Napoléon, French Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (“Napoleon as Seen by Abel Gance”), French epic silent film, released in 1927, that recounted the life of the French general Napoléon Bonaparte, tracing his early years through his invasion of Italy in 1796. It was intended to be the first of several films about the French emperor, but no subsequent movies came to fruition.
The film begins with Napoléon as a child at the military college at Brienne where, in a sign of his future military genius, he leads his classmates to victory in a snowball fight. As an adult, Napoléon (played by Albert Dieudonné) is imprisoned by the revolutionary leader Robespierre (Edmond Van Daële) during the Reign of Terror. After Robespierre’s fall in 1794, Napoléon is released from prison and subsequently marries the beautiful widow Joséphine (Gina Manès) and is appointed the commander of the French army in Italy.
French director Abel Gance was a true pioneer in filmmaking, and the final sequence of his big-budget epic was shot in a unique filming process known as a triptych, an early precursor to today’s IMAX that required shooting with three synchronized cameras. This allowed the right and left portions of the screen to at times present different images from what was being shown in the centre of the screen. At other times, the images blended back into one. When Napoléon was released, however, few theatres were willing to invest substantial sums in the equipment needed to project the film. Gance recut a sound version of the movie in 1934, and the film was reedited into countless other versions. His original cut had been presumed lost forever until British film historian Kevin Brownlow, with financial support from American director Francis Ford Coppola, found the footage and in 1980 launched a major restoration of the film with a triumphant new score by Coppola’s father, Carmine. In 2000 Brownlow presented a further restoration that added 35 minutes of newly discovered footage.