For almost 100 years, this 7h18 film has been the most impressive ever made about Napoleon – Cinema News

“With more than 700 appearances of Napoleon on the big screen […] and approximately 350 on television, the Emperor is one of the most represented historical characters on the screens” commented historian and film critic Antoine de Baecque.

When it comes to books, the figure is undoubtedly even more fascinating. In 2014, the historian Jean Tulard, one of the greatest specialists on the subject, put forward the astronomical (and unverifiable) number of 80,000 works published on Napoleon; or more than one per day since his birth in Ajaccio in 1769. Ridley Scott may well torpedo the unkind criticism of his Napoleon, it is above all an artistic vision – his own.

It is not easy to build an ambitious work on the character. Stanley Kubrick worked on it for years, before throwing in the towel following MGM's withdrawal from his project, which had become frightened by the failure in theaters of Waterloo; particularly unfair indeed.

Years earlier, filmmaker Abel Gance had embarked on the adventure. A truly pharaonic enterprise, carried at arm's length by its main performer, Albert Dieudonné. A role which made him famous and which marked him so much that, subsequently, he was practically only entrusted with the role of Napoleon. And he even devoted himself to giving lectures on the First Empire, and went so far as to be buried in his Napoleonic costume…

A river film

At the beginning of the 1920s, Abel Gance wanted to devote a huge fresco to Napoleon Bonaparte, planning the filming of six to eight films covering the youth of “the Eagle” to his captivity on Saint Helena. Filming of the first episode began in 1925. The film lasts seven hours, at the end of which the viewer is still in Montenotte, in 1796, with the emperor. Abel Gance will never manage to finish his fresco, due to lack of means.

The film cost 17 million francs, while the cost that had been envisaged for the entire fresco was 20 million. The montage, varying from four to nine kilometers of film (even the full version of thirteen kilometers) far exceeded the time limit set by the producers.

However, this first episode, broadcast in two versions, a short one called “Opera” for the public, and a long one called “Apollo” for the press and distributors – was an absolutely phenomenal success. A triumph also crowned with real technical feats of force.

Between split screens, kaleidoscopic images, rapid edits, superpositions and other visual effects which highlight the most personal or the most epic sequences, there is the final battle, 20 minutes long, where Gance uses three cameras in a system called polyvision. The traditional screen is then split into three distinct images, one per camera, which connect into a vast panorama. A spectacular result which increases the epic effect of his work tenfold.

Abel Gance will spend his life editing and re-editing his film, like the version he delivered in 1935, sound this time, which offers a narrative structure very different from the silent one of 1927. Or that of 1971, which will be baptized Bonaparte and the Revolution. In fact, his masterpiece has been edited and reassembled so many times, with the added bonus of losing the original negative to make matters worse, that it has long been impossible to determine its original form.

A quest for the Grail

The film's restoration story is as fascinating as that of Bonaparte himself. For film historian and director Kevin Brownlow, one of the greatest Abel Gance specialists, finding the full version of the filmmaker's work, in any case the most complete possible, was a quest for the Holy Grail. The quest of a lifetime, even.

“I have spent 50 years tracking down surviving archives across the globe, ever since I first discovered the film as a child on a 9.5mm print in 1954.” he confided in a fascinating article published in the Guardianin 2013.

His first encounter with Gance's Napoléon was when he was rummaging through his school library and came across a box of film that he thought was an educational film. “When I projected the film on a wall at home, I had never seen anything like it” he will tell. He quickly realized that he only had two reels out of the planned six; this is where his quest began.

“I even wrote a letter to its director, Abel Gance, […] because I couldn't believe what I saw.” The filmmaker, then director of the Cinémathèque française, was moved to see that a young Englishman had shown interest in his film, so he went to the British Film Institute for a totally unexpected meeting. “My mom called my school, I was in the middle of an exam, but they let me go see it.”

