Napoléon vu par Netflix: What next for Abel Gance’s 1927 epic?

“Sixty years later I am still bringing people to see Napoléon, that’s quite true. And also bringing people back to the cinema because this is the age where they watch Lawrence of Arabia on their mobile phones, for God’s sake. The cinema was designed for sharing, and that is sharing the reactions to the film. It’s not just being in the same room as a lot of other people. It’s much more emotional than that.”
Kevin Brownlow on restoring Napoléon

“Never forget, that this masterpiece is also a monsterpiece.” Georges Mourier on restoring Napoléon

The story of Napoléon will never end, I suspect. This mammoth film, made by Abel Gance at the height of the silent era, intended to be just the start of telling the emperor’s tale, has been through a lot already. This site has covered Kevin Brownlow’s exhaustive restoration of the film, and the late Carl Davis’s process of writing a new score. You may well have had the opportunity to see their lustrous five-and-a-half-hour version, either at one of the live screenings in London, California and elsewhere, or on the film’s release: in cinemas, on Blu-ray, and on BFI Player. It’s a phenomenal experience, even before the famous triptych finale, when the screen gets wider, and wider, and wider.

Alongside this story, there has always been the shorter, Francis Ford Coppola restoration, scored by his father Carmine and screened at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, running at about four hours.

And now there is another Napoléon version, clocking in at seven hours and five minutes, the product of a 16-year digital restoration project at the Cinématheque Française, with the support of the CNC, which will make its debut this year. And you will surely get a chance to see this one.

We’ll get our first chance to see the new restoration at Cannes, where the first half of the film, three hours and forty minutes, will screen to open the Cannes Classics strand of the festival, on 14 May. That is, if you’re at Cannes. Then the full extravaganza will screen with 250 musicians from Radio France, playing a score composed by Frank Strobel at the Seine Musicale in Paris over two evenings on 4 and 5 July, as well as at the Radio France festival in Montpellier, and then at the Cinemathèque française and at “summer festivals”. Subsequently the film will be released in cinemas in France, be shown on French TV and ultimately released on Netflix. So UK Netflix too? I’d say there is a good chance.

Napoléon (1927) Photograph: BFI — Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927) Photograph: BFI

So, we have questions. How on earth have they found an extra 90 minutes of footage from Napoléon? And what about all the work done by Brownlow? The first is easiest to answer.

According to the Cannes announcement, “reels were found at the Cinémathèque française, at the CNC, at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse and Corsica, but also in Denmark, Serbia, Italy, Luxembourg, New York,” and there is definitely some new material in this restoration. Georges Mourier and his team apparently scrutinised nearly 100km of film, in a lengthy process he recently described as “an act of madness”, and they were able to consult Abel Gance’s editing notes and discussions with his editor, found in the BNF archive, to create a version that is closer to the director’s original version. So new footage, and new edits will account for most of the time difference.

It is also possible that this version runs slower than the 20fps of the Brownlow version. That’s just my speculation, but that could really make an impact to the running time.

Georges Mourier from the Cinématheque Française at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Photograph: Pamela Gentile

In 2016, Mourier presented his work-in-progress at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. I wasn’t there to hear him talk about the project, but you can hear him discussing the restoration on this episode of the Drunk Projectionist podcast. In this he says that they found more than 400 reels that had never been opened by anyone since Gance. “So we were taken by destiny.” Mourier’s project is a restoration of the extended Apollo version of Napoléon from November 1927, which he considers closest to the “definitive” version.

In this video, you can see Mourier discussing the restoration in French, with clips.

As for the years of work Kevin Brownlow has committed to this mammoth film. Well I cannot speak to how that will be credited or acknowledged in this restoration, which differs from previous endeavours because it is digital. But I would say that you no doubt saw the film for the first time thanks to his dedication and labour, and I bet you won’t forget that. Mourier did too, as he recalls seeing the film for the first time in the 1983 Paris screening of Brownlow’s restoration with the Carl Davis score, and he mentions his “respect” for Brownlow in that podcast. Kevin Brownlow is irremovably part of this long, and continuing story. I highly recommend his book on the film – the very definition of a passion project.

Mourier says that Napoléon is not so much a movie, more a cathedral, and his restoration may not be the last. “Nothing is definitive with Abel Gance, nothing.”