by Abel Gance
Gance's colossal biography of Bonaparte from schoolyard snowball fight to the Italian campaign — cameras strapped to horses, swung on pendulums, and thrown like snowballs, ending in Polyvision: three projectors opening the screen into a triptych. The most technically audacious film of the silent era, premiered at the Paris Opéra two years before the talkies made its inventions orphans.
“The destiny of an empire often rests upon a single man.”
Winter at the Brienne military school, 1783. The first Napoleon the film shows is not an emperor or a general or even an officer — he is a Corsican scholarship boy with an accent, no friends, and an instinct for turning disadvantage into geometry. The schoolboys divide for a snowball fight. Commanding the smaller side, the child studies the ground, concentrates his fire, and takes the enemy position; when the older boys start packing stones into their snowballs, the game shows the blood underneath its pageantry. Victory does not make him belong. It makes his difference visible.
The scene's real protagonist is the camera. It runs beside the boys, spins, plunges, takes hits from the missiles it records; Gance had a camera sealed in padding and thrown back and forth like a projectile.
“The camera becomes a snowball.”
The dormitory pillow fight that follows goes further: as the feathers fly, the frame splits into four, then nine simultaneous compartments — masks and rewound film, every exposure built inside the camera. Before the film tells you what its hero will do, it teaches you how it wants cinema to feel: fast, physical, excessive, and convinced that technique can manufacture destiny.
In 1923 Gance proposed a cycle of six films that would carry Bonaparte from school to the grave at Saint Helena. The first installment was meant to be an ordinary feature. Instead the screenplay grew, the shoot ran from January 1925 to September 1926, and the production exposed some 400,000 meters of negative — roughly 290 hours of film — while covering only the opening chapter of the life. Gance spent the resources of six movies making the first one.
What the surviving epic actually covers:
There is no Egypt, no coup, no coronation, no Austerlitz, no Moscow, no Waterloo, no exile.
That incompleteness shapes the film's politics. Gance never has to show the revolutionary general becoming an autocrat, or glory collapsing into catastrophe. The story stops at the exact moment when possibility is widest and every consequence still belongs to prophecy.
At the Club des Cordeliers, Danton roars, Robespierre watches, and Marat — Antonin Artaud, gaunt and already half-consumed — burns through the film's middle passages. Rouget de Lisle arrives with a new song. Making the first performance of La Marseillaise the climax of a silent sequence is typical of Gance's nerve: the audience cannot hear a note, yet the cutting moves the anthem from mouth to mouth through the hall until the crowd becomes a chorus. Editing organizes breath. Napoleon stands at the edge of the room, observing the energy he will learn to command.
Gance threads fictional witnesses through the history: Tristan Fleuri, a Brienne kitchen servant carried through successive regimes as France's everyman, and his daughter Violine, whose devotion to Bonaparte turns her into an allegory of the nation itself. When Charlotte Corday kills Marat in his bath, Gance composes the aftermath as Jacques-Louis David's painting made flesh. History reaches us through earlier images, and Gance makes the inheritance spectacular. A year later Artaud sat on the other side of a tribunal, as the sympathetic monk Massieu in The Passion of Joan of Arc — produced by the same Société Générale des Films.
The crowd, in Gance's double vision, can create a nation or consume a person. The same mass that learns a song can demand a head.
Fleeing Corsica in an open boat, Napoleon rides out a storm using a tricolor as his sail — an image too perfect to be history, and not meant as any. Far away in Paris, the Convention descends into purges. Gance cross-cuts sea and assembly until they become one weather system: to film it, he hung a camera from a giant pendulum and swung it over more than a thousand extras, so the parliament pitches and rolls like a deck.
The sequence is the film's central argument compressed into a metaphor. History, for Gance, is not a chain of causes but a climate of force — and Napoleon matters because he is the one figure who stays vertical while everything else pitches.
At Toulon in 1793, the schoolyard strategist becomes a general. Gance plays command as concentration: while other officers bluster and panic, Dieudonné's Napoleon stares at the harbor until its pattern gives way. The night assault is filmed in rain, mud, and blast light, and the shoot was nearly as dangerous as the battle — an accidental explosion injured crew members and temporarily blinded Gance himself.
