonaparte. Which roughly translates as ‘already Napoleon was bursting through Bonaparte’ – or to put it another way, the man was already being consumed by the legend. That idea dominates Abel Gance’s extraordinary, epic, retelling of the Young Napoleon’s life, an origins story that sees a young man become increasingly distant and legendary before our eyes. Gance’s film may be resolutely old-fashioned in its historiographical approach, but is revelatory in its cinematic flair and invention, with almost every scene demonstrating Gance pushing the medium in new directions.

Napoleon was planned as only the first of no-less-than six films that would cover the cradle-to-grave story of the man who defined his whole era. Such was Gance’s ambition through, that even across five hours he felt he had only scratched the surface of the first 27 years of Napoleon’s (Albert Dieudonné) life from his childhood education (snowball fights and all) at Brienne – where he is seen as a Brutish Corsican outsider – via the French revolution, his failed attempt at revolution in Corsica, his successful siege of Toulon and promotion to General at 24, nearly losing his life in The Terror, Thermidor and his crushing of the Vendemaire uprising, marriage to Josephine (Gina Manès) and the beginning of his campaign in Italy.

Gance unfolds this in a film brimming with cinematic verve and invention. Much like its lead character, it is a seismic and larger-than-life (literally so in its most famous innovation, the three frame wide-screen effect achieved for its final twenty minutes). Napoleon practically defines the notion of historical epic, reproducing many at historical events at a 1:1 ratio. At its centre is a magnetically hypnotic (almost literally) performance from Albert Dieudonné (so enamoured with the role, he was buried in his costume) juggling the impossible by suggesting some of the many shades of this fascinating figure, part revolutionary, part tyrant, part romantic, part war-monger.

There is something truly striking and original in every frame of Napoleon. Gance presents a picture of the famous general more than touched with an old-fashioned Great Man theory of history, but still suggests he is almost two men in one. He is Bonaparte, the slightly-chippy, awkward young man who clumsily woos Josephine (barely sure where to do with hands, tugging shyly at his sash), struggles to get noticed in a map-making office and finds it challenging to make friends, either at school (where he is a painfully serious outsider) or as an adult. But he is also Napoleon, the totem of history who Gance frequently frames as almost communing with a historical version of himself.

This Napoleon bursts from the awkward Corsican shell of Bonaparte. Gance frequently frames him almost confronting the camera, light shimmering around him to form halos, with a piercing stare that freezes people into place. He comes to identify himself with the flag and the revolution. So much so that, in his escape from Corsica, he will be borne across the seas by a tricolour jerry-rigged into a sail and visualise himself being hailed by the executed ghosts of the revolution as its natural heir. Indeed, the film ends with Napoleon atop a mountain starring into a montage of his future achievements, as if he was bending history around him.

Which isn’t to say Gance sees him as a constantly sympathetic figure. While there is no question he is a force of nature – he controls the frame, frequently centred and when the camera moves (such as the careering gallop that takes him to Italy) he is always at the eye of its propulsive tracking shots – he is also an imposing, even scary figure, distant and cold. In dyed red frames, he looks positively demonic, such as when he looms forward out of the rain in Toulon, his face filling the frame to demand relentless attack. His self-identification with the revolution becomes monomaniacal.

Gance re-enforces his distance from normal human reaction by returning constantly to the Fleuri’s, a working-class family who shadow the Great Man (Violine loves him hopelessly and her father and brother worship him) but whom he never notices. It’s part of him being crafted into marble before us – with all the terrifying lack of human understanding that suggests. Throughout he’s shadowed by an eagle, a visual representation of his mystical, greater-than-human nature, a bird of destiny that drives him relentlessly on. He’s contrasted constantly with other would-be leaders: the itchy Marat, the empty windbag Danton and (most noticeably) the curiously ineffectual Robespierre, an uncharismatic man who can’t control a crowd, is lost behind darkened glasses, follows the orders of others and is comically dwarfed by an eagle statue not elevated by it.

Gance’s history has a slight school-book Victorianism to it. He’s very proud of “historical” facts – quotes and events are frequently branded with the on-screen phrase “(Historical)” so we can see his behind-the-scenes research – and has more than a little love for irony. Of course, the final island covered in school-boy Napoleon’s geography class is “St Helena”! Of course, the English sailor who spots him escaping from Corsica (and is refused a request to sink his ship) is Nelson! The film is littered with cameo appearances from later Napoleon rivals and allies. There is also a darker irony playing here: we know that when Napoleon is praised by the ghosts of the revolution that, far from protecting it, he will in fact become its final destroyer.

But what really singles out Napoleon is it’s intense, cinematic inventiveness. It’s an explosion of unique, fascinating images packaged into a single film. Gance reinvented the wheel multiple times on this one, not least on his of ghostly images and cross-fades. To achieve this – such as the ghostly appearance of the Great Revolutionaries in an otherwise empty Assembly Hall, he re-exposed the same film multiple times (sometimes as many as twenty) to achieve the effect. The same for Napoleon’s schoolyard fights, a single sequence with the screen split into nine squares each showing a different moment in time achieved by covering different parts of the frame for each exposure.

Gance’s camera is strikingly mobile, his editing frequently thrilling and thought-provoking. The famous sequence of Napoleon’s escape from Corsica is superbly intercut with the clash in the Assembly that will lead to the execution of the Gironists. The swaying of the ship is increasingly echoed by the swaying and eventually full-blown swinging of the camera in the Assembly room. Both events merge together through cross-fades. The camera whips through some scenes with real pace and aggression – witness the fast-paced tracking shots that follow Napoleon to Italy.

That’s matched as well with imaginative scenes of quiet beauty. The young Napoleon quietly communing with his pet eagle. The marvellous “shadow marriage” Violine conducts with a cardboard doll of Napoleon, positioned to cast a full-length shadow on the wall. There are moments of black humour – the coffin Robespierre and Saint-Just keep the death sentences they’ve passed in – and moments of soaring, lyrical inspiration such as the first singing of the Marseilles which takes on a mystical quality. To achieve this, Gance pushed the camera places it had never been before, patenting new techniques and devices to achieve frames, angles and cross-fades never seen before.

The most stand-out being the astonishing three-frame wide-screen effect. Perfectly mapped, with the small distortion in the joins almost adding to the power, this creates Panavision decades before Hollywood had even coined it. It creates awe-inspiring vistas of Napoleon’s Italian army – although the battle scenes Gance shoots are often cruel and dirty, with bodies twisted and crushed by the violence of war – but it also allows Gance to present three different images side-by-side, something he exploits to maximum effect in the closing moments that presents a giddyingly cut (it’s Eistensein-influence is clear) montage of past moments in the film that have led up to the Napoleon we see standing on a mountain before us starring into the future.

For Gance through, it is a future that wouldn’t come. Napoleon was not a success – perhaps people couldn’t quite process the scale of it, perhaps the money-men were terrified that Gance had spent the budget of six films on one and still hadn’t got round to Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo. The film was butchered and tinkered with for decades before it was reborn. And what a relief, because this is a stunning epic, which (for all its narrative simplicity) has something to wonder at in every frame. An extraordinary film, which everyone should see at least once.