A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance's Napoleon 9789048524877

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A Revolution for the Screen

A Revolution for the Screen Abel Gance’s Napoléon

Paul Cuff

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Frame enlargement from a 35mm Pathéorama edition of Napoléon (1927) (Author’s collection) Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 734 4 e-isbn 978 90 4852 487 7 doi 10.5117/9789089647344 nur 674 © Paul Cuff / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2015 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

To Kevin Brownlow – with deepest thanks and admiration



Table of contents

List of illustrations

11

Note on formatting

15

Acknowledgements 17 Foreword 19 Preface: Critical perspective

23

1. Napoleonic ambition and historical imagination 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Messiahs of the nineteenth century 1.3 Towards a new era 1.4 Cinema and the Napoleonic project 1.5 Historiography as ritual 1.6 Summary

31 31 32 40 45 49 54

2. Shaping expectations: The young Napoléon Bonaparte 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Cinema as experiential art 2.3 Multiplying perspective 2.4 Father to the man 2.5 Invoking the future 2.6 Iconic isolation 2.7 Summary

55 55 55 60 64 69 71 77

3. Civilization and savagery: Visions of the French Revolution 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Reasoning with chaos 3.3 Community and spectatorship 3.4 Fire and phoenix 3.5 Summary

79 79 80 83 91 98

4. Mortal gods: Voices of power and of providence 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Communicating authority 4.3 Chaos and providence 4.4 Orchestrating murder 4.5 The rhetoric of the Terror 4.6 Summary

101 101 102 111 116 122 126

5. The dark light of Napoleonic cinema 5.1 Introduction 5.2 ‘Bonaparte’ and ‘Napoléon’ 5.3 Visual antitheses 5.4 Inheritance 5.5 The expansion of visual language 5.6 Summary

129 129 129 133 142 149 156

6. A view from the margins of history 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Oblivion and remembrance 6.3 Parallel lives 6.4 Documentation and survival 6.5 Forlorn recognition 6.6 Summary

159 159 160 164 169 173 177

7. Melodrama and the formulations of family 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Incomplete families 7.3 Fate and fortune 7.4 Flirtation and observation 7.5 Negotiating the future 7.6 Love and war 7.7 Summary

179 179 179 183 188 194 197 201

8. Worlds in transition: Class, consumption, corruption 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Corrupting powers 8.3 New femininities 8.4 The Victims’ Ball 8.5 Summary

203 203 203 208 214 221

9. Death and transfiguration 9.1 Introduction 9.2 From history to legend 9.3 From individualism to universalism 9.4 Summary

223 223 223 232 240

Conclusion: The case for enthusiasm

243

Filmography and bibliography

249

Index 263



List of illustrations

Fig. 1: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 2: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 3: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 4: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 5: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 6: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 7: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 8: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 9: Jacques-Louis David, Le Serment du jeu de paume à Versailles le 20 juin 1789 (1791) (Château de Versailles; photograph within the Public Domain) Fig. 10: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 11: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 12: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 13: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 14: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 15: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 16: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 17: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 18: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.)

66 67 68 73 75 77 86 87 89 104 105 106 107 108 110 111 115 120

Fig. 19: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 134 Fig. 20: Casper David Friedrich, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818) (Hamburger Kunsthalle; photograph within the Public Domain) 135 Fig. 21: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 136 Fig. 22: J.M.W. Turner, War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet (1842) (Tate Britain; photograph by the author) 137 Fig. 23: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 138 Fig. 24: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 140 Fig. 25: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 142 Fig. 26: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 144 Fig. 27: Live presentation of the Photoplay Productions restoration of Napoléon at the Ziggo Dome, Amsterdam, June 2014 (Photograph courtesy of Eduard Engel) 152 Fig. 28: Live presentation of the Photoplay Productions restoration of Napoléon at the Ziggo Dome, Amsterdam, June 2014 (Photograph courtesy of Eduard Engel) 154 Fig. 29: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 155 Fig. 30: Production still from Napoléon (Kevin Brownlow Collection) 166 Fig. 31: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 170 Fig. 32: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 175 Fig. 33: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 188 Fig. 34: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 193 Fig. 35: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 199 Fig. 36: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) 200

Fig. 37: James Gillray, ‘Ci-devant Occupations; or Mme Tallien and the Empress Joséphine dancing Naked before Barras in the Winter of 1797 – A Fact!’ (1805) (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917; www.metmuseum.org) Fig. 38: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 39: Image capture from Napoléon (Courtesy of Zoetrope Corp. and The Film Preserve, Ltd.) Fig. 40: Arnold Böcklin, Die Toteninsel (‘third version’) (1883) (Alte Nationalgalerie; photograph within the Public Domain)

212 216 217 229



Note on formatting

References I have used the Harvard system for citations within the text (author | year: volume/page). Square parentheses [] within a citation indicate a first publication date. Please see the Bibliography and Filmography for a detailed explanation of source material.

Emphases All italicized emphases within quoted material appear in the original sources.

Names For the sake of agreement with original material, my text retains the native spelling of French names and titles. I have also tried to be consistent in referring to the historical individual as ‘Napoléon’ and to Gance’s character as ‘Bonaparte’ – a distinction maintained in the screenplay and in most of the film’s intertitles. (The significance of this nomenclature is discussed in chapter 5.)

Translations Unless otherwise noted, all translations of French-language material are my own. For other foreign-language material, I have tried (wherever possible) to use the most modern and reliable English editions available.

Acknowledgements My first encounter with the work of Abel Gance came in December 2004, a circumstance which was entirely brought about by my dear friend Nick Viale. Displaying his usual knack for locating cultural treasure, he secured two tickets for a screening of Napoléon at the Royal Festival Hall in London. This experience was a revelation, and I can never adequately thank Nick for introducing me to a work of art that has enriched my life like no other. That modern audiences have been able to see Napoléon at all is due to Kevin Brownlow. His work on Gance is of incalculable importance, just as his decades of investigation and restoration have given so many silent films new life. I first met him in October 2005, having written an enthusiastic letter in the hope of an interview. Not only did he accept and answer a barrage of questions, he also showed me the latest fragment of 35mm footage from Napoléon that he had unearthed in Denmark – a great privilege, whose memory I still cherish. My dedication of this book to him can only be a small token of gratitude for all his support and encouragement. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge my debt to Carl Davis, whose extraordinary score for Napoléon continues to deepen my understanding of Gance’s film. Its first performance in 1980 launched the restoration of silent cinema as a performative art, and Davis’s subsequent work has resurrected dozens of other films from this era. I count the many hours I have spent in theatres under the spell of his music among the happiest of my life. I was very flattered to hear from the composer that he was an admirer of my writing on Gance, and hope that this book does justice to the live experience of Napoléon that inspired it. Much of my work on Gance took place in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick (uk). Between my final year as an undergraduate and my last year as a postgraduate, I submitted three theses on Napoléon. At each stage of this study, Jon Burrows acted as my supervisor – exercising great patience and providing much sage advice. As well as Jon, I should thank all those in and around Warwick – colleagues, friends, peers, and students – for their willingness to accept and share my enthusiasm. Equally, my parents provided me with the moral and financial aid necessary to survive during my years of scholarly endeavour. In Paris, my research could not have taken place without the aid of Nelly Kaplan, the staff of the Bibliothèque du Film at the Cinémathèque Française (in particular, those in ‘L’espace chercheurs’), the Arts du Spectacle department of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and Laure Marchaut of the

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Cinémathèque’s Fort de Saint-Cyr film archive. As well as being an invaluable source of hard-to-find dvds, Christine Leteux was able to decipher and translate some of Gance’s most impenetrable handwriting and unearth documentation that I would otherwise have missed. My special thanks go to Sarah Ohana, who acted as both host and cultural guide during much of my time in France. For offering extremely helpful advice on early drafts of this book, I must thank Kevin Brownlow and Erik Schelander. The assembly of illustrative material could not have taken place without the help of Kevin Brownlow and Photoplay Productions, Eduard Engel, James Mockoski, and Dick Moeske. At Amsterdam University Press, I am grateful for the editorial support of Jeroen Sondervan and Thomas Elsaesser – and for the efficient work of their copyediting team. Not only has Natalie Stone sat by my side through multiple screenings of Napoléon, but she has tolerated every manifestation of my monomania. For this, and for so much else, I am deeply thankful and immensely proud. A small amount of material in this study derives from articles originally published in the journal Studies in French Cinema and on the Alternate Takes website – any such work appears here with the permission of the publishers.

Foreword When you read someone’s opinions of a film and you wish you’d thought of them yourself, that writer is worth keeping an eye on. So often, descriptions of films are written in such an impenetrable language that you need a dictionary – and sometimes the word is so obscure you won’t find it. I was impressed by Paul Cuff because he is not only a critic, not only a historian. He is an enthusiast who believes in action. When a new four-and-a-half-hour version of La Roue (1922) was released on dvd, he realized vital elements were missing. So he rounded up all available elements of this monumental film and produced a six-hour alternative (see Cuff 2011). It proved once again that the more you put back into a Gance silent, the better it gets. ‘Come with me to Paris and I will show you a Gance film no one thought existed’, said Cuff one day. I could hardly turn down such an offer, which brought back memories of my early forays as a film collector. We reported to one of the forts built after the Franco-Prussian war to protect Paris, which already had an atmosphere of buried treasure, and were taken to a bunker in which a viewing machine awaited with a pile of cans. To my amazement, the film was one that Gance shot during the First World War but never assembled. It wasn’t exactly an ideal subject for wartime audiences; a holy man from India comes to Europe with a message of peace and endures brutality from both sides. Ecce Homo (1918) was photographed by the great cameraman LéonceHenri Burel, and watching it in rushes form made one long to see it on the big screen. The print had been made direct from the camera negative and was as sharp as any original. It had been filmed in the South of France, where the climate is similar to Hollywood’s. But the production had been closed down by Pathé when the leading actor was called. Gance then moved on to his first masterpiece, J’accuse! (1919). Enthusiasm is not a quality one often encounters in academic writing. One feels they regard film history as dangerously close to trainspotting. But it was this quality that first drew me to Gance. In 1954, I had acquired two reels for my 9.5mm projector, a machine which had so far run little more than Mickey Mouse. The reels formed a chapter in a silent version of Napoléon. When I first screened them, I was astonished at the fluid use of the camera, the bravura editing – and the brilliantly atmospheric lighting. I was so impressed that I did something I had never done before: I wrote a fan letter to the director. I’m sure it was very naïve, but it brought a reply. Gance said he was working on a new process called Polyvision

20 

A Revolution for the Screen

which would cause an upheaval in the cinema world. That upheaval had already been triggered by Cinerama, a development of Gance’s three-screen sequences which climaxed Napoléon. In March 1955, a journalist lent me a photograph of Gance, and I showed it to Liam O’Leary, a friend who worked at the British Film Institute. A day or so later, Gance came to London to see Cinerama and afterwards he walked down Shaftesbury Avenue and found himself outside the British Film Institute. As he walked in, Liam happened to be looking through his glass door. Thank heaven he did. For he greeted the great director, who was startled to be recognized (he had not made a film for twelve years). He organized a reception at the National Film Theatre and invited me. I arrived just before Gance stepped out of his taxi – he was 65, a strikingly handsome man with great charisma. I was 50 years younger, still in my school blazer, and dismayed only that he didn’t speak English. Despite all the years spent studying, my French was hopeless. However, enthusiasm knows no barriers. Gance must have been startled to find a schoolboy so passionate about his work. There were more celebrated film people there that afternoon – Basil Wright, the documentary director, Sir Michael Balcon, producer of the Ealing films – but I was only interested in one man. A friendship began that lasted until his death 27 years later. Whenever I visited Gance, I felt I was meeting Victor Hugo. I wanted to write down for posterity everything he said. (I did record most of it.) And when, in 1967, he allowed me to move into his apartment with a film crew, he gave me the most perfect concluding remarks: While I’m on television I want to tell you that without enthusiasm, there is no cinema, there are no films, there is nothing. Enthusiasm is essential. It must be communicated to people like a flame. Cinema is a flame in the shadows. To vanquish the darkness, you must be able to generate enthusiasm. If you don’t feel it, you cannot transmit it. This is why I believe anyone who doesn’t have this enthusiasm won’t understand me and cannot produce what I consider to be a great film.

Napoléon seems to provoke enthusiasm in a way few (if any) other films can achieve, as Cuff himself says. When my restoration was first shown in London, at the Empire, Leicester Square in 1980, I emerged from the underground station in a state of terror. How would the orchestra stay in sync for five hours? How would an audience unaccustomed to silent films sit still for five hours? It could only be a disaster. I was not aware that the film had caught the crowd until Bonaparte as a cadet is thrown into the snow by the monks at Brienne College, and the orchestra played Carl Davis’s

Foreword

21

irresistible ‘eagle of destiny’ theme. I felt a wave of emotion that was to be repeated throughout the film. Part of what Cuff hopes this book will do is to counter those writers who seem to remain suspicious (if not outright hostile) to the idea that enjoying the film is morally suspect and that enthusiasm is an enemy of critical evaluation. I have no doubt he will succeed. Kevin Brownlow



Preface: Critical perspective Don’t ask me to be a critic [...] What you characterize as fault, I call accent. I accept, and give thanks. Having inherited the marvels of human imagination, I refuse to act like an auditor classifying assets […] A masterpiece offers me its hospitality: I approach it, hat in hand, and admire the countenance of my host. (Hugo 1864: 372)

*** The scale of Abel Gance’s work presents a monumental challenge for film scholars. Paper documentation relating to his career currently occupies over 400 boxes in the Paris archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Cinémathèque Française. The celluloid legacy of his major silent films is equally vast: J’accuse! (1919) had an original length of 5250 metres, occupying over four hours of screen time; La Roue (1922) premiered at 10,730m and lasted over eight hours in the theatre. Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance (1927) consumed 400,000m of film stock during its production (equal to 290 hours of footage), and the longest version of the completed film ran to 12,800m – 666,000 frames of celluloid that took over nine hours to project. The amount of lost evidence is also daunting: up to a third of the material from each of the above films no longer exists, whilst a large proportion of paperwork has yet to be recorded. Gance’s reputation has thus been defined as much by obscurity and incompletion as by grandeur and excess. In order to outline my own approach to Napoléon, this preface must first provide an overview of the film’s physical and critical chronology – two histories that are inseparably linked. In 1923, Gance wrote the synopses of six films that would cover Napoléon Bonaparte’s life from childhood to death. Over the next year, he worked on the full screenplay for the first part of his series, completing the final of three drafts just before production began in January 1925. After eighteen months of filming, spanning the liquidation of his first production company and the formation of another, Gance realized he was running out of time and space. He had already exceeded the budget for all six films making just the first, and hadn’t reached the end of his 1924 screenplay – despite having used a record amount of celluloid. The logistical problems of Napoléon’s temporal breadth were compounded by the technical challenges that the film generated. The scale of the last scenes he filmed in August 1926, depicting Bonaparte leading his

