This broad-beamed silent epic reportedly ran for nine hours in its original cut, which is even more impressive when you consider that it was conceived as merely the first film in a six-part biography.
Napoleon is huge in ambition as well as scale: Gance pushed at the boundaries of the biopic, introducing cinematic innovations at every turn. Film historian Kevin Brownlow embarked on an epic undertaking himself when he began to restore the film from fragments in the s.
In he compiled a staggering, near-complete five-and-a-half-hour cut, complemented by an orchestral score from Carl Davis. The film begins with the hero conducting his troops in a battle. But this is Napoleon the schoolboy, and the weapons are snowballs. Equally resourceful, Gance shoots this prophetic scene with artistic flourishes enabled by technological creativity.
The rapid cutting he had used so powerfully in La Roue returns, and the footage itself has been shot on a variety of rigged cameras β one strapped to a toboggan, one that spins in a circle, another that plunges down a frame grimly inspired by a guillotine. Another schoolboy scuffle, but this time in the dormitories. As the pillows burst, so does the image. The fight is shown in split-screen setups, with four or nine compartments at a time. After the chequerboard come spinning superimpositions, with as many as 16 different images on screen at once.
In Napoleon, Gance hoped to take the audience from a mere spectator to a player in the action. Handheld cameras were a few years away from reality, though, and the cumbersome alternative was for his cameramen to wear heavy, motorised cameras strapped to their chests, connected by a cable to a portable generator on a truck. The scene was inspired by the ride of the Klan sequence in The Birth of a Nation , but Gance naturally wanted to outdo D.
