Abel Gance's 'Napoléon' to be shown in LA for Bastille Day
To mark Bastille Day, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will screen Abel Gance's legendary 1927 epic "Napoléon," which has rarely been shown publicly since its 1981 restoration by film historian Kevin Brownlow, complete with tinted sequences, and presented by Francis Ford Coppola with a score composed by Coppola's late father, Carmine, that is as glorious as the silent classic is itself. (Brownlow also completed a five-hour version in 2004.)
On Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., LACMA will be screening the splendid print struck by Universal in 70 millimeter in the early 1980s, for which Carmine Coppola's orchestral score was recorded in stereo and transferred to the print.
This two-part, amazingly fast-moving and swiftly engaging 235-minute reconstruction premiered in 1980 at Radio City Music Hall with much fanfare, and soon after that at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. Gance, who had traveled to the 1979 Telluride Film Festival for a work-in-progress presentation, complete with its famous triptych concluding sequence, was able to hear the ovations accorded "Napoléon" in New York over the phone from his apartment in Paris, where he died in November, 1981, at 92.
"Napoléon" is history as an action-filled pageant, filled with as many cliffhanging flourishes as a serial, relieved from time to time with scenes of intimacy and humor. Gance was as natural and energetic a storyteller in the silent screen medium as Cecil B. DeMille — and could stage an orgy with similar zest. His visual flair remains awesome and richly varied. He staged complex battle scenes with ease yet could create images as richly textured as those of Josef von Sternberg.
Yet more than anything else, Gance is engaged in mythmaking in regard to his treatment of Napoleon — as much as Leni Riefenstahl would be several years later with Adolf Hitler in her eternally controversial "Triumph of the Will." Indeed, "Napoléon" would seem the very embodiment of John Ford's famous command, "Print the legend," yet Ford's heroes were often far more complex than Gance's unflappable Bonaparte.
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On Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., LACMA will be screening the splendid print struck by Universal in 70 millimeter in the early 1980s, for which Carmine Coppola's orchestral score was recorded in stereo and transferred to the print.
This two-part, amazingly fast-moving and swiftly engaging 235-minute reconstruction premiered in 1980 at Radio City Music Hall with much fanfare, and soon after that at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. Gance, who had traveled to the 1979 Telluride Film Festival for a work-in-progress presentation, complete with its famous triptych concluding sequence, was able to hear the ovations accorded "Napoléon" in New York over the phone from his apartment in Paris, where he died in November, 1981, at 92.
"Napoléon" is history as an action-filled pageant, filled with as many cliffhanging flourishes as a serial, relieved from time to time with scenes of intimacy and humor. Gance was as natural and energetic a storyteller in the silent screen medium as Cecil B. DeMille — and could stage an orgy with similar zest. His visual flair remains awesome and richly varied. He staged complex battle scenes with ease yet could create images as richly textured as those of Josef von Sternberg.
Yet more than anything else, Gance is engaged in mythmaking in regard to his treatment of Napoleon — as much as Leni Riefenstahl would be several years later with Adolf Hitler in her eternally controversial "Triumph of the Will." Indeed, "Napoléon" would seem the very embodiment of John Ford's famous command, "Print the legend," yet Ford's heroes were often far more complex than Gance's unflappable Bonaparte.