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army into Italy, inspired Gance to expand the scope of his frame. Several sequences were shot by three cameras mounted on the same platform, their combined perspectives forming a panoramic view. Gance filmed additional footage in both 3D and colour, but he rejected this material in favour of his widescreen format. The final scenes of the ‘Entry into Italy’ sequence alternate between the formation of a continuous frame and three separate ones. Gance called this style of lateral montage ‘Polyvision’ – an extraordinarily brilliant innovation that enabled his unfinished film to end in spectacular fashion. This formal experimentation had a direct impact on Napoléon’s exhibition. To mount Polvysion in the theatre, three projectors must run side-by-side in perfect synchronization – an extremely problematic feat, even for dedicated screenings in the present day. Despite these practical difficulties, Gance was so enthused by his invention that he edited existing footage of the ‘Double Tempest’ scenes into a second triptych sequence. The first public screening of Napoléon was in April 1927, at the Théâtre de l’Opéra in Paris. As Gance hadn’t had time to complete sorting and editing all his material, this ‘Opéra version’ was an abbreviated edition of the film – running to 5600m and including both triptych sequences. A longer copy of 12,800m was premiered at the Apollo in May. This ‘Apollo version’ was the fullest the public ever saw, but it was screened without the triptychs. Gance wanted to divide this version into episodes and release it as a multi-part film, as he had with J’accuse and La Roue. Though various prints were released in this form in some provincial regions, their integrity was undermined by the inevitable excisions imposed by individual exhibitors who cut the film down according to their own needs and taste. Despite never achieving a general release, Napoléon created a sensation in its numerous trade screenings and special shows. This populist epic was filled with avant-garde experimentation: spectators experienced splitscreen and widescreen effects as well as every conceivable variety of mobile camerawork. There was a huge critical response, but Gance’s disorienting array of dramatic technique caused both rapture and nausea. Scarcely has a film inspired so much contradiction from its critics – even Gance’s friends were often jarringly ambivalent. Marxist writer Léon Moussinac claimed the content of Napoléon was ‘indefensible’ and ‘pernicious’: Gance’s Revolution is a ‘complete distortion of history’ and his Bonaparte the conglomeration of ‘pure fantasy’ that could appeal only to ‘burgeoning fascists’ (1927a: 4). Yet the second half of his review lauds the film’s ‘remarkable […] technical qualities’ and formal daring (Moussinac 1927b: 4). Emile Vuillermoz wrote that Gance was a ‘perfect’ filmmaker, held back from true greatness by retrograde Romanticism – his was an imagination cluttered with literary

Preface: Critical perspec tive

25

anachronisms, in need of a thorough tidying (1927b: 336). Both these writers contrast Napoléon’s praiseworthy style against its ‘reprehensible’ content, which marks ‘a grievous regression in the history of the silent art’ (Vuillermoz 1927a: 4). Those who favoured Gance’s formal experimentation wanted a shorter version of the film which concentrated on stylistic innovation, heightening its ‘artistic’ qualities. Though the condensed format of the Opéra version at least partially fulfilled this desire, many found its narrative incoherent: a plethora of images and a ‘paucity of logic’ (Saint-Cyr 1927: 81). Most reviewers actually preferred the far longer Apollo version: ‘its proportions are more harmonious, its rhythm more sustained, its narrative clearer and more coherent’ (Gordeaux 1927: 4). However, expanding the narrative elements led others to accuse Gance of burdening his film with unnecessary melodrama. Neither the Opéra nor the Apollo version satisfied everyone: abridged, Napoléon was accused of being overwhelmed by its own artistry; extended, it was criticized for falling victim to narrative excess. Gance’s producers had equally strong reactions. The film was distributed by Gaumont-Metro-Goldwyn, the French subsidiary of Metro-GoldwynMayer. The company’s executives were horrified by the sheer length of Napoléon and the exorbitant demands its widescreen format made on cinemas. In 1928, gmg altered Gance’s film into a more manageable form. Reducing its length by half and re-cutting it entirely, they transformed Napoléon into ‘a masterpiece of ineptitude’ (Brownlow [1983] 2004: 151). So appalling was the result, and so insulting its mutilations, that Gance took his own distributors to court – and won. Mgm reconfigured the film yet again for its us release in 1928, reducing Gance’s 12,800m to 2400m. Removing both formal experimentation and extraneous plot, they finally ‘improved’ Gance’s film into an acceptable form; the result was a financial and artistic disaster. Though Gance believed Polyvision would ‘play a leading role in the future [of film]’ (1928c), the only cinema he persuaded to install permanent triptych equipment was Studio 28, a small avant-garde venue in Paris. For this theatre, he re-edited sections of Napoléon into the triptych format to create three short ‘studies’: Danses, Galops, and Marine (1928). Within months of its explosive premiere in 1927, Napoléon vanished from theatrical screens – and his Polyvision ‘studies’ never entered distribution. Only one other screenplay from the proposed series was finished during the silent era – the final of the six parts, Sainte-Hélène (1927-8). Having tried and failed to produce other episodes in subsequent years, Gance returned to his first film in 1934. He shot new footage to reframe his narrative, as well as adding synchronized dialogue and music to existing silent material. This

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A Revolution for the Screen

reworking was released as Napoléon Bonaparte (1935), an embarrassing compromise whose worst consequence was its cannibalization of unique print material from 1927. The reappearance of Gance’s most famous work made little impact on the new generation of film historians and couldn’t prevent the steady erosion of his reputation. Armed only with secondhand knowledge of his silent work, André Bazin tried to tidy Gance away into a subcategory of montage-based cinema without considering his diversity of stylistic expression (1952: 364). His perfunctory remarks did Gance a deep disservice – virtually writing him out of modern film criticism at an early stage in its development. Despite this neglect, Gance received recognition from future members of the French Nouvelle Vague. Extracts from the silent Napoléon were screened at the Cinémathèque Française in 1954, and the following year a new version of Napoléon Bonaparte was shown – complete with the original final triptych, synchronized with sound and music. Deeply impressed by the film, François Truffaut later wrote: ‘each shot is a bolt of lightning that illuminates everything around it’ (1975: 52). Though even such fragmentary material resulted in some enthusiastic appraisals of Gance in Cahiers du cinéma, no real critical resurrection could take place whilst his silent films languished (and perished) in vaults. The textual status of the silent Napoléon was rendered even more illegible by Gance’s final attempt to reanimate his old project in 1970. In Bonaparte et la Révolution (1971), he added yet more new material to this palimpsestic creation, leaving his original film almost invisible beneath the cacophonous clutter of incompatible material. No sound version followed the structure of Gance’s 1927 film, and they should be considered entirely distinct from the silent original. Equally, his Austerlitz (1960) was a film co-written in the 1950s which again diverged from his original 1923 series outline. This perpetual contraction, expansion, and reconfiguration of Gance’s Napoleonic project in subsequent decades fermented critical confusion. Due to the lack of coherent celluloid evidence to examine, one of the most important studies of Gance proved unable to produce a detailed evaluation of Napoléon (Kramer/Welsh 1978). Kevin Brownlow’s painstaking restoration of the silent version led to further variant copies of Gance’s f ilm appearing between 1979 and 2000 – the latest edition (which includes the final triptych) has a length of 7500m. The ongoing project by the Cinémathèque Française has identified and catalogued 22 different versions of Napoléon, spanning 80 years, in an effort to understand and restore the two primary versions (Opéra and Apollo) of 1927 (Mourier 2012).

Preface: Critical perspec tive

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The reaction to the re-release of Napoléon in the 1980s followed a similar pattern to that of 1927: popular acclaim, followed by critical division. Modern reviewers claimed that Gance’s ‘romantic’ (‘reactionary’) content was irreconcilable with his ‘modernist’ (‘progressive’) style. The same writers could deem Napoléon a ‘dramatically conventional, psychologically simplistic and politically suspect’ hagiography, yet praise it as ‘a triumph of audacious technique’ (Andrew 1999:  44). Gance’s intellectual value was often derided as ‘trite’ or ‘insincere’, usually with the claim that his ‘technical developments […] are seldom related to the meaning of his films’ (Thomson 1994: 273). No such review actually defines what Gance’s ideas are before dismissing them – writers seem unable or unwilling to negotiate Napoléon’s inherent characteristics. The painful reality that ‘film history is based on what’s available’ meant that Gance’s film was often treated as a kind of titanic aberrance – perhaps ‘historians can only take in so much’ (Brownlow 2005). Napoléon re-emerged at a time when film theory was least likely to accept it on its own terms. In his political study of Gance from 1984, Norman King argues that we cannot – and should not – trust any criticism that stems from the filmmaker’s own beliefs on the cinema. Such a position explains why he gives lengthy excerpts of Gance’s written texts but doesn’t evaluate the films in their light. Instead, King theorizes that Napoléon exemplifies ‘reactionary innovation’ – its viewers are ‘politicized’ through cinematic spectacle into ‘uncritical subjects’ (1984a: 213-15). Through lack of definition and any substantiating textual analysis, the central assertion that Gance’s sophisticated manipulation of imagery is inherently ‘reactionary’ remains an unqualified assumption. Even before stating his reasoning, King’s introduction contends it would be an ‘unexpected’ result for other studies to define Gance as ‘progressive’ (ibid.: 7). This self-censure had much to do with the psychological, political, and semiotic film theory of the 1970s that sought to denounce cinephilia as fetishism, scopophilia, and voyeurism. Many films were seen as ideologically manipulative delusions, detrimental to the health of the general public. (Only theorists, conveniently, could see through this illusionism.) The immersive experience of Napoléon was destined to confound a generation of critics who prided themselves on denigrating cinema’s emotional engagement. Brownlow’s restoration features an orchestral score by Carl Davis, recreating the performative element which is so essential to early cinema – but the novelty of this theatrical exhibition itself aroused suspicion. Richard Philpott argued that a pre-recorded score accompanying screenings would be ideologically preferential to the ‘elitism’ of a live orchestra (1983: 8-14).

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Similarly, Peter Pappas hailed Napoléon as a ‘great’ and ‘profound’ work, but the very enthusiasm the performances evoked was deemed to be a ‘fascist’ effect. Unable to endorse his own joyful reaction in the cinema, Pappas retrospectively chastises such emotion as morally dangerous (1981: 7-8). Though this puritanical attitude is no longer so prominent, nor so self-righteously proclaimed, in film studies today, its aftereffects can still be felt. ‘Critical distance’ is frequently held to be at the heart of objective analysis, the notion that scholars should keep themselves apart from the language of the artist and the distorting experience of art’s actualization. That Napoléon can still be seen at all is due to the enthusiasm of restorers like Brownlow, yet some have damned these very efforts as an ‘extravagance’ that could ‘prejudice’ scholastic sobriety (Thomson 1994: 272-3). In this view, enthusiasm becomes the enemy of critical argument: analytical competence is defined by a disparaging attitude towards a writer’s subject-matter. Faced with something that resists orthodox boundaries and classification, critics can become regrettably priggish. Scholars have responded to Gance in the same ruffled tone as those in the nineteenth century who complained that Victor Hugo’s prose was intent on ‘troubling us, offending us, buffeting us in the face’, leading readers to emerge from his novels in ‘a dishevelled, unseemly condition’ (Fraser’s Magazine 1866: 741). Opponents of Gance often repeat the same hope that he would ‘use wholesome restraint with becoming liberty, before the impulses, which should be his subjects, break into uncontrollable rebellion’ (ibid.: 745). Hugo wrote that critics were offended by Romanticism because it unbalanced their sensibilities; high drama was like the rolling ocean: ‘some people are exhilarated, others are sick’ (1840b: 1553). In the same way, early reviewers described Wagner’s music as a kind of ‘tonal typhoon’ that produced ‘attack[s] of aquatic nausea’ (Conrad 2011: 182-3). Twentieth-century critics cited both these artists as troublesome predecessors of Gance’s ‘excessive’ cinema. His films possessed an intimidating scale and febrile energy that left viewers as ‘overwhelmed’ and ‘lost’ as with Wagnerian opera (Miomandre 1927: 707). Napoléon was seen as a ‘barbarous and Hugolian masterpiece, which irritates us, which exhausts us with its virtuosity, by the ceaseless movement of its images, by its total absence of critical sense and even of intelligence’ (Bardèche/ Brasillach 1935: 242-3). Napoléon is the ultimate example of how a film can become cast out from established canons of art and taste. It is not the work of a single genre; it is not the work of a familiar ideology; it is a serial film never shown in serial format; it is a widescreen film made before widescreen cinema; it is the first of a series of six films, five of which were never made; it is so cinematic

Preface: Critical perspec tive

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that it defies cinematic exhibition, so varied in style and so multiplicitous in ideas that it befuddles critical analysis. Because of this intrinsic hybridity, critics and producers have tended to use Gance’s unwieldy creation as the means to different ends: the former want usable data, the latter want reliable profit. Both approaches have dismantled Napoléon, only to find it wanting. Yet trying to tame or control the precipitous character of such a film can only damage the work of art and our understanding of it. Napoléon is fascinating because of its strangeness, not despite it. Rather than criticize the film for what it is not, for what it fails to resemble, it would be more productive to examine Napoléon on its own terms. Critics would do well to heed the warning offered by Susan Sontag in her essay ‘Against Interpretation’, which attacks the distortive and self-serving ‘rules’ of academic analysis (1964: 77). As she later reiterated: ‘the intellectual experience is [not] opposed to the aesthetic experience […] The aesthetic experience is a form of intelligence’. The fact that ‘a great deal of what people call intellectual activity is aesthetic experience’ (Sontag 1995: 42) is particularly visible in some modes of film criticism. Evaluation does not begin away from the spell of film in cinemas but during this experience. Though Brownlow’s latest restoration of Napoléon has yet to be released on dvd, its potential impact on audiences in a domestic space cannot hope to recreate the effect the film has in the theatre. The scale and grandeur of Gance’s imagery was designed specifically for, and is uniquely suited to, cinematic exhibition for mass audiences. As much as any sequence or image may be described and analysed in print, the only way to comprehend its power is to experience it first-hand. This is something I can attest to with Napoléon, a film I have seen on three occasions projected on celluloid before an audience, accompanied by a live performance of Davis’s score. Accordingly, I have always tried to articulate the live presence of the film in a cinema, rendering its emotive resonance as well as its formal representation. Following Sontag’s dictum, I hope that in my own judgements the (immediate) aesthetic reaction of the cinematic experience can inform and enrich my (subsequent) close analysis. Physical unavailability and textual instability are the primary reasons for the critical neglect of Gance’s silent work. Whilst some argue that Napoléon will remain ‘forever out of reach’ as a complete text (Kaplan 1994: 9), it is surely an essential challenge for critics and historians to make sense of what remains. The reputations of canonical films are usually built upon their physical accessibility (prints, dvds) as well as their intellectual presence (documentation, scholarship) – luxuries that Napoléon and Gance have never possessed. I believe it both possible and desirable to perform

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a kind of critical archaeology of the film’s language and philosophy to discover the source of its emotive power. To this end, I have consulted a wide range of resources: multiple versions and fragments of Napoléon, archival documentation (much of which is translated here for the first time), and literary material. I have organized this book in a way that I hope will benefit any reader unfamiliar with Gance’s film or the history upon which it is based. Chapter 1 places Napoléon within a wider narrative of European political culture and the specific context of cinema in post-war France. The subsequent four chapters offer a chronological analysis of the film’s major sequences: chapter 2 discusses how the opening scenes of Napoléon shape our expectations of cinematic form and narrative content; chapters 3 and 4 deal with the representation of the French Revolution, both in terms of its historiographic method and the depiction of individual/collective power; chapter 5 looks in detail at the characterization of Bonaparte, examining the relationship between imagery, ideology, and film format. The next three chapters pursue a broader analysis of Gance’s treatment of marginality (chapter 6), melodrama (chapter 7), and class (chapter 8). Chapter 9 looks at the projects Gance conceived in the aftermath of Napoléon: Sainte-Hélène (the final episode of his six-part series) and Victor Hugo (a historical biopic), whilst my conclusion will summarize the main aspects of my argument.

