Word: napoleons
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When the fully grown Napoleon reappears as a young army officer at the Club des Cordeliers, a center of radical activity during the early days of the Franch Revolution it is obvious he has begun to unfold internally. Bonaparte, played by Albert Dieudonne, exudes power as he slowly hitches up his shoulders. When he stares into the camera he peers out of dark eyes set so deeply they look like smouldering fires at the ends of two parallel tunnels. Though runty and still obscure, as Gance reiterates over and over, this is the Napoleon of the Eroica...
...strength. After an abortive attempt at insurrection on his native Corsica, Bonaparte flees the island in a dingy. The boat has no oars, but he has stolen the Tricolor from a government building and makes a jury-rigged sail out of it. Caught in a storm at sea, Napoleon at once contends with nature and embodies the destiny of France. As his boat yaws wildly amid the swells, a sign flashes on the screen saying that Napoleon is "the defiant sport of the ocean" and is being "carried to the triumphant Heights of History." One can hardly imagine a less...
...movie abounds with such scenes, and Bonaparte grows steadily larger. By the end of the battle of Toulon--in which Napoleon first receives the command of a major force and then launcnes an offensive despite a torrential storm--nature ceases to struggle with the Corsican. Instead, it pays homage to him by providing hail to beat the drums of dead soldiers to announce his victory. And although the film takes him only so far as the beginning of his campaign into Italy in 1976--a full eight years before he became emperor--it seems that at any second Napoleon...
...sublime incarnate, but he never transcends France. Gance portrays the Revolution as the necessary precondition to the ascendence of the man who will realize the fate of the nation. The Revolution is the "forge" France must pass through. The shadows of dozens of pikes parade across a wall in Napoleon's room. Robespierre and Saint-Just chat about whom to execute during the Terror. A florid Danton pours forth impassioned speeches, while Marat, played by Antonin Artaud, looks as if he has walked out of David's painting complete with a towel around his head. In these types of scenes...
...THIS were not enough, Gance is determined to break new ground in the use of the camera. It is almost inconceivable that any 1927 film could achieve as much as Napoleon does. Gance seems unwilling to let any straight-forward shot stand by itself. He superimposes endlessly. He splices flashbacks that are projected with such rapidity that one cannot recognize everything, and to watch becomes hypnotic. Other times, the image divides itself, first into four, then into nine identical pictures. When Napoleon is thrown from wave to wave in the dingy, a shot of the National Convention suddenly appears...