Liberty and Tyranny
What kind of hero is this little man? The most famous product the French ever exported, he's not even French. Alone, he seems stifled by tension and suffocated by energy. With others, he is uncommunicative and uncomfortable. Never a participator, always a leader. "I command or I am silent."
He is a man risen from the mud and stones of Corsica, propelled by an urgent sense of purpose too large for him. "All my life I have sacrifice everything--peace, profit, happiness--to my destiny." He sets himself apart from history, and so commands it.
This is the man Abel Gance gives us in his film Napoleon.
Not the dynamic victor of Austerlitz, or the epic exile, but a man with a vision of the Universal Republic, schooled in politics by the French Revolution, in military art by genius. Studying the Corsican Eagle from military school to the first Italian campaign, Gance places the man opposite a tableau of the Revolution. And Napoleon watches it, as the convention destroys the constitutional monarchy and then itself, and the Reign of Terror seizes France. Amid the confusion, he is isolated, detached, observant.
In four-and-a-half hours, Abel Gance depicts the simultaneous birth of Liberty and Despotism.
Napoleon is no documentary, no history lesson. Gance merely puts the man on the threshold of history and lets destiny take over. Yet, there is nothing mystical in what he films: Napoleon is simply the story of a man who knows what he wants and waits for it to come to him.
Gance deliberately chooses as Napoleon a man abjectly lacking in charm or good looks. He does not want a Napoleon God-sent to save France in her hour of desperation, but a man of flesh and intellect. The protagonist, played by Albert Dieudonne, is a short, unimpressive young man. His long hair hangs listlessly about his shoulders, his arms clasped tightly behind him. But for his eyes, his face is hard and ex- pressionless, the face of a bandit or a martyr. His eyes are sharp, black. They scrutinize, and they attack.
And they understand. As the Terror erupts, Napoleon works in his small apartment. From time to time, he glances at the Delcaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on his wall. In the street below, the crowd is rioting; he ignores it. Suddenly, an anguished face passes along the level of his balcony. He rushes to see what has happened: The head is impaled on a pole. The throngs flow under him and the head moves on. He returns to his desk. His eyes see something we cannot--the anguish of France. But we see his tears, and we understand.
HE IS AN adventurer. Returning to Corsica during the first year of the Revolution, he tries in vain to persuade the government to ally itself with France. Declared an outlaw, he snatches the Tricolor and rides toward the coast, chased by troops through the Corsican countryside. He clambers aboard a small boat with no oars and no sail; hoisting the Tricolor, he sets sail for France.
And he is a lover. He meets Josephine de Beauharnais at the Victims' Ball at the end of the Revolution. Active in combat, he is passive in love, more the seduced than the seducer. In Josephine he is confronted with the one challenge he has not yet vanquished: a woman made for a man to dream of.
We watch Napoleon as Gance did, the perpetual outsider dissecting the world before him with his eyes. "To make oneself understood to people, one must first speak to their eyes." When the film ends, on the eve of his first great victory, he stands above the Italian plains, all the world before him, and we have understood what he sees. His vision lies at his feet. And his eyes are the eyes of France.
Paris, 1927. Abel Gance's four-and-a-half-hour monument to nationalism opens at the Theatre de l'Opera. Gance expects that his techniques and innovations will revolutionize film. He is particularly proud of Polyvision, used at the end of the film. The screen widens, and on three separate panels, three different film sequences run simultaneously: the physical, emotional, and intellectual portrait of a nation. In the last frames, the Imperial Eagle, wings stretched to encompass the globe, fills all three screens. Gance is already planning the two sequels to Napoleon--provided he can get the funding.
The film is well-received, but history turns nasty on Abel Gance. Six months after Napoleon, Al Jolson does a little softshoe number; talkies are in, Polyvision is out. In desperation and disgust, Gance burns part of the footage. Who cares now where the life of the Corsican Eagle ends up? The reels are dispersed across the globe.
A young man named Kevin Brownlow finds two isolated reels some 30 years later. Something of the vision remains. He starts researching the film and putting its disjoined limbs together. Ten years later, the De Gaulle government funds a new version for the Bicentennial of the little man's birth. Brownlow, with Gance, reconstructs the 1927 epic. At last, Napoleon stands complete again.
