Hacker Cinema
Napoleon
Napoléon
1927 · Film · 425 min
Directed by Abel Gance
A biopic of former Emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, tracing the Corsican's career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign) to his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political storm) and the Terror, culminating in his triumphant 1797 invasion of Italy.
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7 comments on Hacker News
D.W. Griffith - The Birth of a Nation (1915) The film led to the revival of the KKK
Abel Gance - Napoleon (1927) 562 Minute epos
Buster Keaton - The General (1926) as many have already pointed out
Robert Siodmak - People on Sunday (1930) Captivating images of Berlin pre war
The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe (1897-1902) - Collection of Mutograph (68mm non perforated) films https://player.eyefilm.nl/nl/films/the-brilliant-biograph
I continue to hold out hope some insane billionaire will fund the production of the other two parts(!) of Gance’s Napoleon.
As black and white silent epics shot and edited on film with only practical effects, naturally. :-)
Able Gance’s 7 hour epic Napoleon (1927) employed split screen projection, superimposition, location shooting, super-close up…. All unheard of at the time. But the advantage he had was that cinema was not yet ‘invented’. That would not happen till Hollywood streamlined production and (importantly) consumption. This was effectively Fords assembly-line ethos applied to art. In contrast, Gance believed cinema has the same potential for depth as literature.
Coppola has always had a desire to re-invent cinema. He tried and failed with the digital production techniques of ‘One From the Heart’, though much of what he introduced presaged techniques that are common nowadays.
With Megopolis he seems to be trying to re-invent the form. I believe that is a folly. The form of Cinema is now pretty much fixed in stone. Reinventing it would likely be as successful as reinventing the chair. You might produce something that ‘works’. But people would be unlikely to accept it.
"A bunch of movies" you say. If you want to talk insane ambition and vision, technically groundbreaking and giant scale filmmaking that was so far ahead of its time it took decades to be recognised, Abel Gance's 1927 Napoleon fits the bill nicely.
Abel Gance gave us his Napoléon in 1927. About five and a half hours, and originally envisioned as the first of a trilogy—that 5.5 hours only covers his early life and career!
It's awesome, and I hold out faint hope that some rich Hollywood film nerd will finish the trilogy, silent and in black and white.
And the Napoleon snowball fight is in the 1927 film [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napol%C3%A9on_(1927_film)
A little off-topic but if you want to give silent cinema a go try Abel Gance's Napoleon. It is a 5 hour epic and incredible technical achievement. Some of the tricks in its bag (like the 3 screen finale) haven't ever been attempted since (as far as I know).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6504eRh5h6M