1.

Napoleonic ambition and historical imagination

Bonaparte is no longer the real Bonaparte, but a legendary f igure fashioned from poets’ whims, soldiers’ tales, and popular legend; it is a Charlemagne or Alexander of medieval epic we behold today. This hero of fantasy will become the real individual; the other portraits will vanish. (Chateaubriand 1849-50: VII/126)

1.1 Introduction Interpretations of Gance’s film are often determined by critics’ ‘prejudicial hostility’ towards the historical Napoléon (Icart 1983: 178). Steven Englund argues that there is a tendency among Anglophone scholars to pursue an ‘inaccurate, anachronistic, and […] unfair’ comparison of Napoléon with Hitler and Stalin, in spite of the fact that the Emperor was neither ‘invoked’ by French, German, or Italian fascists nor by Russian communists, in the twentieth century (2004: 459). It is a common assumption that the ‘sinister’ legacy of Napoléon in some way sullies Gance’s film and that its portrait necessarily contains a ‘dangerous’ doctrine (Samuels 2004: 267). Such views attribute Napoléon with vague notions of ‘the political’ (definite article, indefinite meaning) and categorize it according to simplistic binaries of ‘left’/‘right’ or ‘reactionary’/‘progressive’. This ahistorical approach is unhelpful. As Norman King points out, the ‘political’ stance of European intellectuals like Gance in the 1920s was characterized by a cross-fertilization of ideas which renders terms like ‘left’ and ‘right’ obsolete (1984a: 140-6). It is equally important to challenge the view that interpretations of Napoléon were in any way consistent: he inspired an astonishingly diverse, and often entirely antithetical, set of ideologies. As Joseph Fouché told the Emperor during his reign: ‘some say you are a god, others that you are a devil; but everyone agrees you are more than a man’ (1824: I/182). After his death, Napoléon was ‘transformed into a mythical figure, an equivalent to those other Romantic archetypes of transgression and limitless desire: Faust, Satan, Prometheus, and Don Juan.’ (Bainbridge 2005: 451) This chapter outlines the history of Napoleonic messianism through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, locating Gance’s film within the cultural context of Romantic ideology and the political legacy of the Great War.

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A Revolution for the Screen

Messiahs of the nineteenth century

In the summer of 1789, the elected representatives of the French ‘third estate’ defied the clergy, the nobles, and the King of France to demand constitutional reform; their subsequent ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ challenged the ‘divine right of kings’ and instated popular sovereignty. These actions triggered the French Revolution and unleashed immense moral and social forces that the ultra-conservative monarchies of Europe were desperate to contain. From 1792 until 1802, a series of wars were fought to ensure the survival of the Revolutionary Republic in the face of invasion from neighbouring kingdoms; from 1803 until his final defeat in 1815, Napoléon led France through further wars in an effort to establish a continent-wide system of political reform – he refashioned a chaotic map of innumerable feudal states and sprawling empires into a prototype for modern Europe. By dismantling the absolutist Holy Roman Empire in central Europe and challenging the hegemony of feudal Russia in the east, Napoléon encouraged the self-determination of nascent national groups. In 1805, the first Italian constitution was declared; in 1806, the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine was the first step towards a united Germany; in 1807, the Duchy of Warsaw fuelled Polish independence (to this day, Poland’s national anthem remains the only such hymn to celebrate the Emperor by name). Establishing his 1804 ‘civil code’ across much of Europe, Napoléon consolidated the Revolutionary principles of equality into legislative law – religious tolerance de-ghettoized Jews and other persecuted minorities for the first time in centuries. Many intellectuals in these previously disenfranchised peoples greeted the French Revolution as the ‘great necessity’ of the age and its aim of liberty as the ultimate ‘end’ of history itself (Hegel 1822-8: 20). France’s hubristic enterprise inspired both adulation and horror among contemporaries. The Revolution was alternately seen as the work of Christ or Antichrist, just as Napoléon’s miraculous rise from Corsican obscurity to world fame divided opinion: his republicanism as First Consul (from 1799) inspired hero-worship, but his career as Emperor (from 1804) was met with hostility. Even in ‘liberated’ regions, reformists such as Ludwig van Beethoven wavered in a state of ‘unconquerable ambivalence’ about Napoléon (Solomon 1978: 140). Elsewhere, conservatives were ravenously opposed to the man whose reign was built upon Revolutionary ideas. When Napoléon invaded Russia in 1812, the Orthodox Church encouraged peasants to view the French as ‘a legion of demons’ who were ‘commanded by the Antichrist’ (Ségur 1824: I/311). The subsequent campaign resembled a

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religious war in its ferocity, leading the Russian populace to connect events with ‘vague conceptions of Antichrist, of the end of the world, and perfect freedom’ (Tolstoy [1869] 2002: 821). Even within the relative stability of Britain, hysterical volumes were written ‘proving Bonaparte to be the beast that arose out of the earth, with two horns like a lamb, and spake as a dragon whose number is 666’ (Mayer 1803: n. pag.). Lewis Mayer execrated Napoléon as ‘Lucifer and Gog’, prophesizing his ultimate defeat ‘in the mountains of Israel’ in the year 1809 (1806: 17). Though this prediction proved incorrect, the Emperor’s true defeat at Waterloo was seen as the logical endpoint of history, fulfilling the apocalyptic vision of St John in Revelation (Holmes 1819). In the wake of their final victory in 1815, the restored monarchies did their best to dispel reformists’ utopian delusions and affect a return to the preRevolutionary world order: national identities were once more subsumed by colonial empires. Much of the continent effectively became a police state in a mood of constant paranoia about ‘a threatening, unquantifiable, crepuscular underworld vowed to the annihilation of the status quo’ (Zamoyski 2000: 301). The death of the exiled Emperor on St Helena in 1821 did nothing to loosen his influence over the continent. As with Christ’s resurrection, rumours circulated that Napoléon had defied death and would miraculously return in the future. His name was associated with countless intrigues, revolts, and revolutions across Europe and the New World in the 1820s, and thousands of his former soldiers joined patriots and Romantics in pursuit of Napoleonic adventure. Literary responses were equally grandiose. Historians began to philosophize on the meaning of Napoléon’s role in the overall context of human progress. In the 1820s, German idealists postulated about the function of ‘World-Historical individuals’ as agents of the ‘World-Spirit’ (Weltgeist), the force propelling history towards a predestined end. Using Napoléon as an exemplar of this reasoning, G.W.F. Hegel wrote: There is a power within them which is stronger than they are […] Right is on their side, for they are the far-sighted ones: they have discerned what is true in their world and in their age, and have recognized the concept, the next universal to emerge. And the others […] flock to their standard, for it is they that express what the age requires […] [People] follow these leaders of souls because they feel the irresistible power of their own inner spirit pulling them in the same direction (1830: 83-5)

Though these individuals possess great power, in channelling the revolutionary ‘force’ they must sacrifice happiness and choose ‘exertion, conflict,

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and labour in the service of their end’; transgressing the limitations of their age, such figures become tragic victims of fate: ‘they die early like Alexander, are murdered like Caesar, or deported like Napoléon’ (ibid.). Thomas Carlyle explored similar ideas in the 1830s, and his collection On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history famously declares: ‘The History of the world is but the Biography of great men’ (1841: 34). Initiating social evolution and fulfilling the maximum potential of each stage of history, ‘the Great Man [becomes] the indispensable saviour of his epoch; – the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt’ (ibid.: 21). Carlyle believed the great man is a force of action, not merely of rhetoric: ‘He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.’ (1845: I/74) This conception of Napoléon as both warrior and artist suited the diversity of interests his admirers possessed. As a youthful patriot, Józef Hoëné-Wronski had fought in the Polish uprising against Prussia in 1794; he then pursued a military career in Russia, after which he moved to France and studied logic and philosophy. At a ball celebrating Napoléon’s birthday in 1803, he experienced a vision in which it was revealed he would make an epochal intellectual discovery. The ‘transcendental philosophy’ HoënéWronski foresaw would provide ‘absolute laws’ underpinning ‘the whole of human knowledge’, and he later advised the Emperor that mathematics could provide the ultimate stability for the French Republic (1811: 185-8). Invested in a messianic conception of European destiny, he believed that Napoléon had heralded ‘a new epoch for the human race’, and his fall was due to an ‘invisible organization’ akin to the ‘Church of the Antichrist’ which sought to plunge the globe into the ‘hideous disorder’ of political anarchy (Hoëné-Wronski 1840: 72-3). Viewing Napoléon as a lost opportunity for the world, some authors attempted to rewrite history entirely. Louis Geoffroy’s Napoléon Apocryphe (1835) details the Emperor’s conquest of Russia, followed by his victory over Spain; Napoléon goes on to conquer Britain and North Africa, eliminate Prussia, partition Russia, and invade the Middle East via Constantinople; after the subsequent invasion and fall of the Far East and the rest of Africa, the whole of America is willingly subsumed into Napoléon’s new world order. However, all this was not simply a secular revolution but a combination of ‘Christianity and conquest […] formulated by two names: Christ and Napoléon’ (Geoffroy [1835] 1841: 278). Islam is abolished and the world’s Jews convert to Catholicism; when Napoléon dies in 1832, he is Emperor of a Christian universe. For Geoffroy, this history was an act of faith: ‘When I finished this book, I started to believe in it’ (ibid.: n. pag.).

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Less apocryphal, but equally spurious, was Robert Antoine de Beauterne’s contemporaneous Conversations religieuses de Napoléon; the author turns the Emperor into a Catholic icon, celebrating the ‘triumph of religion’ and its ‘definitive conquest of the soul of he who conquered the world’ (1840: iv). In this interpretation, Waterloo becomes Napoléon’s Golgotha and the exile on St Helena his spiritual redemption. After the July Revolution toppled the last of the French Bourbon monarchs in 1830, the ‘Citizen King’ Louis-Philippe sought to appease left-wing elements in the country. In 1840, royal permission was given for Napoléon’s earthly remains to return from St Helena to Paris and be interred in Les Invalides. Victor Hugo was among the crowd of ageing veterans and young devotees waiting for the cortege to arrive, and he observed the sun ‘doing its duty and magnificently appearing’ through the gloomy clouds just as Napoléon’s funeral carriage arrived (1840a: 21). Though the generation who fought in Napoléon’s wars was dying out, a new cadre of activists and writers were competing to claim the Emperor for their own ideologies – his symbolic return to France in 1840 coincided with a burgeoning of messianic literature. Amplifying Beauterne’s evangelical analogy, Simon Ganneau designated the battle of Waterloo as the martyrdom of a nation: ‘A people named France rose up and said: “All peoples are brothers”. And the Nations crucified France. Waterloo is the Golgotha-People. Waterloo is the Good Friday of the great Christ-People.’ (1843: 11-12) Turning the nation into a divine collective body was more than mere rhetoric: in 1838, Ganneau founded a new religion and proclaimed the beginning of the ‘era of Evadism’. This ‘hour of human virility’ began with the symbolic marriage of Mary-Eve (the ‘compound Genesiac female’) to Christ-Adam (the ‘compound Genesiac male’), forming the ‘Androgyne Evadam’ ([Ganneau] 1838: 3). Ganneau’s fusionism attempted to melt all opposites and antitheses into a single system; he took the title of ‘Mapah’, designating himself both mother and father, and his theology reconciled Christian pacifism with Napoleonic action: ‘Jesus and Napoléon: Jesus the Christ-Abel, Napoléon the Christ-Cain, great Beacons of the Centuries, Living Syntheses, sublime forms by which History has been transformed to return to the Unity-Adam’ (1843: 8). France was destined to provoke international redemption and return humanity to a state of prelapsarian oneness; Ganneau’s disciple Charles Caillaux prophesized that this would be the earthly utopia that the Revolution had promised: ‘the time of bread whiter than snow […] of revelation’ and ‘eternal peace’ (1840: 101). Ganneau was not the only Napoleonic messianist to found a religion. After experiencing a vision whilst visiting the battlefield of Waterloo in 1839,

