Classic Napoleon silent movie tops seven hours after epic restoration
THE 1927 four-hour silent film Napoléon has grown to even more epic proportions after a French expert retrieved extra footage that had been stored away for decades.
Georges Mourier told the Sunday Telegraph that researchers had discovered more than 400 cans of film, which means the film now lasts longer than seven hours.
Mr Mourier led a restoration that was so complex, it took 12 years and cost £2 million to complete. “We have retrieved more than one hour of missing shots,” he said. A British historian previously found extra footage to extend it to five and a half hours.
Napoléon, directed by Abel Gance, was the first of six planned films about the French emperor, but the others were never made, due to the steep cost. It covers his early years, including his training in the military college at Brienne – where his military genius already emerges as he leads his fellow students to victory in a snowball fight – as well as the fierce battle at Toulon, in which large grains of salt were used to re-enact driving rain and hailstones.
Gance, who died in 1981 aged 92, had been far ahead of his time, developing techniques that included handheld photography, filming from a galloping horse, sweeping battle sequences shot by different cameras, and showing the film on triple screens – an early precursor of Imax. In the finale, Napoleon’s vast army marches toward the audience, a panoramic sweep spread across three screens.
While he recut the film as a sound version in 1935 and 1971, it has been reedited by other film-makers and there are more than 20 versions.
British film historian Kevin Brownlow achieved an astonishing feat of restoration in reconstructing Napoléon from countless fragments tracked down over many decades. It was premiered in London in 1980 – the most complete
Napoléon since its 1927 premiere. While expressing admiration for Brownlow’s restoration, Mr Mourier said that even more material has emerged since then. His project, a collaboration with the Cinémathèque Française and the Centre Nationale de Cinema, has drawn on hundreds of reels that had somehow been missed until now, concealed in Gance’s archives.
His team of almost 100 technicians, researchers and engineers realised that previous restorations had combined the two original 1927 versions, which are “different, artistically speaking,” he said.
Finding lost footage is all the more significant because so many silent films were destroyed.
Mr Mourier said that “many missing shots” have been retrieved: “In the double storm scene, for example, about 20 per cent of the footage was missing, we discovered, and we have now found it … The dynamic flow between these two storms had been lost and has now been restored … Like music, some notes were missing.”
Mr Mourier hopes that it will be premiered next year. It will require cinemas that are large enough to have three screens, to do justice to Gance’s vision.