Abel Gance's 1927 epic Napoleon was shown in its latest version, now running at five and a half hours, at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday, with live orchestral accompaniment composed and conducted by Carl Davis. It was magnificent, awe-inspiring, colossal, sublime - all those words you use when you look at a work of art and find your critical reactions defused by its enormity.
A colleague has another word for Gance's film - "oppressive" - and it is hard to disagree. Napoleon is oppressive not just because of the length, but because of the scope of the imagery and the kind of story it tells. The film's famous triptych-screen ending, with Bonaparte leading his armies into Italy and towards the creation of his empire, was followed on Saturday by a standing ovation. Davis and the orchestra deserved it for endurance alone, and yet there is something unsettling about standing to cheer a film that was so manifestly designed to rouse you to just such a response.
Seeing Napoleon "live" is not really like going to a movie, more like going to contemplate the Parthenon. The film, as we have it today, is a phenomenal work of reconstruction, undertaken over many years by Kevin Brownlow (joined on this extended version by Bambi Ballard), and now expanded by 40 minutes from the version shown at the Empire Leicester Square in 1980. That screening at once created a new audience for the major silent works and founded the institution of "live" silent cinema.
Napoleon has been overshadowed in public memory by the ending, in which the single screen expands into a tricolor triptych, a massive animated political banner. But there are so many other types of cinema here: the grotesque comedy of the clerks under the Terror, saving the condemned by eating their files; sentimental melodrama, in the figure of Violine, who worships Bonaparte from afar; luscious debauchery à la Stroheim, with the hordes of bare-breasted revellers at the Victims' Ball. There are battle sequences that prefigure, even outstrip Vietnam cinema in their extremity, partly because they come freshly soaked in echoes of the first world war.
Then there is the commentary on cinema itself. Napoleon is not just a great general, but a great film-maker. As a child, he "directs" a snowball fight; later in life, devising a strategy, he stages the battle in his mind as a montage of maps and diagrams. No wonder the film found special favour with Francis Ford Coppola, who relived the equation when he made Apocalypse Now.
The strangest thing about Gance's film, however, is the insistence with which it invokes destiny. It is less the biography of an emperor than the story of someone fated to be an emperor - not quite the same thing.
The film, in fact, is as much about the icon as it is about the man - when Bonaparte is first acclaimed as a hero, Napoleon dolls go on sale in Paris. You could see Gance's film as an exploration of modern history's first personality cult.
Actor Albert Dieudonné - gaunt, rather stiff in his forbidding severity - has so much become the defining screen image of Napoleon that there is something ghostly in the impersonation. It is as if, through Dieudonné's performance, Bonaparte himself becomes an expert actor, brilliantly impersonating his own legend. Or rather, Bonaparte becomes a sort of monomaniac, obsessed from childhood with the figure that he will one day be. Gance's film, you might say, is the case study of a fixation, of a Napoleon impersonator who performs his act so single-mindedly that he actually ends up leading an army into Italy. It's the story of a man who - quite rightly, as it turns out - thinks he is Napoleon.
