A monumental masterpiece of silent cinema, Abel Gance’s 1927 fresco has been reedited many times, to the point that for a long time it was impossible to determine its original form. Director and researcher Georges Mourier and his team have now completed the restoration after sixteen years of hard work. This unedited 7-hour version was presented as a world premiere in an exceptional two-part ciné-concert on July 4 and 5 at La Seine Musicale.

“A monster” is how Georges Mourier describes Abel Gance’s Napoleon, a monumental fresco dating from 1927, which traces the life of the future emperor from his childhood through to the first stirrings of the Italian campaign. Georges Mourier, director and researcher in charge of restoring the film for the Cinémathèque Française, had to battle for sixteen years to tame the “monster”. An unruly “monster” which, over time, became a veritable cinephilic sea serpent. Abel Gance himself, drowned by the excess he had orchestrated, seemed to have lost the thread of a film whose versions he multiplied (there are said to be 22 different versions!). The filmmaker, who died almost forty-three years ago, had made Bonaparte such a fixation that he signed up to a veritable personal body of work: no less than three additional feature-length films in addition to the multiple edits of his original Napoleon. Among those lucky enough to discover this Napoleon, who could be certain of having seen the version closest to the one secretly intended by Gance? Not many. And besides, did this “perfect” film really exist? If so, wasn’t the material scattered to the four winds, long since lost or even too damaged to be used? All these questions dogged Georges Mourier for almost a decade.

Napoleon vu par Abel Gance - Premiere partie - La jeunesse de Bonaparte.1927.1080p.WEB-DL-Threnodyy.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	3 h 51 min
Size: 	8.14 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	4 941 kb/s
BPP: 	0.095
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AAC LC @ 96.0 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/E6F9694ABC144C9/Napoleon_vu_par_Abel_Gance_-_Deuxieme_partie_-_Napoleon_et_la_Revolution_francaise.1927.1080p.WEB-DL-Threnodyy.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/F6591FE86CCF9EA/Napoleon_vu_par_Abel_Gance_-_Premiere_partie_-_La_jeunesse_de_Bonaparte.1927.1080p.WEB-DL-Threnodyy.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/2D1748EA0C119BC/Napoleon.1927.Part.1.RESTORED.1080p.WEB.H264-FW.srt
https://nitro.download/view/3F754DF9E8E509E/Napoleon.1927.Part.2.RESTORED.1080p.WEB.H264-FW.srt

Language(s):None (apart from one song sequence in french) (French intertitles)
Subtitles:English

The post Abel Gance – Napoleon vu par Abel Gance [2024 restoration] (1927) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

TCM Review :
The story behind Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) is as exciting as the film. A masterpiece adventure originally running nearly seven hours, it breaks new ground with practically every shot, was filmed with techniques twenty-five years ahead of its time, and was rescued from oblivion by an obsessed teenager.

French director Abel Gance conceived an ambitious plan to film the life of the famous French leader in the early 1920s and, during a trip to America, even sought out D.W. Griffith to get his blessing for the project. Six feature films were to have presented a comprehensive biography of Napoleon but after a two-year struggle, Gance only succeeded in completing the first film before he ran out of money and time.

A tireless inventor, Gance devised new ways of presenting his story. To show his hero’s rapidly calculating mind, Gance splashed on screen shots containing up to sixteen superimpositions. A pillow fight becomes a flurry of feathers and action as the screen divides itself into four, then nine, separate images. This was not achieved in the lab; for each effect the film had to be exposed and re-exposed in the camera by means of complex calculations.

3.78GB | 5h 12m | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/2AC46B0E0130EEC/Abel.Gance.1927.Napoleon.D1.DVDRip.XViD-KG.avi https://nitro.download/view/28712DCFAA37F77/Abel.Gance.1927.Napoleon.D2.DVDRip.XViD-KG.avi https://nitro.download/view/8FBA415813FB57F/Napoleon.1927.Alternate.Ending.DVDRip.XViD-KG.avi

Language:Silent / Carl Davis Score
Subtitles:English Intertitles

The post Abel Gance – Napoleon [Brownlow restoration, +Extras] (1927) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The last film made by legendary French director Abel Gance, Bonaparte et la révolution (1971) was also his final attempt to release the Napoleonic biopic he had begun in the 1920s. Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance (1927) was over nine hours long, but represented only the first of a planned six-film series. Having failed to get funding for the remaining episodes, Gance revamped his silent film as Napoléon Bonaparte (1935) – adding newly-shot scenes and dubbing his decade-old footage. After other abortive attempts to resurrect part or all of his biopic in the 1950s, Gance gained funding from Claude Lelouch to release Bonaparte et la revolution in 1971. This last version recycles footage from the films of 1927 and 1935, as well as material from his television work of the 1960s. The result is a bizarre mishmash of old and new images, performances, and voices – less a coherent film than a document embodying the whole of Gance’s 45-year involvement with his eternally incomplete project.

https://nitro.download/view/5BF84B37B92D25D/Bonaparte_et_la_revolution_(1971)_-_part_1.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/C89093B955C8547/Bonaparte_et_la_revolution_(1971)_-_part_2.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:None

The post Abel Gance – Bonaparte et la révolution (1972) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

2011 restoration by La Cinémathèque Française of the re-edited sound version of Abel Gance’s 1927 epic silent film “Napoleon”.

