Još malo o izgubljenoj slavi nijemog filma. Gance je vjerovao da će film postati univerzalni ljudski jezik, učiniti ratove nemogućima jer će toliko profiniti ljudske duše.
Dueling Revolutions by Jon Boorstin
While the best silent performers showed beautiful restraint, their audiences were more tolerant of the emotional hard sell. Like practitioners of modern sign language, actors often telegraphed their feelings so effectively that watching serious silents, modern audiences run the risk of overdosing. But at their best, silent films reveal a new world of feeling. Without the distraction of talk, moments slow down so the audience can savor the flux of expressions, what a modern movie writer would call pure subtext. Without synchronous sounds to knit together images the audience becomes more sensitive to their expressive content. Motion becomes emotion — horses hooves, raging ocean, dancing, fighting become their subtext just as talk scenes did. Vast tableaux, wordless, had the power to awe. Dominated by dialogue, sound film pushes the story balance away from pure emotion and toward exposition. Now instead of being over-acted, stories are over-explained. The unique power of images to tap emotion is often forgotten.
Gance
put that pure emotional power in the service of a big idea. When the
ghost of Robespierre tells Napoleon, “We have realized that the
Revolution cannot prosper without a strong authority. Will you be that
leader?” “Yes!” answers Napoleon, and Gance has brought the audience to a
point where they flood with gratitude. Napoleon will save the
Revolution! Gance built his movie from moments that force an audience to
feel, cast with faces that magnify those feelings. He drew performances
of eerily credible intensity, balancing epic and intimate, action and
tableau in a mesmerizing blend. When critic Charles Champlin saw Napoleon the last time it was shown in this country, 30 years ago, he said it was “the measure of all other films, forever.”Napoleon is not available on DVD and is hard to find on the web. With a handful of brief clips I will attempt to give you its essence, a glimpse of the vanished glory of silent film. Imagine these small images 20 feet high. Nitrate film stock was made from cellulose, and light-sensitive emulsion from silver suspended in albumen. The egg bound tight with the wood: Rich silver shadows leapt across the screen. Music wedded with picture like film stock to emulsion, providing solid structure for the images, as much an indivisible experience as image and soundtrack today. King Vidor, who directed some fine ones, said that music is more than half the experience of a so-called silent film. (Music in these clips is by Carl Davis for modern exhibition.)
To make his audience feel Napoleon’s unique greatness, the essential qualities that make Napoleon the one man to save France in her moment of supreme peril, Gance begins with a snowball fight. Napoleon is a young cadet defending a snow fort, “twenty against sixty” the title card tells us. A born commander, coolly calculating strategy, bravely attacking the rock-throwing bully, expertly deploying his troops, Napoleon resolutely provides his fellow cadets the will to win. Gance tells his story with tension and humor (capturing combat action with a specially designed camera strapped to the cameraman’s chest), but at the climax, in an extraordinary sequence, dense with a blizzard of images, he abandons narrative to push his audience inside young Napoleon’s head.
Napoleon is depicted as a “proud, fierce child, who lives in a kind of savage isolation,” disliked by masters and pupils alike, punished for writing his thoughts at bedtime: “I am very unhappy here,” he writes. “I force myself to be patient. Who knows? The destiny of an empire often hangs upon a single man.” When his barracks mates release his pet eagle, he takes them all on in an epic pillowfight, captured in nine scenes shown simultaneously (and in those days before internegatives, all captured on the same piece of film). Unrepentant, he is banished to sleep on a cold cannon. But his eagle returns! In recounting this, it almost sounds like parody. Describing Gance’s story is like describing a dream; without the emotional glue of the actual experience, it sounds arbitrary, overwrought and more than a little absurd.
Gance jumps ahead nine years, to the words “Death to Tyrants” carved on the hairy chest of a rebel Montagnard standing guard at the headquarters of the Revolution, at the moment the Revolution finds its voice, the very first singing of Liberty’s grand anthem La Marseillaise. Gance steeps his audience in massed revolutionary fervor, and at the height of the frenzy reveals the penniless Lieutenant Napoleon for the first time, detached, intensely observant, congratulating the author for a hymn that will “save many a cannon.”