Then the Terror, staged as administration. Prison dossiers decide who reaches the guillotine; Fleuri and the clerk La Bussière save lives by eating the files. Joséphine and Napoleon both pass through the cells.
In October 1795 the film reaches 13 Vendémiaire, and its darkest turn arrives almost without comment: the artillery genius who drove the British from Toulon now turns his cannon on royalist crowds in the streets of Paris. The myth barely slows down. For admirers, this is order rescued from chaos; for skeptical viewers, it is the moment revolutionary energy begins to authorize military power. Gance's exhilaration and the film's authoritarian temptation occupy the same images.
Gance had already made J'accuse (1919), summoning real soldiers — many soon to die — to play the war's accusing dead, and La Roue (1923), whose rapid cutting the whole European avant-garde studied. For Napoléon he resolved that the camera should stop observing and start participating. The production strapped motorized cameras to operators' chests and mounted them on sleds, rails, cars, pendulums, and a horse; one was sealed in a waterproof box and hurled into the Mediterranean.
“Make the spectator an actor: mingle him with the action, carry him away in the rhythm of the images.”
That sentence is the key to the whole machine: every rig existed to abolish the spectator's safe distance. Some of the experiments proved impractical; others became ordinary film grammar decades later, from handheld combat photography to the split screen.
Napoleon takes command of the Army of Italy and finds it unpaid, starving, and mutinous. He promises movement, victory, history. And as the campaign begins, the ordinary frame can no longer hold what Gance wants the audience to feel — so the curtains draw back and the image opens into three screens.
Polyvision, as the process was later named, ran three synchronized projectors side by side across a field roughly four times wider than it was tall. Sometimes the panels fuse into one panorama; sometimes they carry three different images — armies flanking Bonaparte's face, a horizontal montage too large for any single rectangle. At the climax the three panels are washed blue, white, and red, and the auditorium becomes a moving French flag.
Nothing in commercial cinema would attempt the scale again for a quarter of a century, and when widescreen did arrive, CinemaScope squeezed its image onto a single strip — a different, tamer idea. Gance's triptych had no successor; multi-screen projection waited for Cinerama and the world's fairs.
Then it stops.
The finale compresses everything Gance could not afford to film — Joséphine, maps, eagles, campaigns, an empire — into simultaneous prophecy. Polyvision is the ghost of the five unmade films.
The full title is unusually honest: Napoléon vu par Abel Gance — Napoleon as seen by Abel Gance. The broad chronology from Brienne through Corsica, Toulon, prison, Vendémiaire, and the Italian command is recognizable history. Almost everything binding it together is not. Napoleon was not present at the first singing of La Marseillaise; the tricolor sail belongs to legend; the ever-present eagle is pure emblem; Fleuri and Violine never existed.
Gance works the way David worked: the propaganda portrait of the rearing charger over the truthful mule. The film quotes paintings, engravings, and schoolbook legends and never pretends otherwise — cultural memory, not eyewitness neutrality, is its actual subject.
Which leaves the politics. Made in a 1920s Europe fascinated by mass movements and charismatic leadership, the film presents one exceptional man as the answer whenever collective politics becomes frightening. Its form and its story pull in opposite directions: the camera democratizes sensation, diving into crowds with unprecedented freedom, while the narrative channels all that collective force upward into a single heroic body. Form disperses power; story centralizes it.
That tension is a reason to watch the film, not an embarrassment to edit out of it.
There is no useful answer to "how long is Napoléon?" without naming an edition. Gance himself cut different versions for different occasions, distributors recut those, and the footage then scattered across half a century of archives — the film entered the world as a family of versions, never a single stable object.
The music multiplies the versions again. Honegger scored the 1927 premiere while Gance was still recutting the film under him; Carl Davis built and kept expanding a symphonic score across four decades of Brownlow's editions; Carmine Coppola wrote for his son's roadshow; and for the 2024 restoration Simon Cloquet-Lafollye assembled a musical construction some 1,500 pages long, performed by the orchestras and choir of Radio France.
