“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.
Continue reading Napoléon vu par Netflix: What next for Abel Gance’s 1927 epic?
Silent London 