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Andrzej Towiański established an esoteric cult devoted to the deliverance of the human race. Addressing a Slavic literary association in Paris, Towiański said that God had ‘honorifically’ designated the nineteenth century as the epoch in which the chosen nations would ‘wrest the [Holy] sceptre from the grip of terrestrial darkness’; he called upon ‘the spirit of Napoléon’ as the penultimate agent in the ‘luminous procession’ of saints who would inspire France and Poland to fulfil God’s will (1841: 10-14). This self-styled prophet quickly gathered a community of disciples around him, one of whom was the prominent Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Towiański not only performed a miraculous act of faith-healing on Mickiewicz’s wife but went on to stage a series of séances in which Napoléon and the Virgin Mary ‘spoke’ through him. Mickiewicz acted as host to these ceremonies, and used his academic position at the Sorbonne to oracularly glorify the Emperor’s career as ‘an extension of the work of Jesus Christ’. At one such lecture, lithographs depicting a vision of Napoléon at Waterloo were distributed to the audience: the Emperor wore a virginal communicant’s white veil, ‘his eyes turned towards heaven, his hands raised over a map of Europe’ – symbolic of his marriage to a unified continent. In contemplating this image, Mickiewicz ecstatically declaimed: ‘our souls have received a sacrament; we have celebrated one of the mysteries of the New Testament’ (1844: 292-301). Spiritual possession was a way of embodying the lost past, summoning its power to invigorate new creative acts. Whilst Mickiewicz took to signing his name ‘Adam-Napoléon’, the writer Gérard Labrunie reinvented his genealogy to become a descendent of the Roman emperor Nerva and the illegitimate son of Joseph Bonaparte. Renaming himself Gérard de Nerval, he identified with Christ and Napoléon as twin figures of messianic suffering: ‘Both wounded in their sides by a double mystery, / One spilled his blood to fecundate the Earth, / The other scattered into the sky the seeds of gods!’ (Nerval 1840: 735). Nerval suffered from schizophrenia and during a mental breakdown in 1841 he experienced a revelation concerning ‘the migration of souls’; he assured his friends that he was inhabited by Napoléon’s soul, which was ‘inspiring me and commanding me to do great things’ (1855: 489). This delusion of imperial reincarnation was not unique: the 1840s was a decade in which ‘more French madmen took themselves for Napoléon than for any other figure except Jesus Christ’ (Bell 2007: 306). Hoëné-Wronski was worried that no great redeemer had stepped forward to inherit Napoléon’s mission, so he spent the 1840s bombarding European monarchs with vast mathematical tracts that would guarantee harmonious social interaction. Roundly ignored by those in power, he tried to rekindle the Napoleonic spirit by forming the ‘Antinomian Union’: a ‘moral league’ of

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‘superior men’ who would steer humanity ‘towards its ultimate destiny on earth’ (Hoëné-Wronski 1848: 5). At the same time, Alphonse-Louis Constant was urging Europe to ‘hail the spirit of revolution that propels us into the future’ (1848: 218). He believed that revolutions were like ‘storms that purify the air’ and men must ‘bow their heads’ to God’s anarchistic will; those who challenge religious dogma or overturn the state are not ungodly or bloodthirsty but martyrs ‘for world peace and universal harmony’ (ibid.: 181-2). The Catholic Church strongly objected to the Romantics’ recruitment of Jesus Christ for Revolutionary causes; his name became attached to various utopian projects, from Napoleonic messianism to communism and anarchist violence. Any writer who exhibited heresy was forcefully denounced, and the Church’s ever-expanding Index Librorum Prohibitorum condemned each new brand of spiritualism and socialism – wellsprings from which Romantic literature drew increasing inspiration. Nineteenthcentury Romanticism espoused deeply unconventional beliefs, challenging political as well as religious orthodoxy. The individual and collective impact of the movement was taken more seriously than the loose coherence of its views might suggest. Many of the writers mentioned thus far spent time in gaols or in exile for their involvement with networks of liberals, nationalists, and republican revolutionaries. The fear that Romantics inspired in royalist spies and conservative authorities was not unfounded. Constant claimed that the teachings of the ‘Mapah’ Ganneau inadvertently unleashed the great political crisis of the mid-nineteenth century. Having ‘completely lost his head’ under the influence of Evadist propaganda, ‘a nervy, moronic youth named Sobrier’ believed that he was ‘predestined to save the world by provoking the supreme crisis of a universal revolution’. During a period of civil unrest in February 1848, this ‘ranting madman’ rushed around the streets of Paris to harangue passers-by and demand that they march on the government. He disappeared when soldiers arrived to disperse the crowd, but fired his pistol into their ranks as he ran off. ‘This shot initiated revolution, and it was fired by a madman […] Without knowing what he was doing, Sobrier gave a jolt to the world.’ (Constant 1860: 523-4) Barricades went up across Paris and after weeks of fighting, King Louis-Philippe fled the country, ending monarchical rule in France. Thereafter, a wave of revolutions spread across Europe; throughout 1848-9, political Romanticism hoped to realize its ideals. A series of bloody riots and street battles left sections of Paris in ruins and the country without clear authority. Ganneau told his followers that ‘he was Louis XVII, returned to regenerate the Earth’ (Constant 1860: 522) and

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prayed that France’s power vacuum would be filled by a leader worthy of messianic following. He demanded that the Pope abdicate to make way for his alternate religion, then begged Hugo to become ‘Under-God’ or ‘SpiritSaint’ of the Christ-People (Karr 1853: I/284-5). Though Hugo bemusedly refused this offer, he was a significant presence in French politics and believed that the 1848 revolution would enable the establishment of an ideal republican state. He described the rebels’ barricades as the demolition of history before future reconstruction: ‘It was a pile of rubbish and it was Mount Sinai’ (Hugo 1862: IX/13). The leader who eventually emerged triumphant from the revolutionary wreckage was Louis-Napoléon, the late Emperor’s nephew. Elected President of France’s Second Republic in December 1848, he staged a coup d’état in 1851 and became the Emperor Napoléon III the following year. Hoëné-Wronski immediately wrote a lengthy epistle to this new ruler, demanding that he treat ‘the supreme goal of nation-states, begun so stridently by the Emperor Napoléon’ as ‘a true providential mission’ to fulfil (1851: v). Yet despite a popular myth that Louis-Napoléon was a (literal) ‘reincarnation’ of his ‘supernatural’ uncle (Robb 2007: 304), he proved to have none of the charisma or vision of the first Emperor. Hugo dubbed him ‘Napoléon-le-petit’, a man who presided over a ‘horrible, hypocritical, and inhuman’ government and legislated ‘a constitution-gibbet on which hung our every liberty’ (1852: 113). Hugo was the son of one of Bonaparte’s generals and saw himself as ‘the Napoléon of the Romantic movement’ (Robb 1997: 265). He demanded that artists become martyrs: ‘Lay down the pen, and go where you hear the grapeshot. Here is a barricade: be there. Here is exile: accept it. Here is the scaffold: so be it’ (Hugo 1864: 543). Hugo had fought on the streets in 1848 and tried to incite an uprising in 1851, after which he went into exile in the Channel Islands. Other French writers faded from the scene with less grandeur. The ‘Mapah’ died in obscurity during Louis-Napoléon’s presidency, leaving his wife (whom he believed to be a reincarnation of Marie-Antoinette) a ‘captive’ in the ‘state of permanent somnambulism into which he had plunged her’ (Constant 1860: 565). Constant rejected Ganneau’s teaching as that of a ‘false god’ and warned against the ‘enthusiast manias’ such revolutionaries inspired: ‘they are contagious, and it is dangerous to stand too close to the abyss of dementia’ (ibid.: 523). Another sober reflection on the failed ambitions of reformists is found in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men, published soon after the revolutions of 1848-9. Napoléon is seen as the essence of the nineteenth century: enhancing the ‘mineral and animal force, insight and generalization’

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of his age, he combined both ‘natural’ and ‘intellectual’ power, ‘as if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher’ (Emerson 1850: 225). However, though Napoléon possessed demiurgic potential, his efforts at world-changing reform were doomed to fail: Here was an experiment, under the most favourable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed and so weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers. And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away like the smoke of his artillery, and left no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole contest for freedom was to be begun again (ibid.: 251).

Nevertheless, this defeat ‘was not Bonaparte’s fault’: the rise to prominence of any individual may refine their power but will simultaneously emphasize their faults. The Napoleonic project was ‘baulked and ruined’ by the fatalistic ‘nature of things, the eternal law of man and of the world’. The result, Emerson felt, would be the same ‘in a million [such] experiments’ (ibid.: 252-3). During the 1850-60s, European Romantics brooded on the fate of human greatness and collective action. In France, Constant hebraicized his name to Eliphas Lévi Zahed and retreated into the world of magic and the occult; the exiled Hugo continued to publish dazzlingly inventive condemnations of Napoléon III, demonstrating both the need for art’s sustained pressure on political life and his own belief in the artist’s superior position as social visionary. Though warriors such as Napoléon worked to demolish the old order by force, the reconstruction of humanity required a different form of greatness. Hugo classed the Emperor alongside other conquerors like Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar – ‘all these vast, ferocious men are vanishing’ and not ‘without a kind of pious terror can one behold [these] stars changing to spectres’ (1864: 567). Destroyers like Napoléon could be admired only ‘on condition of their disappearance’: ‘Make room for better, greater men!’ (ibid.: 538). Similarly, in an essay on Beethoven, Richard Wagner defined the hero not as a military figure but as ‘the complete man in full possession of the purely human feelings of love, suffering, and power, in their highest, most powerful degrees’ (1851: 491). For Romantics, art was to be the new instrument of revolution: ‘The swordsmen are gone, now is the

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time for thinkers’ (Hugo 1862: III/123). Honoré de Balzac stood a plaster statuette of Napoléon on his cabinet, placing beneath it a piece of paper saying: ‘What he failed to achieve with the sword, I will accomplish with the pen’ (Werdet 1859: 331). Perhaps the grandest articulation of this impulse is found in Hugo’s William Shakespeare (1864). This bizarre crash course in bowdlerized history and great literature canonizes the author’s preferred pantheon of writers to create a vast treatise on the nature of genius. Hugo believed that geniuses were enriched by a superabundance of ‘nature and humanity’: these ‘great souls’ are simultaneously men and ‘superhuman men’, charged with leading social and spiritual enlightenment (1864: 358). Artists’ work benef ited all humanity society: ‘Genius is not made for genius, it is made for man. Genius on earth is God giving himself. Whenever a masterpiece appears, a distribution of God is taking place. The masterpiece is a variety of the miracle’ (ibid.: 424). Hugo deemed that ‘solar men’ are apostles charged with ‘the transport of civilization’ through the centuries: artists, not soldiers, must drag the human race into the future (ibid.: 227-42).

1.3

Towards a new era

For the rest of the nineteenth century, the utopian society that Romantics had envisaged remained a remote ideal. Napoléon III fell from power during France’s disastrous war with Prussia and the German States in 1870-1. However, the first act of the Third Republic that replaced his imperial regime was to violently suppress a socialist uprising in Paris: government forces killed more communards and civilians in this one week than had died during the year-long ‘Terror’ of 1793-4. The brutal extermination of this short-lived ‘Commune’ in the nation’s capital drove a permanent wedge between French traditionalists and socialists, setting in motion bitter political rivalries that would resurface at regular intervals during the twentieth century. Karl Marx felt that the event revealed the ‘hideous face of bourgeois civilization’ and pointed to the co-ordination of French and German ruling classes to achieve a ‘bloody triumph over the self-sacrificing champions of a new and better society’ (1871: 201-2). The defeat of France enabled the unification of Germany in 1871, but the state that liberal intellectuals had dreamt of shaping throughout the century became increasingly conservative, combatting rising socialism with an increasing appeal to militaristic nationalism.

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In the last years of the nineteenth century, some artists felt that the bourgeois establishment had stifled the ambitions of more radical social reform. From the midst of what he considered a ‘tame, mediocre, emasculated society’, Friedrich Nietzsche looked back at the dynamism of the Napoleonic era and its enigmatic leader with a degree of longing: Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up; their precondition is always, historically and psychologically, that for a long time much has been gathered, stored up, saved up, and conserved for them [...] Once the tension in the mass has become too great, then the most accidental stimulus suffices to summon into the world the ‘genius’, the ‘deed’, the ‘great destiny’ (1889: 547-9).

The eponymous prophet of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an emblem of just such an ‘explosive’ agency and natural power: I love all those who are as heavy drops, falling one by one out of the dark cloud that hangs over men: they herald the advent of lightning, and, as heralds, they perish. Behold, I am a herald of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud; but this lightning is called overman (1883-5: 128).

As ‘overman’ (Übermensch), Zarathustra becomes the centre of endless wordplay on ‘overgoing’, ‘downgoing’, and ‘self-overcoming’ – a figure capable of rejuvenating the stagnant moral and social order of fin-de-siècle Europe. The French historian Frédéric Masson also expressed a deep personal connection to an era he was too young to have experienced. Born in 1847, he regarded himself as an orphan ‘adopted’ by the Republic after his father was killed in the 1848 Revolution (Masson 1894: ix-x). Writing at the end of the century, Masson recollected his childhood wonderment at hearing stories from Napoleonic veterans, touching their battle scars as they spoke: To this new gospel, the gospel of He who is no more – like that Other, the Son of Man, but who is Man itself – these witnesses bore the proof of their wounded bodies. [As they spoke,] their Holy tears fell on my forehead, baptizing me what I am and shall remain: a loyal believer (ibid.: xx-i).

The issue of faith is more prominent in Léon Bloy’s L’Âme de Napoléon (1912), which pursues the same line of Catholic interpretation as Beauterne in the 1840s:

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Napoléon is the Face of God in the darkness […] Napoléon is unexplainable and, without question, the most unexplainable of men, because he is, before all and above all, the Prefigurer of he who is to come and who is perhaps not far off, a prefigurer and a precursor very close to us, signified by all those extraordinary men who have preceded him throughout the whole of history (1912: 8-9).

