Paris Gazes Upon A Full Restoration of Abel Gance’s ‘Napoleon,’ and You Should Too

For a while, it seemed like the “grand,” seven-hour version of French silent filmmaker Abel Gance’s landmark film, Napoleon (1927), was gone forever. Sure, throughout the decade, using the materials from the available negatives, film restorers have been able to slowly match that original runtime. The last restoration—released in 2016—capped out at five-and-a-half hours, but still missed key scenes that Gance felt important to his interpretation of the French emperor’s story.

Abel Gance’s Napoleon—in its full 7-hour and 25-minute runtime, thanks to the 16-year-long restoration effort led by La Cinémathèque Française—is here. The miracle project, inspirational both in terms of Gance’s filmmaking itself and the tiring work done to bring it back from the dead, premiered over two nights in Paris on July 4/5 in a 4,000-seat concert venue, with a live accompaniment from a 300-piece orchestra and choir. This critic was lucky enough to attend the screening, an event poised to go down as one of the greatest film-watching experiences of all time.

For those unfamiliar with Abel Gance, or his Napoleon rendition, Gance was a pioneering French filmmaker throughout the 20th Century, whose most famous works date from the silent film era. The film world knows him best for his sprawling silent features—including Napoleon and La Roue, a somewhat experimental 418-minute film (restored last year). A true master of the moving image and how to manipulate it, Gance’s films are especially unique in the way they advance, and challenge, the limitations of the medium and of his time period. Even in a time when Hollywood films were taking bold technological risks that would change cinema forever, no one was doing it quite like Gance.

That spirit of experimentation shines in Napoleon, where—despite the film’s long runtime—it’s impossible to look away from the screen. Gance’s film moves so fast that, even when staring directly at the images and actions unfolding in front of you, there’s a fear that you’re still missing key moments. At certain times, even blinking can be anxiety-inducing. To add to this tension, Gance is a director and editor whose mastery of overlaying and crosscutting images exceeds those of almost any other filmmaker. Battle scenes—such as the first part’s infamous “Siege of Toulon” sequence—often utilize quick cutting and overlaying of past moments (notably, scenes from Bonaparte’s childhood) to increase the film’s physical and emotional tension. The result is wildly enthralling—a silent film that shatters the barriers of what a silent film can be, a melody of images rather than sound.

Despite the rhythm of the images having a sense of sonority in themselves, the orchestral accompaniment—performed by the National Orchestra of France, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France and the choir of Radio France; composed by Frank Strobel–syncs perfectly with the quick pacing of the film’s images. Certain shots—such as ones of Bonaparte standing over the ocean or having visions of the French Convention members instructing him to invade as much of the world as he can ‘in the name of France’—are already jaw-dropping in their blocking, color tinting and overlaying. But, the orchestral accompaniment—perfectly understanding and adapting to the emotional stakes of these moments—makes them unforgettable.

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about Gance’s Napoleon without mentioning the film’s final 20-minute triptych sequence, where Gance uses three cameras to create a faux-widescreen effect as Bonaparte inspires and instructs his army to march forward. The restoration’s transition into this effect is somehow both subtle and direct. In the minutes leading up to it, the image quite literally shrinks down—at a snail’s pace—until it’s a small, yet still visible, dollop surrounded the dark screen. Then, as the scene intensifies, the left- and right-side images surround this central image, creating a thin-band at the center of the screen.

From there, Gance’s magic (and skill) takes over. At certain times, the three images create that widescreen effect, with continuity established by people—usually on horses—moving from one side of the screen to another. At other times, the images create a symphony—the leftmost and rightmost images project crosscut content from Bonaparte’s past while the center captures him instructing his soldiers what to do. In a film that spends almost its entire runtime being an overwhelming, overstimulating experience, the triptych finale takes the cake. It’s the ultimate synthesis of the filmic medium, a complete understanding of how to manipulate images in a way that—even after all the technological advancements we have made in the century since—still feels timeless, fresh and shocking.

“Timeless” might be the best word to describe the experience of watching Napoleon, all these years later, in a setting as magical as La Seine Musicale. Almost every seat in the venue’s Grande Seine auditorium was full, and the crowd spanned all ages. You could feel a sense of excitement in the air, both before the film began and during the two intermissions each night, where patrons would rush to the bar to grab their glass of champagne and watch the sun set over the Seine River.

When the film played, the crowd would sit in complete silence, everyone enthralled by both the film’s images themselves and the orchestra, placed right below the screen, conducted to perfection. There also seemed to be a communal comprehension of the work put into bringing a film like this back to life—clapping at every opening title explaining the process of restoring it, roaring for the orchestra at each intermission and shockingly long lines at the merchandise queue to memorialize the experience with postcards, programs or books.

The Napoleon restoration released in France this month in select theaters across the country, and will release on French Netflix later this year (in episodic installments, which may echo the six-part [including intermissions] structure of the premiere experience). They haven’t yet confirmed worldwide release dates—although for those in North America, one might expect the film to play in the Classics sections of the premier North American festivals (of course, this is anything but certain). Even so, the idea of Gance’s monumental chef-d’oeuvre re-entering the cinematic canon—regardless of how it happens or how long it takes to happen—is exciting in itself. In a long-winded way, it’s a testament to the self-reliance of cinema—the idea that, no matter how lost a certain work may be, it may always find its way back to the big screen.

And, as the 4,000-strong crowd at the Napoleon premiere exemplified, it’ll always find its audience as well.