“Napoleon seen by Abel Gance”, the wild opera of a precursor

Selection The cinematic event of 2024 was a French film from 1927, finally presented in its definitive version, almost a century after its first screening. Tonight at 9:05 p.m. on France 5.

A sign of his mythical status, he is commonly called “the Napoleon”, like a monument planted in French cinematographic heritage but which, until now, had remained in a state of ruin. Restored by director and researcher Georges Mourier, it is a brand new copy which was successfully released in theaters this summer and which, on November 22, sets out to conquer the small screen. This adventure began in 1921 when, galvanized by “Birth of a Nation”, by DW Griffith, Abel Gance also decided to offer French cinema a spectacular historical fresco. Gance is used to daring projects like “J'accuse”, an indictment against the massacre of 14-18 and its “broken faces” parading like the living dead, and the melodrama “La Roue”, lasting 4h33 . At the crossroads of popular cinema and art film, Abel Gance was driven by a high idea of ​​cinema as a poetic and experimental tool. For this scholar, imbued with romantic literature, no one better than Napoleon to embody this “birth of the French nation”, to evoke the revolutionary turmoil and the melancholy of an Empire never realized. The failure of the Napoleonic vision, shattered against its hubris, will also, in a certain way, be that of Gance's project.

His “Napoleon” is, from the beginning, pharaonic because Gance wants to shoot no less than eight episodes, retracing the life of the Emperor from his childhood to his exile and his death in Saint Helena. Six years later, only the first two-part episode was completed, swallowing up almost the entire budget (17 million out of 20 million) allocated to the complete fresco. This is how Albert Dieudonné only lends his face to young Bonaparte, with…