Napoleon

Back in the summer of 1980 I read an article in the Sunday colour supplement about a silent film from 1927 called Napoleon.  Something about the article caught my attention.  As it happened, I'd read about the film before but I'd forgotten that at the time.  Way back in 1970, the Sunday Times had done a cut out and keep series on the history of the cinema and in the section on epic films, Napoleon was in the top ten.  That list had been compiled by someone called Kevin Brownlow and it was he who had masterminded the restoration of the film.  He was also the co-director of the made-on-a-shoestring alternate history film It Happened Here, which I had seen on television in the seventies.

I think the article mentioned a planned showing in London that autumn, but from what I now know, that may have been speculative at the time.  The composer Carl Davis was going to score and conduct the music to accompany the showing, and according to the history books, he did the music in three months.  The showing did go ahead, exactly thirty-three years ago, on the 30th November 1980.

I never saw details of that showing but at some time later I saw an advert for further showings in March 1981 and I was able to get a ticket.  (In those pre-internet days, that probably involved either going to the box office in person or applying by post.)  The screening was at the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square and started at ten a.m. on a Sunday.  It lasted about five hours.  It was a mind-blowing experience.

The film had been directed by the Frenchman Abel Gance, who was still alive at the time.  He died later that year at the age of 92, his masterpiece now having been re-discovered.

A year or two later, the film turned up again, again with Carl Davis, at the Barbican concert hall and I saw it.  Kevin Brownlow had written a book about the film and his reconstruction and I bought a copy.  I even got him to sign it.  Some members of the cast had turned up at the signing and my copy is also signed by the actress Annabella who was a teenager when the film was made.  She played the fictional Violine Fleuri, a young girl who becomes infatuated with Napoleon and becomes Josephine's maid.  (The actress went on to marry Tyrone Power.)

Screenings continued at the Barbican every year or so throughout the eighties. It was shown on Channel 4 a couple of times. And the version shown constantly changed as new material was rediscovered.  In 1999 a new restoration was started and I saw that in 2004 at the Royal Festival Hall.  However, a problem developed.  Francis Ford Coppola had acquired the global rights to the film and he only sanction showing a shorter version of the film which used music composed by his father.  There were legal threats to prevent the showing but it was shown.  Carl Davis conducted with his leg in a cast following a recent accident.  The restoration included tinting the print, a practice common during the silent era.  There were many scenes I hadn't seen before.

As far as I know, that was the last showing in London before it was shown today, again at the Royal Festival Hall.  I don't know what the legal situation currently is.  I foolishly delayed booking and I nearly couldn't get a seat.  I ended up in a corner of the balcony.  During the dinner interval, I was in an Indian restaurant and found myself sitting on the table next to a Dutch couple who had come over from the Netherlands just to see the film.  The shows the enthusiasm this film generates.

So what is so captivating about this film?  After all, it is just one part of an incomplete project to film all of Napoleon's life.  It was to be the first of six films and follows Napoleon from his school days at a military academy in 1783, through the French Revolution and The Terror to his invasion of Italy in 1796.  But Gance used an array of cinematic techniques, many of them new.  He liberated the camera by putting it on sledges and on horseback.  He put it on a swing over a crowd of people.  In one battle sequence, it is on the barrel of a cannon so as the cannon recoils the camera moves back too.  (He did not put the camera in a cannon ball, as has sometimes been said.)

He used superimposed ghost images, so that at one point Napoleon kisses a globe and we can see Josephine's face on it.  He used split-screen techniques.  A pillow fight in the school dormitory has the screen split into a three by three grid.  And he took this to its extreme in the concluding triptych sequence which was filmed using three cameras simultaneously to produce a cineramic widescreen.  There is a shot here where Napoleon rides his horse up a hill to review his troops that I'm sure influenced a scene in Peter Jackson's The Return of the King.

So, after thirty plus years, it is still mind-blowing.  But I wish they could produce a DVD of this version.

Napoleon and History

The film Napoleon I posted about yesterday is not supposed to be an historical document.  It is a work of fiction, with invented characters interacting with real historical figures.  And as is common in such works, errors of fact can creep in.  For instance, the IMDb goofs page for the film mentions that a reference to Corsica aligning with Italy is anachronistic, as there was no Italian state at that time, Italy was a region.

However, in the opening titles to the film it is stated that incidents and quotations taken from an historical source are marked as such when they occur.  So, Napoleon's speech to the army about to invade Italy is reported as being (a translation of) the words he actually said.

I have my doubts about some of them.  At the end of the first part, Napoleon and his family flee Corsica in a ship called Le Hasard.  As they sail towards France, an officer on a British Navy ship spots them and asks his captain if he can fire on the "suspicious-looking vessel".  The captain replies, "No, Lieutenant Nelson, we have better things to do."  This is marked as "historical" and presumably implies that the officer is Horatio Nelson.  Nelson was in the area of Corsica in 1792-3, but by that time, he was captain of his own ship.

The incident I'd most like to be true involves a character named as La Bussière, the eater of documents.  During the Terror, the Committee for Public Safety was your typical bureaucracy.  When a prisoner was selected for the guillotine, the documents of the case were handed to a clerk for copying.  This character allegedly ate the documents instead while nobody was looking.  If the document didn't exist, then the person could not be executed.  The film states (historical, again) it was due to him that Josephine escaped the guillotine.  (And the film adds the fictional Tristan Fleuri who takes inspiration from La Bussière and tries to eat Napoleon's documents.)

Trouble is, I can find no reference to him that does not come from the film.  There is a Narcise Labussière mentioned in Simon Schama's Citizens, but that individual appears to have been a member of a Revolutionary youth group, aged nine, not the bearded adult man shown in the film.

Update:  A further google search turned up a biography of Josephine by Ernest John Knapton which tells this story.  However, whoever put the book on the net has added a footnote at this point: "Here is where I would have liked to see a footnote with citation. As far as I can tell, Knapton is the first author to tell the tale of Delperch de la Bussière: later writers all refer back to him, and some (Philip Dwyer, for example, in Napoleon: The Path to Power) call this a 'legend'."  The book is dated 1963, over 35 years after the film was made, so it is possible Knapton got the story from seeing the film, or he and Gance got it from another source.  I have the Dwyer book on my to-be-read pile.