Napoléon (1927)

Napoléon is a French period drama film first released in 1927, directed by Abel Gance.  The film stars Albert Dieudonné, Edmond Van Daële, Alexandre Koubitzky, Antonin Artaud and Abel Gance.  It has also been released under the title: Napoleon.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


In the dying days of the French Revolution, a Corsican general comes to great prominence. Over the following years, Napoléon Bonaparte would win France many great military victories, transforming a divided nation into a great empire...

One of the most ambitious films in cinema history, Abel Gance’s epic six-hour long Napoléon is both a stunningly visual work of cinema and a poetically beautiful telling of the life of France’s most famous general.

The film was originally to have been made as a six-part series about the full life of Napoléon.  In the end, it became a single epic film which covered only part of Napoléon’s life (up to the invasion of Italy).

With scant regard to the commercial imperative (which runined his financial backers), Gance immerses himself fully in his artistic achievement, perfecting new techniques of film-making that are breathtaking in their originality.  For example, he introduces colour tinting, use of split screen, triptych photography (shooting a scene three times and combining to form a single image), and wide-screen expansion.  The latter required specialist projection equipment which few cinemas had.  That, and the sheer length of the film, resulted in the film being a commercial failure.

The film was restored and released a number of times, most successfully in the 1990s by Kevin Brownlow, with music by Carl Davis, running to 5 hours.  There is also a 4 hour version by Francis Ford Coppola with music by his father Carmine.

Today, as a result of these restorations, Abel Gance’s Napoléon is regarded as the definitive film of the life of Napoléon and one of the unrivalled masterpieces of early French cinema.

© James Travers 2003

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If you don’t know anything about France, I recommend you see this old B&W silent film. You will feel the force of the human revolution, and of course how the genius Napoleon saved it from interior terror and exterior royal coalitions – a double victory.
Maximumuse  

Wonderful, simply wonderful. It is incredibly atmospheric and really gives an insight into how thrilling a time the Revolution must have been. It shows the passions apparent in politics and who can forget scenes like the storm at the sea mirrored by the storm at the convention with the camera rolling from side to side?
Rhiannon (UK)  

It’s simply the greatest French movie ever made, but it’s not available in France! Why doesn’t the culture minister work for its return?
NapoCinePeida (Nimes, France) 

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