A runtime without an edition name, in other words, is not information.
Kevin Brownlow found the film as an English schoolboy in the 1950s, when two reels of a cut-down 9.5 mm print turned up in a street market. Reassembling the rest took him the better part of a lifetime — hunting fragments across archives and attics, comparing variants shot by shot, through successive editions with Photoplay and the BFI.
The revival became public in stages: a triptych screening at Telluride in 1979 with Gance, nearly ninety, in attendance; the triumphant London premiere of the Brownlow restoration with Carl Davis conducting in 1980; and Francis Ford Coppola's roadshow edition at Radio City Music Hall in 1981, which turned a lost film into an event and sent it on tour across America.
Gance died that November, having lived just long enough to watch the world rediscover him.
The Cinémathèque française then spent sixteen years on the fullest reconstruction yet: a team under Georges Mourier examined nearly a hundred kilometers of surviving film, guided by Gance's editing notes and his correspondence with editor Marguerite Beaugé, to rebuild the Grande Version. The result — about seven hours, with the triptych finale restored — opened Cannes Classics in May 2024 and premiered complete at La Seine Musicale that July, with Radio France's forces performing Simon Cloquet-Lafollye's score; Potemkine brought it to French home video in November 2025.
Nearly a hundred years on, this is a work whose definitive form arrived within living memory of no one who saw it first.
1923
Gance proposes a cycle of six Napoleon films, from Brienne to Saint Helena. Only the first will ever be made.
January 1925
Shooting begins at the Billancourt studios; it will run twenty months and expose some 400,000 meters of film.
August 1926
The three-camera material for the Polyvision finale is shot.
7 April 1927
The four-hour Opéra version premieres at the Palais Garnier with the triptychs and Arthur Honegger's music.
May 1927
The far longer 'Grande Version' is shown to trade audiences at the Théâtre Apollo — the assembly whose reconstruction would take a century.
1929
MGM releases an American version cut to roughly a hundred minutes, without the triptych. Reviews judge a film Gance never made.
1935
Gance reworks the material as a sound film, Napoléon Bonaparte.
1950s
A teenage Kevin Brownlow buys two 9.5 mm reels in a London street market and starts asking what the rest of the film looked like.
1979
A full triptych screening at the Telluride Film Festival, with Gance — nearly ninety — in attendance.
1980
Brownlow's five-hour restoration triumphs in London with Carl Davis conducting his new score live.
1981
Coppola's roadshow edition, scored by his father Carmine, fills Radio City Music Hall and tours America's picture palaces. Gance dies in November, rediscovered.
2000–16
The Brownlow/Photoplay/BFI restoration grows to five hours thirty-two minutes; the BFI's 2016 digital restoration brings it to disc at last.
May 2024
The Cinémathèque française's sixteen-year reconstruction of the Grande Version — seven hours, under Georges Mourier — opens Cannes Classics.
July 2024
The complete two-part version premieres at La Seine Musicale, with Radio France performing Simon Cloquet-Lafollye's score.
November 2025
Potemkine releases the Grande Version on French home video — the closest thing to a definitive edition the film has ever had.
Abel Gance's silent epic follows Napoleon Bonaparte from military school at Brienne through the French Revolution, Corsica, the siege of Toulon, the Terror, his marriage to Joséphine, and his taking command of the Army of Italy in 1796. It covers only his rise — there is no empire, no Waterloo, and no exile.
It depends entirely on the version. The 1929 American cut ran about 100 minutes; the Brownlow/BFI restoration runs 5 hours 32 minutes; the Cinémathèque française's 2024 reconstruction runs about 7 hours in two parts. Historical 1927 running times vary further because silent films were projected at different speeds.
Not one you can watch. The very long 'Grande Version' shown to trade audiences at the Apollo in May 1927 is often reported as nine hours or more, but the surviving evidence does not translate into a modern nine-hour cut. The 2024 reconstruction derived from it runs about seven hours at 18 frames per second.
Gance's three-screen process: three synchronized projectors throw three strips of film side by side, sometimes fusing into one wide panorama, sometimes carrying three separate images as a horizontal montage. It appears in the film's finale, which ends with the three panels tinted blue, white, and red.