Years later, at the cost of the work of a Benedictine monk scouring cinema libraries all over the world, including of course that of Paris where he was nicknamed “the thief”, Kevin Brownlow was able to get his hands on enough material to restore a five-hour version of the film, which he showed at Gance and premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in 1968 and then at the Telluride Film Festival in 1979.

An experience which will make Gance – who was approaching 90 years old – confused and tense, thinking at first that he was going to be shown a documentary on the restoration of his film: “I remember that Gance said that he had the impression of having made all his sound films with his eyes closed. He was so friendly, so surprised to find this little child passionate about his work. […] The only downside for him was his level of English, although enthusiasm doesn't really need translation.”

Its copy was shown in English cinemas, while Francis Ford Coppola took care of distribution in the United States with his company American Zoetrope; doing new editing work and creating a new Carmine Coppola soundtrack from this restored version. There was also success. In New York, in January 1980, Coppola rented the immense and famous Radio City Hall, with 6,000 seats, to organize a screening of the film. It will be played with a closed box!

Netflix joins the dance

Since 1927, Abel Gance's Napoléon has already been restored five times, including three times by the Cinémathèque française. In 2000, Kevin Brownlow did a third restoration of his own; version which will be published by the BFI on Blu-ray in 2016. But it's not yet enough.

For his part, the director and researcher Georges Mourier also took up his pilgrim's staff and began a very long and costly restoration work, under the auspices of the Cinémathèque française which commissioned him in 2007. Originally, he was to lead a mission consisting of taking inventory of the boxes containing the multiple reels of the film – which has more than 600,000 images.

“After two years of work […]we realized that all the previous restorations had indiscriminately mixed two original negatives. Namely, the negatives of the first version, called “Opéra”, broadcast at the Opéra Garnier in April 1927, and those of the second version, called “Apollo”, broadcast to the press and professionals two months later in a long version, at the Apollo cinema” he confided at the microphone of Radio France in 2020.”

A titanic restoration preparatory work, which will take ten years. “On March 3, 2009, we had to submit our first expertise to the Cinémathèque. With Laure Marchau, my assistant, we realized that one of the CNC boxes had a strange coding.

In reality, behind this number were hidden not one but 179 boxes. On site, a new surprise, the slip indicates a completely different number: 487. All these boxes had been stored at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse years earlier by Claude Lafaye, a great lover of Gance's work, to be saved from planned destruction “. Georges Mourier's team found itself with almost 1000 additional boxes to inventory.

“It’s a Frankenstein movie!”

As reported in this fascinating article on the CNC website detailing the stages of this restoration, it was actually only in 2017 that the restoration work could really begin. The process is so long and expensive (4 million euros) that it requires the intervention of a patron. Netflix will announce in January 2021 participate financially in the reconstruction of the work.

In May 2021, Georges Mourier came to present his work during Cannes Classic, and hoped to complete this restored version by the end of the year, which also marked the bicentenary of Napoleon's death. “It’s a Frankenstein movie.” he explained.

“The viewer of 2021 will never know where we started from. There, to find a plan, it was recomposed into four pieces. It's more than couture, it's lace, it's is lace because we are obliged to undo the lace that was made by our predecessors, not to break the thread and to reweave it with common sense which is the meaning of the great version.

17 years of waiting for a final version

But no screening of the restored work in sight that year, alas… We will ultimately have to wait until the summer of 2024 to see this final version of Abel Gance's masterpiece arrive in a few selected theaters on the shutter. 17 long and interminable years after the start of what was supposed to be a “simple” inventory work.

This complete and fabulously restored version was to be broadcast last September by the public channel France 5. But, due to a technical problem, it was canceled. Broadcast in two parts, 231 min and 207 minutes respectively, Napoleon seen by Abel Gance has finally found its place this November 22 on France 5. So prepare yourself for a 7:18 a.m. marathon, which will begin at 9 p.m. But the experience is worth it.

In finefor lovers of physical media, know that this extraordinary version will not be released before December 2025. Yes, it is still very far away… All the more reason to let yourself be harpooned, in the meantime, by this miraculous work.