Napoleon (1927) *****

That Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) dominated the foreign film scene in the silent era was only because Abel Gance’s majestic Napoleon the same year was butchered on release and rarely seen outside its native France. Audiences who might fancy waiting for streaming to view Ridley Scott’s new epic on the grander four-hour scale might prefer to test their stamina against this early masterpiece that broke incredible new cinematic ground.

You could easily get the impression from the vast amount of innovation on display here that one man – and a Frenchman at that – had single-handedly decided to revolutionize the entire medium. Of course, France had been instrumental in the birth of cinema. Alice Guy was key to the development of narrative cinema although the world being male-dominated that singular achievement was erroneously handed over to George Melies.

Here’s the list of Abel Gance’s innovations: split screen (in fact, triple images), underwater shots, tinting, fast cutting, hand-held shots, extensive close-ups, point-of-view shots, superimposition, use of multiple cameras, mosaic shots and multiple exposure. Perhaps even more astonishing was that at the time the bulk of movie cameras were static.  Even if the result had been, dramatically speaking, as dull as ditch water, it would have been of historical cinematic importance, possibly on a par with This Is Cinerama (1952) or House of Wax (1953), the first 3D.

And it if had been as visually striking and cinematically interesting as The Robe (1953), Twentieth Century Fox’s first demonstration of Cinemascope, it would have more than passed muster as a cinematic footnote.

Instead, it is just stunning. You couldn’t ask for a bolder storyline, the biopic of one of the most fascinating characters who ever lived, Napoleon Bonaparte, who resurrected France after the Revolution of 1789, conquered most of Europe, and rose from defeat and captivity to rally his troops for one final battle at Waterloo in 1815. Wisely, Abel Gance doesn’t attempt to cover all that territory, only going as far as the invasion of Italy, which marked the Little General’s rise as a battle master.

Which version you see – the most common one comes in at around the four-hour mark but if you have the stamina there’s enough in the longer version to keep you engrossed for another couple of hours – will inform your assessment of the authenticity of the narrative and attest to the compelling nature of the tale.

Beginning with a young Napoleon revealing his military skills just to engage in a snowball fight, it moves with narrative focus and cinematic flair through his difficult time at school to the invasion of Italy. Some of the imagery is haunting, a freed pet eagle returning out of choice to his side, the French flag used as a sail, lightning illuminates hand-to-hand combat (that battle taking place in the kind of driving rain Kurosawa would employ in Seven Samurai, 1954), scenes change color, and the final unfurling of the triptych (three connected screens a la Cinerama) is one of the most visual climaxes in cinema.

But even the shortest version contains the bulk of the innovation, perhaps proving that dialog was the most redundant of all the cinematic developments. The trailer, which you can catch on YouTube (see link below), is almost jukebox cinema, a compilation of many of the greatest scenes. Unless you are familiar with silent cinema style, you might recoil at some of the acting, but, once you get into the swing of it, that seems to jar less.

Much as I am a huge fan of Ridley Scott (the extended version of Kingdom of Heaven, 2005, a long-time fave), I doubt if his version (even the longer one promised for the Netflix screening) will come anywhere close to the almost cinematic perfection of Abel Gance.

Don’t take Stanley Kubrick and martin Scorsese’s word for it, this is a must watch.

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