Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Northcliffe Lectures from University College in London, can be read in two ways. One is as pure literary criticism, as a reinterpretation of Stendhal and Balzac. She writes with assurance and insight of the 19th century novel, of George Eliot's "homely English novel," of the literary use of Napoleon as the personification of genius, of Les Miserables and Jean Valjean's conscience as a dialogue. Her writing is spirited but there are grounds for disagreement, such as her contention that the fiction of Conrad "went so far in' the direction of brevity and concentration that they were closer...
...most vivid element in Brownlow's reconstruction is a concluding 18-minute triptych in which three well-synchronized images are simultaneously projected on a suddenly expanded screen, as Napoleon is preparing to lead his army into Italy and the campaign that made him a world figure. By another name, this is Cinerama, though it is 30 years ahead of that gimmick's invention. It is also crudely stirring, and just about as big a finish as any movie has ever...
This episode alone is not what makes Napoleon memorable. That quality derives from its shooting and editing. D.W.Griffith demonstrated the limitless scope of the screen's ability to tackle big scenes in Intolerance (1916). Eisenstein, in pictures like Battleship Potemkin (1925), showed how the juxtaposition of disparate images could create, through montage, meanings that were more felt than consciously understood. Gance's great contribution was to set the camera free of the tripod, making it a participant in, as well as an observer of, the action. His tracking shots were unprecedented...
...schoolboy snowball fight. But Gance was capable of hanging a camera on anything-a galloping horse, a firing cannon, a storm-tossed boat-thereby forcing emotional involvement with what otherwise might have been mere tableaux. His tour de force is a sequence in which the pitching of Napoleon's boat as he escapes his Corsican political enemies is crosscut with scenes of riotous action in the Paris Assembly in which the camera is made to rock as it does when it is on the ocean. Gance's experiments with quick-cut editing-split-screening, double-printing, creating images...
...Napoleon-like all the great silent epics-is a triumph of pure cinematic style over conventional expectations. There is no "characterization" in the usual sense, though in the title role Albert Dieudonné gives a great silent performance of looks, gestures and poses. Mostly, however, people are used as unparticularized symbols. Nor are there many dramatically pointed scenes, only groupings in which it is up to cameraman, editor and director to ferret out (and impose) meaning-to "photograph thought," in Griffith's phrase...