It is one of the earliest and most radical widescreen experiments, though 'first' depends on definition. Polyvision differs from later formats like CinemaScope because it needs three cameras and three projectors, and because its panels can act independently rather than only forming one panorama.
Always in performance. Arthur Honegger scored the 1927 premiere; Carl Davis wrote the monumental score attached to the Brownlow restorations; Carmine Coppola scored the 1981 American roadshow; and Simon Cloquet-Lafollye assembled the music for the 2024 seven-hour version, performed by Radio France. The score you hear is part of which version you are watching.
The broad chronology is real; the connective tissue is myth. Gance compresses events, invents characters (Fleuri, Violine), stages symbolic scenes like the tricolor sail, and puts Napoleon where he never was, including the first singing of La Marseillaise. The title says it plainly: this is Napoleon as seen by Abel Gance.
Albert Dieudonné plays the adult Napoleon — a role that consumed his public identity for the rest of his life — and Vladimir Roudenko plays him as a boy at Brienne. Gina Manès is Joséphine, Antonin Artaud is Marat, and Gance himself appears as Saint-Just.
No. This page covers Abel Gance's silent epic, premiered in Paris in 1927. Ridley Scott's Napoleon (2023), with Joaquin Phoenix as Bonaparte, is a separate, unrelated production. Gance's film also stops much earlier in the life: it ends with the Italian campaign of 1796, before the coronation and the wars Scott's film stages.
Before his theoretical writing made him famous, Artaud worked steadily as a screen actor. His gaunt, feverish Marat — composed after David's Death of Marat — is one of the film's most striking presences, and one of two great roles he played in 1927–28; the other is the young monk Massieu in The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Napoléon was planned as the first of six films covering the whole life, and the first production consumed the money and material intended for the entire cycle. Gance ends at the Italian campaign of 1796 and compresses the unfilmed future — empire, decline, exile — into the Polyvision finale as prophecy.
The 1927 film is public domain in the United States, where copyright in works published in 1927 expired at the start of 2023. That does not free the modern restorations, their scores, or their subtitle translations, which carry their own rights — and the film remains under copyright in France, where terms run from Gance's death in 1981.
The Brownlow–Davis restoration is distributed by the BFI on disc and on BFI Player in supported territories. The 2024 Grande Version was released on UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD in France by Potemkine in November 2025 — check subtitle options before importing. Treat unlabeled 'full movie' uploads with suspicion: most are mutilated cuts or unauthorized copies of restored editions.
For English speakers at home, the Brownlow/BFI edition with Carl Davis's score is the accessible landmark. The 2024 Cinémathèque reconstruction is the fullest version that exists and the one to see when it is legally available with subtitles you can read. A live-orchestra triptych screening, if one ever passes within reach, outranks both.
It is unmistakably heroic and national-mythic: Napoleon appears as the exceptional man who masters revolutionary chaos, and the film never shows the cost of where that mastery led. It also contains some of cinema's most extraordinary images of collective energy. Neither 'propaganda' nor 'innocent' quite covers it — the tension between the two is what keeps the film alive.
Napoleon — BFI restoration trailer
Napoléon — bande-annonce officielle (Pathé, 2024)
Reconstructed by
The Cinémathèque française's full reconstruction and restoration of Napoléon — directed by Georges Mourier with the CNC's support — the modern successor to the Epstein–Langlois Museum Copy, presented as a complete seven-hour version in 2026.
Reconstructed by · 1953–1959
With Marie Epstein, Langlois built the Cinémathèque française's 19-reel “Museum Copy” of Napoléon between 1953 and 1959, the archive's first reference reconstruction of Gance's fragmented film.
Reconstructed by · 1953–1959
From 1953, Marie Epstein and Henri Langlois established a 19-reel version of the 1927 film at the Cinémathèque française — the “Museum Copy” — and worked to perfect it until 1959. It became the reference reconstruction later restorations built on.
Cast · 1927
Albert Dieudonné plays Napoléon Bonaparte.