Making spurious claims as to the Emperor’s Catholicism, Bloy believed that ‘History is like an immense liturgical text […] whose meaning remains whelmed in secrecy’; Napoléon is a herald of the Second Coming – the ‘union of symbols and fulfilment of every prophesy’ concealed within the divine course of human evolution (ibid.: 14-15, 58). Thanks to his bigoted attacks on numerous contemporary writers, Bloy was despised by the left wing as a ‘false prophet’, an ‘Apocalyptic prattler’, a ‘coprophore who jumbles symbols and mystical ejaculations’ (Suarès 1933: 34). Yet those who attacked him were just as keen to claim Napoléon for their own beliefs. André Suarès confessed that he felt drawn to the period of national history which had become legendary for its unfulfilled promise: ‘France cannot think of Napoléon without trembling; and in her trembling, as much as she regrets it, she is afraid of him – afraid of the longing she still has for him’ (1912: 11-12). Though the volume of Romantic literature on Napoléon had dwindled by the start of the twentieth century, the last expression of Napoleonic messianism was inspired by the Great War – an apocalypse no less significant than the French Revolution. This ‘storm’ that broke across Europe in 1914 was not the moral revolution that Nietzsche had imagined, but it profoundly altered the course of world history. The defeat of the Central Powers in 1918 triggered the collapse of four world empires: those of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Ottoman Turkey, and Russia. Only after the Great War were the houses of Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Osman, and Romanov overthrown – their respective emperors being direct descendants of those who Napoléon had fought a century earlier in what had (until 1914) been known as the (first) ‘Great War’. When politicians met to discuss the future of Europe in 1919, the ‘great model’ they had in mind was the Congress of Vienna – a series of meetings undertaken by the Allied powers after Napoléon’s defeat. It was imperative that ‘something better’ emerge from the catastrophe of 1914-18 – this was a chance for ‘European civilization’ to right the wrongs of a century of lost opportunities (Cooper/MacMillan 2009: 126). Indeed, the causes of the 1914 war could be traced back to the treaties of 1814-15:

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The Vienna settlement imposed an orthodoxy which not only denied political existence to many nations; it enshrined a particularly stultified form of monarchical government; institutionalized social hierarchies as rigid as any that had existed under the ancien regime; and preserved archaic disabilities […] By excluding whole classes and nations from a share in its benef its, this system nurtured envy and resentment, which flourished into socialism and aggressive nationalism (Zamoyski 2007: 569).

In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles and the formation of the League of Nations (the forerunner of the United Nations) were attempts to diffuse the effects of these grievances that had built up throughout the nineteenth century. In the wake of the Great War, many writers reflected on the destiny of Europe. Just as Lord Byron began his post-Napoleonic epic Don Juan with the words ‘I want a hero’ (1819-24: I/3), so Elie Faure’s post-war study of Napoléon is dedicated ‘To he, whoever he may be, among the leaders of the universal revolution, whatever form it may take, who will possess the divine virtue to impose upon it the order which it will establish in his heart’ (1921: n. pag.). Writing in the immediate aftermath of Napoléon’s fall, Byron was searching for a subject worthy of admiration; writing exactly 100 years after the death of the Emperor, Faure looks back to the French Revolution to prophesize a future messiah. Faure calls Napoléon ‘a poet of action’ whose achievements were ‘the most decisive in the spiritual history of humanity’ since those of Christ. Both men were deemed ‘immoral’ because they ‘overthrew every social habit and prejudice of an age, dissolved and dispersed families, and precipitated the whole world into an abyss of war, glory, misery, and illusion’ (ibid.: 10). Echoing the solar imagery of Zarathustra, Faure envisions Napoléon as an ‘overman’ capable of ‘breaking down the gates before the sun’ (ibid.: 24). As a Nietzschean prophet, Napoléon ‘sanctifies the morality of conflict and condemns the immorality of ease’, complacency being a bourgeois quality that fosters oppressive social systems and moral stagnation. Faure uses Nietzsche’s phrase ‘beyond good and evil’ to describe Napoléon as a man who tries ‘to build the world after [his own] vision’ (ibid.: 260-3). Faure viewed this construction of a new world as a parallel to artistic endeavour: ‘art is action which is dreamed, action is art which is lived’ (ibid.: 235). As such, Faure variously calls Napoléon a poet, a conductor, a symphonist, a painter, a sculptor, a storm, and a demiurge; France becomes his musical instrument, his orchestra, and even his horse. The era’s whirlwind of social and political change is seen as work of musical

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harmonization: Bonaparte was a composer-conductor of ‘Napoleonic symphonies’ (ibid.: 209). Genius enabled him to communicate this spirit of transformation to others, endowing society with an unprecedented sense of collective agency: The day when a few people realized that one man had been able to grow to unlimited heights, to raise men above themselves, to let loose upon the world an impetuous stream of new forces and new ideas – and all this against a social system and, above all, a moral order which were age-old – Napoléon’s spiritual sphere of attraction really began to take effect (ibid.: 263).

Napoléon represents not a simplistic national figurehead or ideal political leader but a symbol of transcendent forces that lie within the individual – he demonstrated the ‘central force’ that lies within everyone but that we ‘do not know how to use’ (ibid.: 138). Faure demonstrates his argument by pointing to the diverse artistic, social, and ideological impact of Napoléon over the intervening century: from the music of Beethoven to the philosophy of Nietzsche. Faure also believed that Napoléon was essentially paradoxical: From a moral point of view, Napoléon is surely the Antichrist, as the disciples of Christ conceived of the Antichrist. And yet, in the depths of reality, he is undoubtedly the closest to Christ than was the most powerful of his disciples […] These two are the only known shades of Prometheus on Earth (ibid.: 9-11).

It was Napoléon’s chimerical dream of achieving peace by waging war that made him ‘the fraternal antithesis of Christ’; he was a ‘free’ agent, yet made a ‘slave’ by his ambition (ibid.: 185, 205). Yet it is precisely this stubbornness in the face of overwhelming odds that Faure admires; the tragedy of Napoléon’s forlorn pursuit was the basis of his continued greatness and relevance to the modern world: He forged ahead, and, despite everything – under grapeshot and in snow, even when he was crushing the people at the same time as he was crushing the old framework which wanted them imprisoned – he carried the new hope of mankind, an illusion still perhaps, but for that very reason a force, and exactly the force of the century at the head of which he was marching (ibid.: 160).

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45

Cinema and the Napoleonic project

In order to continue this Napoleonic momentum into the twentieth century, a new solution to cultural divisions must be found. At the end of the nineteenth century, intellectuals like Edouard Schuré viewed orthodoxy as a barrier to truth: the ‘salvation of humanity’ depended on the ‘conciliation and synthesis’ of all the world’s major religions (1889: 16). Only through this union of divergent positions could a ‘science of the spirit’ prevail, paving the way for international understanding (Schuré 1912: 435). The views of such intellectuals were not far removed from the language of Ganneau’s fusionism of the 1840s; even if individual religions were deemed to be defunct, the religious impulse was not. Hugo wrote that ‘a religion is a translation’ but insisted a less distorted path must be found to access the divine reality behind humanity’s religious articulation (1863-4: 1085). Pursuing the same argument after the cataclysm of the Great War, Abel Gance wrote that Christ’s reliance on words was a source of profound regret and necessarily limited the extent to which his ideas could be understood (1930: 69). Bound by cultural specificity, written language was an outdated instrument; if mankind was to shed its materialistic individualism and achieve genuine social reform, it must find a means to speak ‘directly with the human spirit’ (ibid.: 145). Gance entered the film industry as an actor in 1909, but within three years he had established himself as a scenarist and director. He swiftly embraced cinema as a ‘faith’ whose strength was growing throughout the world (Gance 1912: 10). After achieving commercial success with a number of quickly made melodramas during the early 1910s, Gance began to conceive projects of a considerably larger scale. If the latest films from America (particularly those by Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith) demonstrated the technical possibilities of the medium, the Great War provided the motive to undertake weightier subject matter. Accordingly, in the summer of 1917, Gance outlined a trilogy of films to be based on the war and its (imagined) aftermath: J’accuse, Les Cicatrices, and La Société des Nations. Simultaneously, he planned a second trilogy focused on religious themes: Ecce Homo, Les Atlantes, and La Fin du Monde. Both series were to demonstrate the disastrous consequences of the world’s political shortsightedness and spiritual cynicism and to suggest a new way forward for the rebuilding of society on universal values. The first of these films to go into production was Ecce Homo (1918), in which the modern-day prophet Novalic (Albert t’Serstevens) preaches pacifism and the reconciliation of world philosophies. He is initially greeted

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with derision by the materialistic populace; however, by translating his ideas into works of cinema, he is eventually able to convince the crowd of his message. Though Gance abandoned Ecce Homo before it was completed, another prophetic figure appears in J’accuse – his next completed project. The horrors of the Great War turn the pacif ist poet Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé) from a naïve dreamer into a radical visionary. Like Novalic’s cinematized ideology, Jean’s literature is transformed into imagery; Gance thus uses cinematic technique to link the mission of the on-screen visionary to his own as filmmaker. At the end of J’accuse, Jean voices the filmmaker’s own accusations against the complacent civilian population who are unworthy of the millions who have died for their sake. The film climaxes with a terrifying sequence in which thousands of dead soldiers rise from their graves and confront the living in order to make them change their lives. Gance juxtaposes a shot of the marching dead with footage of the victory parade through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris after the Great War. This ironic contrast pits the superficial pomp of official celebration against the reality of death and destruction. The Arc was commissioned by Napoléon to memorialize a generation of men and women who had fought for a recognizable purpose and to cement the link between the French Revolution and the wars he continued in its name. Napoléon’s remains had passed under the arch in 1840, just as the body of Victor Hugo had lain in state there in 1885. Gance saw the Europe of 1919 as an unworthy successor to the Europe commemorated by Napoléon’s monument. In his next film, La Roue, Gance’s characters are weighed down by the fatalities of economic and psychological circumstance; narratively and aesthetically, they are unable to escape the titular ‘wheel’ of fate, which condemns them to forever repeat their mistakes. La Roue points to a much wider cultural concern with a world that seems incapable of breaking free from its own past. The tremendous commercial success of J’accuse and the critical impact of La Roue enabled Gance to embark on the largest project of his career. In a spate of interviews and public speeches during the mid-1920s, the filmmaker set out his view of cinema as the ultimate synthesis of ideas, a medium that offered a chance to reimagine human communication and overcome cultural sterility. Using rhetorical enthusiasm not dissimilar to Ganneau’s annunciation of the ‘era of Evadism’ in 1838, or Constant’s call for revolution in 1848, Gance proclaimed the arrival of ‘the Time of the Image’ in 1927: Every legend, every mythology and every myth, every founder of religion and every religion itself, every great figure of history, every tangible echo of

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human imagination across the millennia – each and every one awaits their luminous resurrection and the heroes jostle at our doors to enter (1927c: 96).

Acknowledging that the twentieth century might dismiss such a view as a ‘Hugo-esque fantasy’, Gance nevertheless believed that cinema would offer the chance for a new Homer to tell a modern Iliad or Odyssey (ibid.). Film was uniquely capable of reigniting social idealism in the wake of global catastrophe, finding the ideal expression for Faure’s investment in the powerful ‘illusion’ of Napoleonic hope. Gance wrote: ‘We’re charging on horses we’ve fashioned from clouds, and when we fight it’s to force reality to become a dream.’ Faith was required to sustain this transformative force: ‘those who don’t believe in cinema’ will fail to see ‘the most conclusive proof’ of its vision (ibid.: 97). Napoléon was to be the ultimate expression of Gance’s belief in cinema as both art and religion. Gance counted Napoléon among the ‘great line of idealist republicans, the first of whom was Christ’ (1927f). He was a successor to the visionaries in Ecce Homo and J’accuse and no less defined by predetermined fate than the characters of La Roue. It was precisely because Napoléon didn’t represent any specific political party that Gance saw him as a prophetic figure. As the literature of the nineteenth-century century amply demonstrated, the Emperor had come to embody any number of conflicting desires and forms of representation: he was a figure who embodied the synthesis, and transcendence, of divergent ideas. Whilst Napoléon had waged war in order to create a united Europe, Gance’s own revolution would be through art. On 11 November 1924, exactly six years after the end of the Great War, Gance recorded a conversation about his forthcoming film with its chief financier, Hugo Stinnes. Both men wanted to emphasize Napoléon’s ‘pacifist work’ rather than his military career, and Gance noted with approval that Stinnes ‘understood Bonaparte’s basic psychology: he did not like war, but was trying to create a universal republic’ (1924-7). Less understanding was the right-wing French press, which in early 1924 condemned Napoléon for being funded by foreigners like the Russian Vladimir Wengeroff and the German Stinnes. The Wengeroff-Stinnes company (abbreviated to Westi) was built on industrial profits from France’s recent military enemy, and xenophobic journalists found the notion that Germans would ‘profit’ from ‘one of our most glorious figures’ both ‘exploitative’ and ‘repugnant’ (L’Eclair 1924: 1). There was a fierce exchange of views in the press, and Gance’s financial administrator Edouard de Bersaucourt had to publish an explanatory letter to allay accusations of a ‘German influence’ on the film (1924: 1). After accusations of being Francophobic, François Coty worried that Napoléon would be unpalatably Francophile by

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glorifying military conquest (1925: 1). Gance responded by saying that J’accuse offered ‘sufficient vindication’ of his anti-war credentials (1925d). Napoléon was inspired by ‘the War, the Ocean, and Great Art’: rather than pursuing a ‘political’ agenda, the film was propaganda for cinema itself (Gance 1924b). In order to ‘conclusively’ counter those who believed that Napoléon would be a work of ‘French imperialism’, Gance planned to rerelease J’accuse through the League of Nations in order to promote the cause of pacifism (1924f). In fact, internationalism was at the heart of Gance’s Napoleonic project. Both the first-choice actors for the young Napoléon (Nicolas Roudenko) and his adult incarnation (Ivan Mosjoukine) were Russian. Even after Mosjoukine reluctantly turned down the lead role, the film counted a large number of émigrés among its cast and crew. Furthermore, when Westi collapsed in the spring of 1925, Napoléon was taken over by the Société Générale des Films (sgf) – a company founded by another Russian, Jacques Grinieff. As Gance pointed out, the financial basis of Napoléon was as multinational as its personnel, forming ‘an International Society’ (1925c, 1925e). Whilst Napoléon had sought to federalize the political map of Europe in the 1800s, Gance had similarly ambitious plans for the continent’s industrial infrastructure in the 1920s. In 1927, he invited various European film companies to form a production association called ‘Occident’, the first of other continental syndicates that would ultimately constitute an ‘International Film League’. As Hoëné-Wronski’s ‘Antinomian Union’ attempted to shape world events in the 1840s, so Gance envisaged an ‘Academy of Ten’ in the 1920s: an elite cadre of European filmmakers whose work would form the artistic and moral basis of world cinema. The chief project for this association was Les Grands Initiés, a series of films depicting the prophets of major religions. Inspired by Schuré’s 1889 study of the same name, Gance’s huge project would demonstrate the commonality of diverse belief systems to promote universal confraternity: millions of spectators could experience films ‘of the most profound religious nature’, and the series would be ‘a new gospel for the eyes’ (Gance 1927i). Like many intellectuals in the post-war years, Gance rejected ‘the politics of politicians’ (Parker 1998: 271) and sought to use art to engage directly with an international public. Just as Hoëné-Wronski had done a century earlier, Gance pestered politicians with grandiose formulae for world peace. In May 1928, he sent a lengthy document to the League of Nations, proposing the creation of a ‘Cinematographic Section’ in their organization (Gance 1928a). Not only would this further the anti-war cause to which the League was expressly committed, it would also cinematize the process of pacifism itself. Gance envisioned that his cinematic wing would produce and distribute a new brand of ‘world cinema’ dedicated to the overthrow of social prejudice,

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industrial self-interest, and governmental interference across the globe. Films would be used as instruments of universal education and cultural reconciliation. Gance even commissioned a statistical survey to substantiate his belief that the world was ready to receive his message of universal fraternity, and wrote to a series of financial institutions to convince them to back his grandiose project. His view was that cinema ‘belongs to the whole world’; just as every race and religion had the ‘duty’ to use film art ‘to explore the depths of their existence’, so Gance believed that governments were morally obliged to offer economic support for his scheme (1928f). Ecce Homo was the first of many religiose projects in which Gance aimed to ‘give a god back to mankind’ through cinema (1976). The director himself went on to play the prophet Jean Novalic in his first sound film, La Fin du Monde (1930); Gance’s appearance as the crucified Christ in the opening depiction of a passion play overtly signals his messianic conception of cinema. Similarly, in the post-apocalyptic narrative of his unrealized film La Divine Tragédie (1947-51), the last surviving members of the human race are confronted by a prophet who projects the life of Christ onto a Turin Shroud-like garment. Gance believed that a cinematized Passion was ‘the sole possible ideographic symbol of deliverance’ for the redemption of modern man (1949: 34). Only through its visual mediation could Christ’s message of fraternity be truly convincing to the masses: on- and off-screen audiences of La Divine Tragédie must accept the necessity for social change to advance to a better future. Characteristic of all these projects is their incomplete status: Ecce Homo was never finished, La Fin du Monde was taken out of Gance’s hands, and La Divine Tragédie remained unrealized. The various trilogies and series Gance envisioned from the 1910s to the 1920s seldom existed beyond paper proposals. Despite being the first instalment of an unmade series, Napoléon is therefore still the most complete evidence of Gance’s vision of the prophetic hero and his cinematic representation.