Napoleon, fiercely committed to the cause, carries the Revolution to his native Corsica. But its government is in the grip of English interests, and a price is put upon his head. Betrayed by his countrymen, he’s chased on horseback by English troops across the island, and leaps aboard an empty skiff, dodging bullets, using for his sail a giant flag of the Republic. Meanwhile, in Paris, the Montagnards turn against their allies the Girondins at the Convention, launching the Reign of Terror, and the Revolution commences to eat its own.
Gance wanted to force upon his audience the contrast between Napoleon’s single-minded steadiness of purpose and the violence and volatility of the Revolution. He found his inspiration in Victor Hugo:
To be a member of the Convention is to be a wave of the ocean. There was a Will of the Convention which was that of all yet not that of any one person. This Will was an Idea, an idea indomitable and immeasurable, which swept from the summit of Heaven into the darkness below. We call this Revolution. When that idea passed, it beat down one and raised up another; it scattered this man into foam and dashed that one upon the rocks.
Gance decided that Napoleon would fight a hurricane single-handedly while the political maelstrom engulfed the Convention.
Gance filmed the crowds from special pendulums devised for the purpose, and pulverized poor Dieudonné, who played Napoleon, with thousands of gallons of frigid water. The result is one of the great montages in the movies. (The merciless trio at the eye of the Assembly storm are Danton, Robespierre, and Marat; Marat is played by Antonin Artaud).the sky is lit up with lightning flashes. The tumultuous Assembly rising and falling in a terrifying swell, streaked with flashes of the guillotine blade, a head falling with each flash. WORDS CAN NO LONGER DESCRIBE THE PARALLELS. Who can try to explain music in words? Indescribable, double storm. INNER DYNAMISM. Suggestion rather than evocation.
The real Napoleon fled Corsica, but not in a hurricane clutching the flag of France. Gance wanted less historical specificity, than, as he put it, to enter “the temple of the arts through the vast portal of history.”
Gance’s model for Napoleon by Antoine-Jean Gros (1796)
Still, his 600-page screenplay’s bibliography cited 80 works and 250
volumes; it was supported by a reference library of 3,000 pictures. He
filmed in the actual locations on Corsica and elsewhere, he used
Napoleon’s actual words in the title cards, and labeled the cards of
actual events “(Historical).” This passion for accuracy grounds his
expressive flights, seducing the audience into suspending critical
judgment, yet ultimately Gance regretted what he called his “abuse of
documentation.” He felt that he lost emotional impact when he forced his
narrative to hue to facts.
Napoleon is finally given his chance at command when the generals,
fearing failure, put him in charge of retaking the port of Toulon. He
leads a bloody assault in torrential rain. Gance had fought in the First
World War, and he had no illusions about the glories of battle. He has
Napoleon, after his victory, a solitary figure, contemplate the
battlefield. The audience isn’t so much watching the devastation as
watching Napoleon watch it. Gance uses the audience’s horror to ennoble
Napoleon’s mourning the dead.
Napoleon’s infatuation isn’t simple. Josephine is shown to be just as taken with her lover Barras, and Napoleon chooses to ignore it. As he says playing blind man’s bluff, “In love, my dear Josephine, one should not see more clearly than this.” Her dual allegiance, in turn, gives Napoleon his heart’s desire: as a favor to Barras, who wants to be rid of her, she agrees to marry Napoleon “on condition he appoints him commander of the Army of Italy.” They wed, although immersed in planning strategy, he’s five hours late to the ceremony. A night of passion, and he’s off to join his command at the Italian border. First he must stop at the Convention “to acquire new strength” within its walls. In Gance’s favorite scene, the martyrs of the Revolution appear, and entreat Napoleon to save their cause (Gance himself portrays the earringed Saint-Just). This is the scene, almost five hours into the movie, that had us cheering in Oakland when Napoleon took the torch.
