Content area
Full Text
In his expansive study of Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (1927), Paul Cuff immerses the reader in his experience of three different screenings of Kevin Brownlow's latest restored version 1 of the mammoth film (all accompanied by Carl Davis's orchestral score) and in his numerous, wide-ranging research discoveries. The heady enthusiasm of his prose at times conveys, and even matches, the filmmaker's enthusiasm for the paradoxical French hero.
Gance's vision of Napoleon, Cuff asserts approvingly, aligned closely with that of such 19th-century writers as Victor Hugo and Thomas Carlyle as well as his own contemporary, Élie Faure. As Bonaparte, he exemplified the "poet of action," a "symbol of transcendent forces," who rescued the French Revolution from its enemies and boldly envisioned its potential wider realization in the future. But as the Emperor Napoleon, he turned into an autocratic tyrant whose failure was tragic, for France and the rest of Europe. Gance's overall project sought to present the full arc of this transformation in six feature-length films, only the first of which he was able to complete. Misleadingly titled for the whole, yet focused solely on Bonaparte's rise to prominence, the single completed film, Cuff argues, led many critics to misunderstand and even excoriate Gance's work.
Cuff's book is especially valuable for the archival research, much of it original, that he has done in the Fonds Abel Gance at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Bibliothèque du film. That research is crucial for his insightful analysis of the entire "Napoleon Project" (arguably his real subject), especially drawing on a draft scenario for the sixth and final film, "Sainte-Hélène," and of...