1.5

Historiography as ritual

In his cinematic project, Gance’s historiographical method continued the Romantic view of the historian as a kind of magus – a conduit for spiritual revivification. For Carlyle, writing history involved ‘a double journey’: ‘backward in time and downward into the self, a descent simultaneously into the underworld of the historical past and to [the author’s] own interior life.’ He composed his work in ‘a strange, self-induced state of hyper-alertness and somnambulance, a kind of feverish self-consciousness’:

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However eccentric, Carlyle’s method of composition is as old as that of the Hebrew prophets and ancient Bards, for whom memory did its labour of sorting and synthesizing in a state of inspiration or semi-trance. Carlyle’s great works of imaginative synthesis […] are shaped not as reasoned arguments but like controlled dreams in which recurrent symbols do the work of discursive logic. Writing, particularly the writing of history, always necessitates for Carlyle a kind of willed fellowship with the dead (Rosenberg 2005: 14).

In writing his account of the French Revolution, Jules Michelet wrote that he ‘exhumed’ the dead to enable them to live ‘a second life’; works of history became a ‘shared’ space where the living and the dead could cohabit (1875-6: I/iv). Hugo took this idea literally; in a series of séance sessions conducted on the island of Jersey, he interviewed departed souls from the Revolution: Marat, Robespierre, and Charlotte Corday all ‘visited’ in 1853. Gance employed a similar methodology in the creation of Napoléon. Thanks to his friendship with curator Georges d’Esparbès, Gance was able to research and write his screenplay at the palace of Fontainebleau, where Napoléon had resided as Emperor. Scripted in the very rooms its subject had inhabited, Napoléon sought to exploit the aura of the past from the moment of its inception. Witnesses to Gance’s creative process at Fontainebleau claimed that ‘the intense reverberation’ of ‘the soul of the lost Empire’ could still be felt. Historical research was transformed into an ‘evocation of the afterlife’ that could be ‘mistaken for a spiritualist séance’: d’Esparbès was a ‘medium’, initiating Gance into the ‘formidable mysteries’ of Napoleonic invocation (Arroy/Raynaud 1929: 34). This was not an isolated effort to channel nineteenth-century spirits in the post-war world. Though he died in 1885, Hugo was made the foreign ambassador of the Vietnamese Caodai religion after his soul contacted its leaders via a séance in 1926 to approve their revolutionary ambitions (Gobron 1949: 59-67). Gance himself discussed the possibility of his being a reincarnation of Hugo (Brownlow [1983] 2004: 24) – a logical extension of faith in literary kinship. According to one recent interpretation, Gance’s film should also credit its success to astrological correspondence: 1927 was the year ‘when transiting Neptune conjuncted [sic] the Sun in Napoléon’s birth chart and the long-deceased Emperor enjoyed a glamorous renaissance’ (Greene 2000: 262). Such views may be entirely fanciful, but they nevertheless capture the kind of willed susceptibility to history’s literal presence within the contemporary world. In late 1924, a startled museum attendant at Fontainebleau was woken one night by a figure he took to be the ghost of Napoléon; the spirit reprimanded him for being asleep on duty, and then marched into the

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palace. In fact, this was Albert Dieudonné turning up in costume to clinch the lead role for the film (Brownlow [1983] 2004: 51-3). Having made a ferocious effort of preparation for the part of Bonaparte, Dieudonné embodied exactly the kind of enthusiasm Gance wanted everyone working on the film to possess. In January 1925, the director delivered a pre-written address to all those involved in Napoléon to insist they maintain an elevated spiritual concentration across every aspect of artistic production. His actors should do more than simply ‘rediscover’ their ancestors by reperforming history: the cast would ‘resurrect’ the consciousness and spirit of the Napoleonic era. This mass cinematic reincarnation would render the world on-screen ‘indistinguishable’ from the reality of a long-lost past; capturing the ‘flame’ and ‘madness’ of the Revolution, their actions would generate a force ‘capable of sweeping away all critical barriers’ and infusing spectators with the power of the world’s ‘most miraculous instrument of glory’ (Gance 1924e). When the production moved to Corsica in the spring of 1925, the island’s most famous son was still alive in the public imagination. Gance and his crew arrived during the run-up to elections in Ajaccio, and Dieudonné was asked not to wear his Napoleonic hat off-camera because he might excite the population into a state of civil disorder (Scize 1925: 1466). The mayor was campaigning against the Bonapartist party, whose popular support was evident among Gance’s local extras: many refused to shout ‘Death to Napoléon Bonaparte!’ during the filming of their crowd scenes. Gance embraced the opportunity to engage with the omnipresent past: he was able to film scenes in the exact locations in which they had taken place, and one of his extras proved to be the grandson of a shepherd who had helped Napoléon escape from royalist troops in 1792. Dieudonné couldn’t help but follow suit: just as he had haunted the elderly guard at Fontainebleau, so his surprise appearance in uniform was taken as a genuine apparition by some Corsicans (Arroy 1927a: 54-6). At the historical home of the Bonaparte family, Dieudonné was greeted by a swarm of bees – fulfilling a local legend that these insects (the Emperor’s personal emblem) would surround Napoléon whenever he returned to the island. Inevitably, the excitement provoked by Gance’s production helped the Corsican Bonapartist party win the election; a popular vote subsequently made Dieudonné an honorary citizen of Ajaccio (Brownlow [1983] 2004: 77-81). Throughout the filming of Napoléon, observers were struck by Gance’s uncanny ability to inject his cast and crew with collective enthusiasm. Léon-Gabriel Gros wrote: One wave of a magic wand and a world reappears. We are no longer in 1926, but in an era when life is filled with hope. The Revolution is

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still young. Gance presides over this birth of Christ, orchestrating the Napoleonic era like a god (1926).

In likening Gance to a conducting divinity, Gros recalls numerous nineteenth-century mythologizations of great composers: Giuseppe Verdi became an ‘Assyrian god’ or Moses when standing at the podium, whilst Wagner was referred to as Jehovah in command of his orchestra (Conrad 2011: 229). By playing the role of Saint-Just in Napoléon, Gance was both a conductor of the crowd and a participant in its midst. Not only might the present witness the past, but vice versa. Gance begins Napoléon with a quotation from the memoirs of Joseph Bonaparte, in which the Emperor seemingly addresses the filmmaker 100 years in advance: ‘I should like to witness my posterity, and discover what a poet would make me feel, think, and say.’ (1853-4: I/38) Gance explained that filmmaking was a form of collaboration between the living and the dead: I was ruled by history. It was not I who made this great film, but Bonaparte himself. I only had to draw from the incredible images which he himself had given me while filming it. The warm contact he had established between himself and the whole of France was still so alive that I couldn’t tell whether those images weren’t actually being photographed as I was filming them (1980).

Later in Napoléon, Gance introduces us to the Bonapartes’ home on Corsica with a close-up of a commemorative plaque on its wall. A slow dissolve buries this twentieth-century totem beneath a large window-box of flowers; this shot then dissolves into a long-shot of the entire building, the shutters of which are opened by the Bonaparte family. This beautiful scene gently transports us from the present-day into the eighteenth century, revealing a past that is equally alive. It is no wonder that Emile Vuillermoz saw Napoléon as a kind of ‘time machine’ (1926): Gance’s film lets us experience history in the present tense. When Faure saw Napoléon for the first time, Dieudonné’s interpretation provoked an ‘anxiety’ that was as ‘uncanny’ as any resurrection: the cinematic creation was more powerful than reality. ‘If the real Bonaparte returned’, Faure wrote, ‘I would recognize him only if he resembled Dieudonné. If he didn’t, I would ask the impostor to be on his way […] Napoléon’s spirit lives again in this actor’ (1927: 192). Such remarks were common; many contemporary articles refer not to actor and character separately but to a co-existent ‘Dieudonné-Napoléon’. Dieudonné further blurred the lines between past and present realities in a novel published in 1928. Le Tzar Napoléon details the

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production of a film about Napoléon shot in the midst of civil unrest in the Soviet Ukraine. The role of the Emperor is given to a Russian émigré actor, who turns out to be Alexei Nikolayevich Romanov: the sole heir of Tsar Nicholas II, who has miraculously survived the execution of his family at Ekaterinburg in 1918. When the news is discovered, the cossacks serving as extras on the film become a private army and encourage the heir’s desire to assume the imperial mantle and eliminate Bolshevik rule. Amid the turmoil of the Russian Civil War, Alexei is offered the throne of the breakaway nation of Ukraine. His cause is backed by Basil Bankroff, a British spy who seeks to establish a puppet state in Eastern Europe that will allow colonial access to Constantinople and Asia. Despite a seemingly pro-tsarist stance, Dieudonné ends his novel by echoing the socialist tone of Gance’s J’accuse in a condemnation of capitalist politics: The fate of nations is decided in the boardroom, not on the battlefield. [Stock-marketers] mastermind worldwide hecatombs so they can rob the dead, yet they maintain a respectable distance from their ossuary: credulous nations continue to devour one another without ever understanding why (1928: 246-7).

Alexei goes from being ‘the emperor of cinema’ to ‘the king of a scrap-heap’: his crown is ‘always a prop’, rendered impotent by modern politics. Only Bankroff possesses true power, a man ‘as invisible as God’ who ‘rules the world’ (ibid.: 247-8). Gance’s Napoleonic project must be understood as a response to this context of post-war despondency. Cinema was to be a secular faith, free from the materialism and self-interest evidenced by the plutocrats and politicians who had plunged the world into war. Through a ritualized evocation of the past, audiences would be encouraged to realize the unfulfilled promises of history. It is for this reason that Gance placed such religious effort into the reanimation of the Napoleonic era. When Jean Arroy emerged from the eighteen-month-long production of Napoléon, he felt his eyes blinking in the unaccustomed light of reality: Modern Paris seems dull, lugubrious. It lacks any sense of purpose in life. We have been jettisoned in an alien century. We are no longer of our time; we live in the past. But when we encounter Gance, the visions of our dreams trail in his wake (1927a: 133).

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Napoléon was to reconnect the modern world with its mythical past: the film would be an ‘overture’ to a new Iliad, ‘the Marseillaise of the image’ (Gance 1927?).

1.6 Summary By the dawn of the twentieth century, the Napoleonic legacy incorporated a tremendous variety of radical causes, most often characterized by internationalism, liberalism, and socialism. Napoléon had come to be regarded as ‘the Achilles, the Mercury, and the Proteus of the modern world’ (Rose 1901: I/505-6). It was this mythic synthesis of legendary qualities that drew Gance to the Napoleonic legend. ‘I did not want to serve any political party’, he stated, ‘I say simply that Napoléon is one of the most outstanding figures of humanity’ (Gance 1927f). As the last in a long lineage of Romantic messianism, Napoléon strikes some as an absolute stranger to the twenty-first century: I find it impossible, at such a chronological and cultural remove from Gance, not to say Napoléon, to regard Napoléon as any kind of living political or moral document. It is an extraordinary artefact from another culture, a mythology as remarkable and as alien as the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Icelandic Eddas (Greydanus 2004).

Though its Napoleonic enthusiasm may derive from a previous century, Napoléon embraces the possibilities of twentieth-century cinematic art. Gance wanted his film to inspire audiences with an energetic desire for social change in the wake of the Great War: ‘it is a work whose thesis aims to show the actuality of Bonaparte’s European designs at a time when the old continent, bled to death by a fratricidal conflict, sought in vain for reasons to hope’ (Icart 1983: 180). Gance’s Bonaparte is a symbol of elemental forces at work in the human psyche: the desire to transgress, the will to change society, the belief in individual and world destiny, the ability to embrace the universal. These were values drawn from the Romantic era but designed to reshape the modern world.

2.

Shaping expectations: The young Napoléon Bonaparte

The man is revealed in his childhood, if one is prepared to judge men by the passion betrayed in their glance, and not by the docility they show on their benches at school. Napoléon appeared in his savage pride, a sign of the greatness which already marked him as a child; equally, he took the lead in any game – the role of chief, his clothes torn, his mouth bloody; or, his loneliness and silence in the midst of laughter and noise. Beaten until he bled, he never cries out or weeps. Innocent, he never speaks up. He is bullied, he is abused, he keeps his teeth clenched (Faure 1921: 35).