Gance as Saint-Just
Now Napoleon must transform an ill-provisioned, demoralized rabble
into the Grand Army of the Revolution. The generals have no desire to
help him in this task. “Imagine imposing on us this little upstart of a
Bonaparte, this back-alley general,” says Augereau; Masséna and the rest
agree. They don their bicornes and show their backs to Napoleon. In the
next clip, Napoleon conquers them in a game of hats all the stronger,
Gance would maintain, for being purely visual, sheer clash of character. 
The resolute Napoleon gallops in review across all three screens; the ragged men hoist their hats atop their bayonets and cheer. “That night, for the first time, the army slept confidently.” Then, as the title card tells us, “On the morning of April 11, 1796, this ragtag crowd would awake with the spirit of the Grand Army.” Napoleon rings the change, filling the center screen, blank screens honoring him on either side; facing him, the army ranges across the three in a vast panorama.
This moment is magnified by the triple
screens, but it’s magnified more by the emotional investment in
Napoleon’s struggles leading up to it. Seeing it here, small and
isolated, I have trouble believing the power it held after five and a
quarter hours in the theater, but it did, and it propelled me through 10
minutes of marching and cannons and assault.
Then, “April 16, 1796, having outstripped his entire staff,” the title cards tell us, and Napoleon stands “alone on the heights of Montezemolo, at an altitude of 2,700 feet.” There, his “soul soaring on a fantastic dream,” he “plays with the clouds at destroying and building worlds.” In his script, Gance describes the moment:
The broad panorama will now give way to separate action on each of the three screens, making possible extraordinary juxtapositions of images. Every symbol becomes palpable. The cinema enters a new era; from the melodic, it becomes the symphonic. The orchestration of the images on three screens will render tangible the symphonic rhythm of the overture to this Iliad: the Marseillaise of the image.
Napoloeon's final fantastic dream (center screen of three).
Gance spent three years making Napoleon. Before it premiered, in December of 1925, a film appeared that took only three months to make, rushed out for the 20th anniversary of a failed revolution to please the victors in a triumphant one, Battleship Potemkin, directed
by Sergei Eisenstein. “There is no story to this film,” a critic said of Eisenstein’s movie, “or no leading actors. If you weren’t told that it was staged, you’d swear it was a prehistoric newsreel.” The clip below shows the pivotal moment. Sailors in the Tsar’s navy have refused to eat rotten meat. The Captain orders the insubordinates covered with a tarpaulin and shot. (Music composed by Edmund Meisel and supervised by the director.)
Battleship Potemkin feels modern because it’s constructed in our own language of cuts. D.W. Griffith, the maestro of the last minute rescue, had established a basic syntax 10 years before, but Eisenstein took film grammar to another level. Battleship Potemkin is less than half as long as Griffith’s masterpiece Birth of a Nation and has twice as many shots. Camera angles and editing rhythm build suspense and drive the story. Eisenstein said it was “montage as collision of independent shots — shots even opposite of one another … A series of explosions of an internal combustion engine which propel the machine forward.”
Watching
a movie we experience every moment twice, from our own point of view
and from the character’s. We judge the characters even as we lose
ourselves in them. This dance drives the movie forward. Eisenstein
intensifies the tension by choosing shots that force us to feel, then
juxtaposing them with faces, so we see them through his characters’
eyes. Gance, by comparison, plays Napoleon’s game of hats almost
entirely in a few static wide shots. When Gance uses flurries of shots
to exploit the tension between the audience’s point of view and his
character, he’s not pushing the story forward, he’s pushing the audience
inside his character’s head. Gance’s climactic moment, his Marseillaise of the image, is a wildly ambitious attempt to plumb Napoleon’s soul.Today Gance’s style seems almost abstract, as LaSalle said, like seeing the world on drugs, an alien vision, but as intense and emotionally valid as our own. As biographers James Welsh and Steven Kramer put it, “Abel Gance is the epitome of what the cinema might have become, but never did.” Battleship Potemkin on the other hand set the worldwide standard for story-telling. Charlie Chaplin called it the “best film in the world,” Douglas Fairbanks “the most intense and profoundest experience of my life,” and another critic “unparalleled for its elemental force by anything in the field of art, with the single exception of the Marseillaise.”