French language only, no english subtitles.
One of the most high-profile casualties of the transition from silent to sound cinema was the French filmmaker Abel Gance. In the silent era, Gance had proven himself to be as great a cineaste as the other legendary pioneers of cinema, D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, through a series of groundbreaking masterpieces that included J’accuse! (1919), La Roue (1923) and Napoléon (1927). It was the latter film that was to earn Gance particular acclaim and lasting recognition as one of the architects of cinema art, a five hour visionary epic that presented the early career of Napoléon Bonaparte with a visual artistry and panache that is, to this day, virtually unrivalled. As he struggled to make much of an impact with his sound films, it was inevitable that Gance would return to his earlier great achievement and give it a voice. His sound version of Napoléon would prove to be both a monumental piece of cinema in its own right and a terribly prescient foretaste of the cataclysmic events that would soon overtake Europe in the mid-to-late 1930s.

It must be remembered that Gance was not only an auteur of the first rank, he was also a talented and driven experimentalist. He was not content merely to add recorded dialogue to his original film (which he does brilliantly, the near-perfect lip synchronisation made possible by his insistence that his actors spoke all their dialogue in the silent version). He also added some sophisticated sound effects (which match the intensity and frenzy of the visual images) and pioneered an early form of stereophonic sound for this film. In addition, Gance undertook a complete re-edit, restructuring the film and including additional filmed sequences in an attempt to present a more complete account of the life of Napoléon.

Originally, when he embarked on his silent masterpiece, Gance had intended to make a series of films which told the complete story of France’s greatest military commander. The production cost of Napoléon proved to be far in excess of what Gance had anticipated and so he was prevented from carrying out his great ambition. The silent version of Napoléon was concerned only with Bonaparte’s childhood and early military career, ending with his victory at Montenotte in 1796 during his Italian campaign. The sound version, which is some three hours shorter in length, covers the same ground but also crams in (with the somewhat unsatisfactory device of a slide show) the edited highlights of Napoléon’s subsequent military and political career. Throughout, it is evident that Gance is far less concerned with historical accuracy than in portraying Bonaparte as a national hero, a Messianic force behind which the French nation could unit at a time of political and economic crisis. Gance’s attempts to crown a man who is now widely considered a monomanical tyrant with a Christ-like halo of sanctity are almost as distasteful today as D.W. Griffith’s apparent support of white supremacism in Birth of a Nation (1916), but this does not diminish for one moment the director’s immense artistic achievement, nor the obvious sincerity that underpins his art.

Whilst the sound version of Napoléon is every bit as visually stunning as the silent version (and retains, almost intact, some of the most jaw-dropping sequences from that film, including the extraordinarily ambitious battle sequences), it is far more of a political statement than a pure celebration of a great historic figure. Like many filmmakers and writers of his time, Abel Gance was deeply preoccupied with France’s immediate political woes and feared for the worst. As a weak French government failed to come to grips with the economic problems of the day, the country faced a real threat from Fascism both within and outside its borders. In a similar vein to Jean Renoir’s subsequent La Marseillaise (1938), Napoléon Bonaparte was intended as an appeal for national unity at a time when France was in danger of losing both her identity and the long-cherished freedoms that derived from the Revolution. Rousing bursts of the hymne nationale and intermittent incursions by symbols of French nationalism – the Tricouleur, the imperial eagle and the spirit of France – are there simply to ignite the fires of patriotism in the heart of every French man and woman who saw the film. Could Gance have known that, in doing so, he may have been serving the interests of the ultra-right?

Napoléon’s return to Paris at the end of the film is highly symbolic, but it is particularly interesting that Gance should avoid showing us Bonaparte in the flesh. All we see is the ecstatic reaction of ordinary French people and the shadow of the returned Emperor passing along a wall. There is no reference to Napoléon’s subsequent defeat at the hands of the English – the film ends at a moment of triumphant anticipation, with France holding her destiny in her own hands. Unfortunately, watching the film today it seems to be tragically portentous. The implacable silhouette of Napoleón on horseback leading his vast armies from one victory to another, subduing whole swathes of Europe through insuperable military might, now evokes the indomitable spectre of the Wehrmacht. Perhaps the deepest irony is the film’s representation of Napoléon by an eagle, the symbol of the French Empire that Bonaparte created. As luck would have it, the eagle was also chosen by the Nazi party to symbolise the military ambitions of Germany, and so when we see the proud, hungry eagle swooping across the screen at the climax of the film we are left with a very different impression to the one that Gance intended.

© James Travers 2011

1.55GB | 2h 07m | 720×540 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/2E0A54AB89557EE/Napoleon_(1935).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/D01A37DAC694F42/Intro_Napoleon_(1935).mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:None

The post Abel Gance – Napoléon Bonaparte (1935) first appeared on Cinema of the World.