2.1 Introduction My chronological survey of Napoléon begins with the opening scenes, set during Bonaparte’s boyhood days at Brienne College. This was a military academy the child had joined in early 1779, having been sent by his parents to the mainland from the island of Corsica at the age of nine. Gance’s scenes are set in 1783, the year before Bonaparte left Brienne for the Ecole Militaire in Paris. This prologue establishes a number of aesthetic and narrative ideas that are developed over the course of the film. After examining the intellectual impetus behind the cinematic techniques visible in these scenes, I will explore how Gance’s visual language and manipulation of historical evidence produces an engaging characterization of the young Bonaparte (Nicolas Roudenko). I aim to highlight the ways in which dramatic irony creates both objective distance to, and subjective involvement with, this central figure – and the effects of this ambiguity on our understanding of character and narrative. Far from offering a ‘banal’ (Thomson 1994: 273) or ‘psychologically simplistic’ (Andrew 1999: 44) portrait, Gance produces a complex interpretive experience for audiences.

2.2

Cinema as experiential art

Gance’s f ilmmaking techniques in Napoléon must be understood in conjunction with the nature of the cinematic experience in the silent era. Between the late nineteenth century and the universal adoption of sound

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in the 1930s, live performance was standard practice in film venues. The type of accompaniment varied hugely, both in scale and in quality: bands and orchestras, soloists and singers, narrators and showmen all featured in the 1900s. Even in those sites that lacked any form of music, there was the presence of the audience itself – often far from passive in its involvement with the drama on the screen. By the 1910s, larger and more permanent theatres were being built to accommodate the industry’s expanding infrastructure, whilst the length of films was also growing with the rise of the feature presentation. In these circumstances, increasing importance was placed on providing music that could support and enhance the drama on screen (as well as trying to silence audiences to concentrate their attention on the film). Premieres became chances to show off the commercial heft and cultural importance of cinema, which still struggled to be taken as a serious art form by many commentators; producers engaged composers to arrange or compose appropriate music for films, and the resulting scores would be played by orchestras (and even choirs). For general distribution, most major towns and cities would be able to provide substantial groups of musicians to perform music in theatres, whilst some films would even tour with an orchestra to play a set score. Such was the case with D.W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance (1916), for which the director travelled across America, transforming the space of each successive theatre into an ideal audio-visual environment for audiences to experience the film. When such obsessive personal effort or the corporate clout of studios could not provide orchestral backing, films were nevertheless rarely left unaccompanied. Even the humblest cinema establishment sought to offer a small ensemble or soloist. There were also those individual exhibitors who travelled through rural regions with a projector and screen; they would bring to life the films they showed by narrating the action in their own dramatic fashion. All of this is not to say that the music was uniformly great or even adequately performed (the problem of inappropriate accompaniment was a common topic of debate in the contemporary trade press) but that there was invariably a live element to cinematic exhibition – even if that element was the collective presence of an audience. In the silent era, the experience of film went beyond the frame and into the auditorium itself. By the 1920s, the biggest cinemas could seat thousands (rather than hundreds) of people in conditions that matched even the most established of theatres or opera houses. Just as cinema was undergoing physical and commercial expansion, so the theoretical and aesthetic dimensions of film were also developing. Fin-de-siècle Paris had attracted an international

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gathering of creative minds, and the city was a melting pot into which an incredible array of artistic ideas mingled and multiplied. A generation of artists and intellectuals born in the last decades of the nineteenth century had become obsessed by cinema at the start of the twentieth. The impulses of Romanticism and Modernism converged in the new medium, and an outpouring of visionary ideas came from the pens of luminaries like the Italian musicologist Ricciotto Canudo, French art historian Elie Faure, and Swiss author Blaise Cendrars. In France, filmmakers like Marcel L’Herbier, Jean Epstein, and Gance began to realize the far-reaching possibilities of cinema. Gance in particular sought to produce work that was both artistically meaningful and commercially accessible to international audiences. Pursuing this ambition, Gance and his circle were deeply indebted to the work of Wagner. The composer’s conception of the ‘Art of the Future’ had been ‘music-drama’, the creative synthesis of all the arts. Gance envisioned cinema as ‘the second stage of the Art of the Future’ – the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk (1930: 73). Perhaps the main reason why Wagnerian music-drama was so widely discussed in the early 1900s, and so pertinent to the theorization of filmmaking, was its insistence on the ritualistic aspect of art. Wagner believed in the redemptive power of music to transform human conscience and human society. Opera was to provide an immersive and all-encompassing spiritual experience for audiences. Such an effect could not be achieved in existing theatres, which emphasized the glamour and luxury of the setting as much as the world on stage: seating tiers were a visible reminder of the divisions of class and wealth, whilst houselights remained on during performances for the audience members to gossip and gaze at one another. In French ‘grand opera’, even the coherence and continuity of the music was interrupted by the elaborate ballet sequences that composers were forced to include; these provided erotic enticement for male patrons, many of whom were busy having dinner during the first act and only turned up in time to see the young female dancers in the second. Wagner reformed both the text of operatic music and the context in which it was seen, realizing his ambitions in the construction of a purpose-built theatre at Bayreuth in southern Germany. The Festspielhaus was completed in 1876 and featured a radical new design: Wagner removed all boxes and galleries to provide a classless seating arrangement and consistent views; he insisted upon absolute darkness in the auditorium during the performance; and he concealed the orchestra’s pit beneath the stage. Thus, all barriers between audience and art were abolished and all aesthetic and social distractions suppressed in order to privilege the drama and enable the crowd to become totally absorbed

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in the world on stage. In virtually every respect, therefore, the theatre at Bayreuth is the perfect design for a cinema. This dream of ritualistic art was picked up with unbounded enthusiasm by Gance during the 1910s and 1920s. Like Wagner, he was inspired by Schopenhauer’s concept of a realm of ‘noumenal oneness’ – that aspect of reality that was outside time and space, inaccessible to our (phenomenal) sensory or (subjective) intellectual apparatus. The only way to overcome the limitations of our reasoning and reveal ‘the inner being, the in-itself, of the world’ was through music, which Schopenhauer saw as a ‘universal language’ and a direct expression of the noumenon ([1818] 1969: I/260-4). This idea that art ‘galvanizes awareness of the world’s essential Oneness’ (Foster 1999: 224) paralleled dharmic conceptions of art as a kind of selfabnegation that would enable social harmony. Equally, it was reminiscent of Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime experience, where ‘the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it’ (1758: 95-6). Though Wagner felt that music-drama could access such hidden truths in specialized theatres, Gance believed that film could communicate them to far larger audiences through modern cinemas. Central to Gance’s artistic ideology was his obsession with light itself. He embraced the mysticism of Jacob Böhme, who experienced a revelation when staring into a beam of sunlight in 1600. Böhme’s writing rang with the cry: ‘Make me light’ ([1624] 1978: 57). For him, light was ‘the living spirit’ – source of all ‘power, understanding, and knowledge’ (Böhme [1612] 1914: 169; Böhme [1619] 1910: 118). Gance was also an admirer of the early Christian mystic Pseudo-Dionysius, for whom ‘Light comes from the Good’ and nurtured the living universe (c. 500: 74). The filmmaker believed such visionaries offered a vital link to modernity: Böhme was ‘the gigantic bridge between Aristotle and Eisenstein’ (1928b). Gance not only saw light as a ‘living’ force but believed the earth’s magma had ‘fermented’ into ‘a special animal life, as within suns’ (1930: 72-5). This was a pantheistic conception of the universe, where energy and matter were ‘the same thing’ – ‘two sides of a single force’ (ibid.: 133). This blend of mysticism and theoretical physics echoed contemporary scientif ic speculation that ‘the universe is a dynamism’ (Flammarion 1907: 37). Canudo treated music in these same terms, believing the medium ‘represents the maximum of vibrations of matter before it becomes light’ (1907: 192-3). Gance followed this logic to claim cinema as ‘the music of the future’ (1930: 73-4): filmmaking was the art of light and could create ‘a bridge between the noumenal and phenomenal world’ (Kramer/Welsh 1978: 57).

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This belief that film would offer ‘lyric proof’ of the material world’s inner life (Gance 1930: 175-6) was one shared by many intellectuals during the early twentieth century. Faure envisioned films being able to ‘take in the totality of universal life down to its smallest manifestation visible to the human eye’, revealing everything from the ‘infinitely complex drama’ of molecular movement to the innermost workings of human psychology (1937: 99-100). As a way of expressing ideas and realities that were incommunicable through language, Gance saw cinema as ‘the music of light’: this was a medium capable of universal communion (1923b: 11). Light was both a literal and metaphorical agent – a living, alchemical force that endowed every frame of celluloid with ‘the power of a sun’ (Gance 1973). Cinema was nothing less than a religion, a source of spiritual nourishment whose theatres were ‘cathedrals of light’ (1930: 72). In this moral revolution, scripture would be cast out and replaced with images: words were ‘the Judases of our realm’ (Gance 1930: 372) and the inclusive faith of art would supersede the exclusive doctrines of the Church. Its freedom from written text allowed cinema to transcend national, social, and political barriers and the dogmas and prejudices of traditional religions. Cinema was not merely escapism but a vital force for the reconfiguration of human interaction. Escaping the material limitations of theatre, cinema was as physically unencumbered as music; thanks to modern technology, films were mechanically reproducible for the mass market. Works of celluloid art could travel the globe and their message be brought to life through the performative element of music and the presence of an audience. Furthermore, film images possessed both the capacity for representation and for abstraction, for subjective interiority and objective exteriority. Through their capacity to let viewers access an infinite variety of perspectives, Gance believed that films would break down the boundaries between audiences and the world on screen, between animate and inanimate objects, between individual consciousness and collective experience. In the rush of creative energy that followed the Great War, Cendrars proclaimed that ‘a new synthesis of the human spirit’ would soon result in the appearance of ‘a race of new men’ whose ‘language will be the cinema’ (1919-21: 165). Gance filtered these ideas through Nietzsche, whose work was widely translated and discussed in France during the early 1900s. He remembered reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra ‘with enraptured eyes, like a man seeing the sun for the first time’ (Gance 1915). The Birth of Tragedy offered a Wagnerian theory of ancient Greek drama that Gance applied to film; audiences would become the chorus and participate in the action on screen. Superimposition, split-screen, and rapid montage could synthesize multiple

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subjective viewpoints, realizing Nietzsche’s vision that ‘state and society, the gulfs separating man from man’ would ‘make way for an overwhelming sense of unity that goes back to the very heart of nature’ ([1872] 2003: 39). Individual physical and cultural being might be transcended on the single, unitive canvas of the screen – an animist experience only possible through cinema. For Gance, ‘a spectator who maintains his critical sense is not a spectator’ (1974: 21). This ideological development is evident in the visual vocabulary of Gance’s early films. The central sequence of La Dixième Symphonie (1918) is a performance of a new symphony; both on- and off-screen audiences experience the work visually, seeing a series of elaborate superimpositions and hand-tinted designs. In these scenes, ‘music ceases to be simply the subject-matter of the film; it generates images that are presented as the visual equivalent of the musical’ (King 1984b: 5). Several sequences in J’accuse build upon this innovation: we do not read the poetic texts of Jean Diaz but see them visualized through a combination of lyrical location photography, matte-painting, multiple-superimposition, and colour tinting and toning. If these films heightened the expressionistic tendencies of Gance’s filmmaking, La Roue marks an even more radical step forward in the emotive scale and formal grammar of cinema. Though its exterior settings (from the sordid terrain of Nice’s railyards to the transcendent beauty of Alpine mountains) are captured with stunning pictorial realism, the film mobilizes numerous techniques to explore interior subjectivity. As I have detailed elsewhere, Gance shaped every aspect of visual expression to engage audiences with the emotive world on-screen; pioneering the use of rhythmic rapid-cutting, he aimed to capture the hidden psychological states of his characters and transform cinematic spectatorship into a form of experiential involvement (see Cuff 2011). Yet the greatest exemplar of these ideas is Napoléon, a work that marks the apogee of intellectual and aesthetic experimentation in silent cinema.

2.3

Multiplying perspective

The prologue of Napoléon begins with an intertitle that sets the scene: ‘During the memorable winter of 1783, when the snow was heaped up in the courtyard of Brienne College’. The basis of the ensuing sequence (footnoted in the screenplay) is a passage in the memoirs of Louis de Bourrienne, who had known Napoléon since childhood. He recalls the young Napoléon organizing a mock siege of fortresses and trenches built from the snow.

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‘This small war-game lasted a whole fortnight; it ceased only when gravel, or small stones, started getting mixed in with the snow being used to make the balls’, resulting in boys from both sides being seriously wounded (Bourrienne 1829-31: I/25-6). Gance’s academic citation implies authenticity, but in fact these memoirs were mostly ghostwritten and ‘hardly more than a travesty of Napoléon’s life cooked up for Louis XVIII’s reading public’ (Cronin 1994: 442). Even in the early nineteenth century, a two-volume work was published attacking their manifold inaccuracies (Buloz 1830). In Napoléon, Gance takes an already semi-fictitious event and creates a further level of mythology: Bourrienne’s original episode of biography is transformed into a uniquely cinematic sequence. From its first scenes, Napoléon marks a dramatic departure from earlier cinematic depictions of reality. The Lumière film Bataille de neige (1897) places its camera at a road junction in order to capture a snowball fight. A row of bare trees lining the street recedes into the distance, creating a diagonal line that is heightened by the depth of focus and contrast between snowy ground and dark branches. In the foreground, two rows of people on either side of the road throw snowballs at each other; a cyclist approaches from the distance and, when he arrives, both sides pelt him. The Lumière camera is static, relying upon composition in depth and careful framing to provide viewers with a coherent on-screen world and a continuous record of space/time. The opening scene of Napoléon depicts a similar subject: the young Bonaparte is leading the defence of a redoubt built in the snowy expanse around Brienne College from a team of opposing pupils. Initially, the scene’s spatial relationships are defined with wide-angle establishing shots and a pattern of continuity editing. However, when Phélipeaux (Petit Vidal) and Peccaduc (Roblin) put stones in their snowballs and wound him during a stealth attack, the outraged Bonaparte runs across the snow to attack them single-handedly. Instead of maintaining the single, fixed viewpoint of the Lumière scene, Gance picks up his camera and hurls it into the midst of the ensuing action. Mobile camerawork enables us to follow the tussle blow by blow. After Bonaparte floors his two rivals with violent blows, the opposing teams suddenly rush at one another; cameras run alongside them, behind them, in front of them, above them, below them; we track and pan with dizzying speed; the two sides clash and we are among the frenetic rhythm of bodies; we see feet, arms, legs, faces, fists; the camera is in one instant being punched by a boy on the ground and in the next being hurled to the floor from the side; we are suddenly tumbling under the sky as the horizon tips madly back and forth; we crouch behind the coattails of a cadet clambering up a snowy redoubt, then unsteadily