Yet Napoleon is closer than Battleship Potemkin to modern films in perhaps the most important way: Napoleon is built upon a character. Even if the film were less impressive, Napoleon the man would carry it, as Margaret Thatcher carries The Iron Lady or Idi Amin The Last King of Scotland. When Vakulinchuk ignites rebellion in Battleship Potemkin he is not its charismatic core, he’s the spark in the tinderbox. Eisenstein focuses the scene on the hesitant marines, and five minutes later Vakulinchuk is shot dead. Eisenstein doesn’t feature a central hero because the film’s theme, as Eisenstein puts it, is “the human urge to mass collective action.” Eisenstein makes me feel through his characters but doesn’t let me think it’s anyone’s particular story. His hero is the revolution. To make a movie where the hero is mass collective action requires a miracle of balance, pace, and structure. Potemkin had to be a masterpiece to work.
What ignites both Napoleon and Battleship Potemkin is something we seem to have lost, a burning faith in revolution. Not just change, but radical transformation, unlocking the human spirit. What drives great change? Napoleon makes an overpowering case for our fundamental need for leaders. Battleship Potemkin is just as convincing that revolution comes from below. Which is the truth? We don’t expect a movie to give us the answer to such a central conundrum of history.
But Gance and Eisenstein did. They believed in the transformative power of movies. “I don’t believe in the kino-eye,” Eisenstein wrote, “I believe in the kino-fist.” Gance thought cinema would become the universal human language, would make war impossible by instilling the finest qualities of the human spirit. As Gance put it:
This is gone forever.For me, the cinema is not just pictures. It is something great, mysterious and sublime, for which one should not spare any effort, and for which one should not fail to risk one’s life if the need arises.
SOURCES
VideoThe version of Napoleon screened in Oakland is not available on video. Earlier versions are also hard to find. The version I used for my clips is Abel Gance’s Napoleon, written, directed, and edited by Abel Gance, reconstructed by Kevin Brownlow, music arranged, composed, and conducted by Carl Davis. Video presentation produced by David Gill and Kevin Brownlow for the National Film Archive, Thames Television Production for Channel 4, 1983. Total running time an abbreviated 3:55.
Battleship Potemkin (1925) directed by Sergei Eisenstein, music by Edmund Meisel (1926). Kino Classic two disc special Edition. Beautifully restored by Enno Patalas with Ann Bohn, with original Eisenstein-supervised score and Russian titles. Includes Tracing Battleship Potemkin, a documentary on making and restoring the film.
King Vidor reference from Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s superb series Hollywood, a celebration of the American silent film, for Thames Television, 1980. Alas, not available on video.
BOOKS
Napoleon, Abel Gance’s Classic Film, Kevin Brownlow, Knopf, New York 1983. Fine book on the making and restoration of Napoleon.
Napoléon, as seen by Abel Gance, Abel Gance, translated by Moya Hassan with an introduction by Kevin Brownlow. Faber and Faber, London 1990. Gance’s script.
Abel Gance, Steven Kramer and James Welsh, Twayne, Boston 1978, cited by Brownlow, 1983.
Eisenstein by Yon Barna, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1973
The Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, translated from the Russian by Gillon R. Aitken, introduction Andrew Sinclair. Lorrimer Publishing, London 1968. Eisenstein’s script and analysis of the film.
Eisenstein’s Potemkin, a Shot-by Shot Presentation, David Mayer, Da Capo Press, New York 1972
Sergei M. Eisenstein, the definitive biography by Marie Seton, Grove Press, New York 1960.
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