Cinema
Napoleon by Abel Gance
Napoléon
Abel Gance · 1927
Synopsis
At the college of Brienne, the young Napoleon Bonaparte leads his classmates in a snowball fight and already shows his gift for command. The film then follows him through the Revolution: the birth of the Marseillaise, the sessions of the Convention, his family's flight from Corsica amid the political turmoil, then the siege of Toulon, where he distinguishes himself, and his meeting with Joséphine de Beauharnais, before the Italian campaign opens for him.
Context
The premiere took place on 7 April 1927 at the Paris Opéra, before President Doumergue and Marshals Foch and Joffre, in a version of nearly four hours that ended with a triptych projected on three screens. In May, a boulevard cinema, the Apollo, showed a version of more than nine hours, without the triptych. After several restorations, including those by Kevin Brownlow, the Cinémathèque française, under the direction of Georges Mourier, reconstructed a Grande Version of about seven hours, after sixteen years of work on nearly a hundred kilometres of film.
Who it is for
A silent film of nearly seven hours, in two parts, in the Grande Version; the triple-screen finale needs a cinema.
Prizes and reception
Presented as the opening of Cannes Classics on 14 May 2024, the Grande Version was then performed as a ciné-concert in Paris.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.