Word: napoleons
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...