The Fundamentals: Able Gance's "NAPOLEAN"

For over sixty years he was a mystery.  No one knew of him.  No one cared.  It would take a young English film buff who would later have an established film editing career and receive an Oscar for his dedication in the preservation of films of the silent era to piece together frame by frame quite possibly the most magnificent work of art ever captured on film. A witness of the genius of the human mind when it is unleashed to freely express itself in a coherent yet creative manner.  Abel Gance's NAPOLEON is not only a wonder to see but a marvel to experience and to be reminded of the power and influence the movies continue to play in our lives to this day and beyond.

Ramsey Seikaly

Most notably is the ground breaking attempt at creating a wide screen experience decades before the invention of Cinema Scope, Cinerama, Todd AO and Vista Vision.
 
Before Imax was concieved Gance had taken account of creating for the grand finale what he called Polyvision whereby 3 cameras were synced to capture the action projected onto a cinematic tryptich of sorts, three screens side by side, a precursor of the Cinerama process that would eventually come into use in the mid 1950's.  

Original Musical Score

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Los Angeles -- We begin a series that lays out literary the art and craft of the visual medium. In this instance the craft of story telling at its best, exemplified in the filmed fictional narrative format. There is but a handful of creative types whom you can literately anoint as the true pioneers, whether you agree or disagree with their political stance and personal opinions, their ability to create life across a two dimensional flat white screen from a series of celluloid transparencies, through the medium of light and today through the digital electronic transmission of electrons and magnetic pulse, should be fodder for thought and enlightenment to both the aspiring amateur and the seasoned professional, in this the so called medium commonly referred to in the popular colloquial vernacular as the movies.  

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Here is an itemization of some of the visual techniques employed by Gance and his team in the making of this monumental ground breaking cinematic achievement. 

1.  Fast Cuts
2.  Extensive Clos-Ups
3.  Variety of Hand-Held         Camera Shots
4.  Location Shooting
5.  Point of View Shots
6.  Multiple-Camera Setups
7.  Multiple Exposure Shots and Sequences
8.  Superimpositoins
9.  Underwarter Camera Shots
10.  Kaleidoscopic Images
11.  Film Tinting
12.  Split Screen
13.  Mosaic Shots
14.  Multi-Screen Projection
15.  Other Visual Effects 3D
16.  Boom Shots on a Swing
17.  Auto Pan 
18.  Horizontal and Vertical Shots
19.  Animation
 A revival of Napoléon in the mid-1950s influenced the filmmakers of the French New Wave.

Originally planned as a six part series on the life of the French Emperor who planned to rule the world or at least Europe...Gance took the money and launched a very ambitious project to refine not only the legend of Napoleon but as well to refine the medium by which the myth this military and political genius would best be represented on a scale as magnificent as his early life and career evolved.

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The greatest film sequence ever created with no computer generated effects nearly a century ago whose techniques are today known as montage before the Russians even conceived of this not to mention pre-MTV. 

Here is a synopsis of the general plot line of Abel Gance's epic film on the early years of Napolean as best summarized by Michael Brooke.  We have included his email just in case you have the itch to contact him and continue the conversation.  

A massive six-hour biopic of Napoleon, tracing his career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign), his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political storm) and the Terror, culminating in his triumphant invasion of Italy in 1797 (the film stops there because it was intended to be part one of six, but director Abel Gance never raised the money to make the other five). The film's legendary reputation is due to the astonishing range of techniques that Gance uses to tell his story, culminating in the final twenty-minute triptych sequence, which alternates widescreen panoramas with complex multiple- image montages projected simultaneously on three screens.

- Written by Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>

The movie premiered in 1981 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City to a score composed by the late Carmen Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola's father to a thundering standing ovation.  It would be 30 years later that the U.S. premiere would occur in Oakland's 3,000 seat Paramount Theater in 2012 to a new score by Carl Davis and an expanded screen time with more footage discovered and restored, closer to the original six hour run time when it first was released in Europe back in 1927.  

You can get a DVD copy from your Library or Amazon.  So instead of being the spoiler here is a teaser of what to expect when you become part of cinema history not as a spectator but as the participant.  

And that is the secret of Napolean; the triumph of imagination over rational thinking for Gance wanted us to be active participants not inactive observers.  So here then is the trailer from the Oakland 2012 U.S. Premiere.  

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