WHAT COMES together after four-and-a-half hours in the dark is a tremendous sense of Gance's technical innovations. Revolting against the dictates of the time, he sets the camera free of its confining tripod, creating a frenzy that propells history itself. To film the chase across Corsica, he straps a camera to a horse's back, and keeps pace with the lead troops. Not one image is blurred or out of focus. Before the audience, the foremost rider's horse unfolds its limbs in the rhythmical ritual of a gallop. Its nostrils flair, its hind quarters fleck with sweat. The earh resounds under the pounding of great hoofs. For an instant, we forget the object of this chase, so intoxicated are we by the fluidity of the horse's movement.
And, at that instant, Gance cuts to an overhead shot. A country road divides the hillside from the fields. From atop the hill, the camera spies the tiny figure of a man weaving across the screen. The road is crooked, his purpose, straight. Behind him ride the troops, their motion no longer the fluid, individual beauty of the previous shot. The silence implied by the distance from the action immediately withdraws from personal involvement to a historical perspective, the entire scene displayed rather than a slice of it.
To show a storm overtaking Napoleon's boat and its political counterpart shaking Parisian convention, Gance alternates between two scenes bursting with the innovative use of his camera. The storm at sea, tinted a deep blue, is filmed within a vat. Gigantic waves rock the miniature boat with desperate slowness. Gance also shoots some close-up footage, using the same technique as with the chase: a camera fixed beside Napoleon's boat. From the distant view of great waves, we are brought suddenly into the thick of the storm, the young man furiously and futilely bailing his wreck with a bucket.
This alternates with an overhead shot of the Convention. Every deputy in the great hall is on his feet, long lines of men facing each other, shouting. As the scene becomes more riotous, the camera starts to sway, rocking back and forth with a nauseating momentum. The scene cuts back to the little man alone in the storm, his Tricolor ripped to rags, and then back again to the Convention. When the sequence draws to a close, the camera above the Hall is in full swing. Human figures barely distinguishable, the motion is sickening yet hypnotic--Gance turning Napoleon's role in history into a visual metaphor. What Gance pioneered has since become standard.
Gance's focus, on the other hand, fixes the flow of history in a series of static images that capture in them all the horror and irony of the French Revolution. While The Terror creates a murderous chaos in the streets, Gance turns suddenly to an enclosed office: the nerve center of the Committee of Public Safety. A high wall is divided into four sections: Accused, Acquitted, Guilty, Innocent. Accused and Guilty overflow with dossiers; Acquitted and Innocent stand nearly empty. An officer enters, announcing to the pie-eyed overseer, "I must have three hundred today. Draw up the lists." A little man on a swing rides up and down along the wall, pulling files indiscriminately. He piles them before two scriviners, who begin to list the future victims of the blood-thirsty guillotine. On the left sits La Bussiere, the little-known hero of The Terror, who has earned his place among the just by eating the documents, page by page, and saving lives.
As La Bussiere surreptitiously makes his way through several dossiers, his table-mate tries to imitate him. The noble gesture of the one becomes a comic pantomime in the hands of the other. He chokes, grimaces, swallows with deliberate difficulty. "How can you do this?" he asks. The paper-eater shrugs and chews on. The scene turns in our minds from farce to cynicism. This is the face of The Terror: a mournful man behind a stack of paper.
GANCE'S TREATMENT of the Victims' Balls, spontaneous explosions of frenetic relief sweeping though the prisons at the end of the Revolution, frames the orgiastic celebration in a series of viscous pink images. Exuberance at surviving the horror strips the victims of social convention. Prudence gives way to prurience. Bodies flow across the screen, men indistinguishable from women, limbs distorted in ecstasy. Yet, the pink tinting and writhing limbs make these survivors somewhat less human than the head on a pole that we believed to be still the part of a whole. This unwholesome rapture has none of the humanity of the earlier image. How better to seize the inhumanity of the declining Revolution than in these disembodied limbs, leaping to a rhythm that pulses in their veins?
It is in this conglomeration of technical fluidity and focal images that the heart of the movie beats. As a statement of a man's life isolated in the flow of history, it stands as a testimony to Napoleon. As a tapestry of a bloody time begetting yet another, it is unparalleled. Now, as in 1927, Napoleon reflects the vision of an era, through the unique vision of Abel Gance.