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slide down the parapet; the camera simultaneously turns its head around 360° from right to left and from left to right; superimposition doubles, trebles, quadruples, quintuples, sextuples the image of Bonaparte over the fight; the cutting between shots becomes faster and faster, continuing to increase until there is a final burst of images at the rate of one per frame; in the space of a second, we see abstract clashes of light and dark, shadow and sun, and the triumphant smile of Bonaparte flickering among the luminous fragments of space and time. Through handheld camerawork, rapid cutting, and multiple superimposition, this scene offers not merely first-person perspective but multiple subjectivity: we see the snowball fight from the viewpoint of everyone in the battle, even from the viewpoint of the space in which it is taking place. This proliferation of perspective is enhanced by the stunning pictorial quality of the print itself; seen on a big screen, with the emotive brilliance of Carl Davis’ music, the effect is breathtaking. Gance saw the sequence as ‘a luminous symphony, at once physical and spiritual’ (1929d: 290). As the myriad of shots decrease in length and burst into a tremendous visual intensity, we are meant to be whipped into the state of ‘Dionysiac excitement’ that Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy; Gance wanted his art to be ‘capable of communicating to a whole crowd of people the artistic gift of seeing itself surrounded by a host of spirits with which it knows itself to be profoundly united’ (Nietzsche [1872] 2003: 43). Even if this might be an impossible philosophic goal, Gance’s snowball fight still stands as a miraculous experiment in the expressive potential of cinema. At the November 2013 screening of Brownlow’s restoration in London, I was particularly struck by a shot in which the camera hurtles towards a standing figure. This was likely created by an automated camera that Gance fitted to a specially designed guillotine device, which was itself mounted on a sled. Pushing this contraption over the snow, the technical team of Napoléon enabled the camera to simultaneously dive and swoop. The bizarre physical set-up of the shot is transformed into an astonishing sense of propulsive movement on screen; it only lasts for a single second, but in the cinema I was nearly jerked out of my seat by its power – it was as if I was being hurled through space like a snowball, a feeling that was both a bodily sensation and an out-of-body experience. In this sequence, as so often in the film, the camera is unlimited in its exploration of the physical and temporal environment; the viewer crosses space and time with the leaping mobility of thought and the immaterial flight of music. The sled-mounted shot is only one of a bewildering array of techniques employed by Gance and his Russian technical director, Simon Feldman.

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In order to record the logistic effort that went into the production, Gance made the documentary Autour de Napoléon (1928). Although it exists only in truncated form, this film is vital evidence of his cinematic undertaking. It is essential to remember that every instance of movement seen on the screen involved a considerable effort of abstract imagination and practical engineering to realize. Cameras in the silent era had to be cranked by hand, which rendered what are now termed ‘handheld’ shots extremely difficult to achieve. To do so for Napoléon involved mounting the apparatus on a leather cuirass that was strapped to the cameraman’s chest. When the camera could not be operated by hand, various forms of motorization had to be employed – numerous electrical and compressedair mechanisms were specially made for the film. Autour de Napoléon reveals how Gance variously mounted his cameras on tripods, tricycles, cars, ropes, pulleys, guillotines, sleds, and pendulums. As well as placing the camera on the backs of horses or into the sea later in the film, Gance planned to put the camera inside a football and have it thrown about as if it were a snowball in the opening sequence (Brownlow [1983] 2004: 44-5). Though this technique was never used, it demonstrates the aesthetic and emotional purpose behind every such effort: by freeing the camera from all conventional placement, Gance takes cinema’s ‘superb conciliation of the Rhythms of Space […] and the Rhythms of Time’ (Canudo 1911: 169) to its logical extreme. In this light, the dismissal of the snowball fight by some critics as a ‘[wearyingly] repetitive’ descent into ‘bombastic cliché’ (Abel 1984: 433) shows a palpable lack of engagement with the real meaning and value of the sequence. Despite the superabundance of technical devices, the overall effect is far from superficial in its exuberant sense of spectacle. Superimposition and rapid montage produce images so fast and numerous we cannot consciously separate or distinguish them, a visual proliferation which bypasses any critical response and evokes an emotional reaction. The actual experience of watching the film is so instantaneous and involving that much of the intricate sophistication involved in its makeup is lost, just as in a piece of music where the detailed orchestration cannot be fully understood without looking at the written score. The speed at which one can later analyse the full significance of rapid visual imagery is far slower than the act of experiencing the same moment in the cinema. Visual polyphony works on an almost subconscious level in the theatre – our minds cannot unpick and examine the detailed elements that make up a montage of eighteen images a second or a dozen superimposed images in a single shot. Examining Gance’s single-frame editing reveals a wealth of absolute

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abstractions – unrecognizable swipes of darkness and light, as close to a rendering of pure movement as it is possible to get in a single image. The move from representation to abstraction, from stable continuity to rhythmic fragmentation, demonstrates Gance’s belief that cinema ‘must become a visual orchestra’: ‘A great film must be conceived like a symphony, like a symphony in time and like a symphony in space’ (1929d: 286). The audience is allowed to glimpse the ‘hundred thousand miraculous worlds’ that exist beyond their own perspective, allowing them to flash ‘instantaneously beneath the brow of this person, or that one, or the one over there, always being able to return to [their] own point of view’ (ibid.: 285-6). The sequence makes history come to life; losing their place in the present, the viewer is propelled into the midst of the action.

2.4

Father to the man

At the start of Napoléon, an intertitle states: ‘All the quotations and incidents taken literally from history are followed by the word “Historical”.’ This is not merely the voice of a boastful researcher, but signals the film’s use of a vital interpretive tool. Throughout Napoléon, the audience’s attention is alerted to the factual basis of its narrative – fostering the dramatic irony created by our historical knowledge. Gance may also use words like ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ in several of the film’s titles, but these are not as vague as such terms might seem – they are synonyms for the unalterable nature of historical fact. Gance assumes (but does not necessarily rely upon) an audience’s basic knowledge of Napoléon’s life to create tension between a predetermined narrative outcome (defeat and exile) and the potential of success (the spread of the Revolution). This subtle manipulation of audience expectation is an essential quality of the film – as its full title lays bare, we are being given history ‘seen by Abel Gance’. Napoléon is both objectively informed and subjectively charged. At Brienne, Bonaparte’s schoolboy enemies are examples of the fatalist foreshadowing that Gance so often utilizes during the film. A title states: ‘The opposing leaders, Phélipeaux and Peccaduc, were personal enemies of Napoléon at Brienne. By a disturbing coincidence, we shall find them ranged against him on most of the battlefields of the Empire.’ It is important to remember that Gance had planned Napoléon as the first of a six-part series – Phélipeaux and Peccaduc are two of the many characters whose brief appearance is set up for later encounters, but whose subsequent roles are not covered by the extant film. Phélipeaux was at Brienne with Bonaparte

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and a childhood rivalry genuinely existed; he was later involved in Royalist uprisings during the Revolutionary Wars – Gance had planned to show him helping the English against Bonaparte at Toulon (1924a) – and would die of the plague as a result of service in the Egyptian Campaign in 1799. After their defeat by Bonaparte in the snowball fight, these two boys stay apart from the others. The remaining cadets gather on the front porch of the school building, where their teacher, Pichegru (René Jeanne), asks for the winner of the battle to step forward. Bonaparte does so and is asked his name. He replies in his heavy Corsican accent and Pichegru is baffled: ‘What did you say? Paille-au-nez? [Straw-in-the-nose?]’ The surrounding cadets burst into laughter, but Bonaparte turns sharply towards them and the ferocity of his gaze stuns them back into silence – they whip themselves to attention in response. The intensity of Roudenko’s eyes is remarkable for an actor so young – it is an extraordinary moment of performance that captures the wounded pride of an independent soul with alarming vividness. His teacher tells the young Corsican he will go far: ‘Remember it was Pichegru who said so’. As with Phélipeaux and Peccaduc, Pichegru is earmarked for a future appearance in Gance’s cycle – the appeal to remember him is directed as much to the audience as to Bonaparte. Historically, Pichegru would be involved with the ‘Cadoudal Conspiracy’ to overthrow Napoléon in 1804. Arrested and imprisoned, he was later discovered strangled in his cell. Pichegru had left Brienne for active service in 1780, so his meeting with Bonaparte in Gance’s film in 1783 is historically false. As so often, Gance alters chronology to suit his own needs. This dramatic irony is not confined to such narrative elements – an awareness of the future is omnipresent in the film’s imagery. Our first sight of Bonaparte in the prologue is a rather abstract shot of his black hat rising out of, and then sinking back into, an entirely white image – the snow wall of the cadets’ parapet (Figure 1). This primary glimpse of Bonaparte plays on his own (future) iconography, immediately teasing the audience with a recognizable item of military uniform before we see the young Bonaparte’s face. As Gance’s screenplay describes: ‘Little by little the famous hat emerges like a black sun rising above the horizon of the wall’ (1927b: 3). This selfconscious scene is reminiscent of the way Hugo introduces Bonaparte at Waterloo in Les Misérables: To outline here the aspect of Napoléon with horse […] at dawn on 18 June, 1815, is almost superfluous. Before we point him out, everyone has seen him. This calm profile under the small hat of the school of Brienne […] Caesar is alive in the imagination, acclaimed by some, denounced by the rest (1862: III/31-2).

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Fig. 1:  Abstract sunrise: the film’s first image of Bonaparte

Both authors begin by consciously alluding to the unmistakable iconography that almost negates the need to create an image of Bonaparte: the film audience recognizes him before we are given his name, before we even see his face. Many commentators have assumed that Napoléon provides a simplistic, unambiguous portrait of its central figure. Yet this is a very superficial reading of Gance’s portrayal: in fact, from the first frame of his appearance, Bonaparte possesses a highly discordant and ambiguous presence. Our introduction to the child through the antithetical image of a ‘black sun’ is part of the key set of visual, symbolic, and metaphorical leitmotifs of light and dark, radiance and shadow that will be associated with Bonaparte throughout the film (discussed further in chapter 5). During the snowball fight, there is a close-up showing Bonaparte’s shadow cast over the white snow (Figure 2) – the silhouette of a child but an outline that could just as well belong to the adult. The multiple superimpositions of Bonaparte in the snowball fight not only illustrate his burgeoning instincts – his presence and value literally multiplying in the centre of the battle – but also offer a number of different visual perspectives of him all at once (Figure 3). Bonaparte is already showing his multifarious character, just as he will possess

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Fig. 2: Bonaparte’s shadow cast over the snow of Brienne

numerous, often paradoxical, identities over the course of the film. The innocence of the childish snowball fight becomes entangled in the fatalism of the imagery. From the opening image of his famous hat, Bonaparte is bound into his destiny: the child is father of the man. Another complicating factor in our engagement with Bonaparte is the figure of the school’s scullion, Tristan Fleuri (Nicolas Koline) – a perfect embodiment of the film’s tension between subjective involvement and objective distance, as well as that between fact and fantasy. Tristan (a fictional character) reappears in numerous scenes throughout the film, accompanied (after the prologue) by his daughter Violine (Annabella) and his son Marcellin (Serge Freddy-Karl) (see chapter 6). On each occasion, Tristan tries to remind the adult Bonaparte of their childhood encounter at Brienne – each time Bonaparte either ignores or rebukes him. The only time Bonaparte even bothers to speak to Tristan with anything other than withering disdain is when he thanks him during the snowball fight at the start of the film. It was Tristan who warned him of his opponents putting stones in their snowballs and, after the fight, Bonaparte dashes back to thank him. Before he rushes off again, there is the briefest of physical touches as the child clasps Tristan’s hand. This fleeting moment of contact

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Fig. 3: Multiple superimpositions of the child Bonaparte

passes in a fraction of a second. Tristan’s strangely transfixed gaze lingers after the child has run out of the frame, his hand hesitating for a second once Bonaparte has let go. In retrospect, this moment possesses a haunting property: it is the only time in the entire film that these two figures share a moment of physical intimacy. Tristan is also the only character to directly recall Bonaparte’s childhood. During the climax of the Battle of Toulon scenes, set in 1793, he watches Bonaparte’s final assault on the English positions. Tristan’s role as witness is reinforced through his position at a window, looking out onto the battle – just as he had done at Brienne. However, the crisp whiteness of the child’s school-ground has become a sodden, fetid field of battle for the adult – a contrast Gance powerfully highlights when we are given a flashback to the snowball fight as Tristan cries: ‘This is nothing! I’ve seen it all before at Brienne!’ Bonaparte’s adult success is more glorious, but the innocence of his boyhood tousling succeeds to something hideous and sombre. Whilst the winded little child who staggers back to the school building, bent double in pain, is a comic touch to end the snowball fight, the Toulon sequence ends with Bonaparte brooding over the dead and dying soldiers who lie in a morass of mud. The prologue’s portentous fight was also to have been

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revisited later in Gance’s series, when Bonaparte returns to Brienne during the 1814 campaign to fight a real battle amid the snow in the last throes of his empire: ‘Here is the Emperor at Brienne, re-enacting on a larger scale his little snowball battle of long ago and Napoléon and Tristan Fleuri sadly reflect on the tragic turn events have taken’ (Gance 1923a).

2.5

Invoking the future

As with the rest of Napoléon, the Brienne scenes offer us a dual perspective on history: from first-person subjectivity (present-tense involvement) to distanced objectivity (past-tense dramatic irony). If the snowball fight represents the engagement of the former, the geography lesson demonstrates the detachment of the latter. Having signalled Bonaparte’s destiny as a great military commander, the film’s very next scene points to his ultimate defeat: the child is symbolically shown the place of his death. Bonaparte, Phélipeaux, and Peccaduc are in the centre of a classroom teeming with bored pupils. Whilst their teacher’s back is turned, faces are pulled and a delightful air of chaos breaks out. As the lesson comes to an end, the students start putting away their books, but the master suddenly signals one more location for them to record: ‘A little island, lost in the ocean’. He turns to a second blackboard and slowly draws an outline, writing a name underneath: ‘St Helena’. There is a shot of the three central pupils at their desk, Bonaparte staring reflectively ahead. The master turns back to the class, making a dismissive gesture as if to say they hardly need bother noting down such an insignificant island. Phélipeaux and Peccaduc look down at Bonaparte’s work, a high-angle close-up revealing the notebook as he puts down his quill. They pinch and tease him, trying to make him react. He stays perfectly still, staring straight ahead. A brief subjective shot, from Bonaparte’s perspective, isolates the image of St Helena on the blackboard. Another mid-shot of the three pupils reveals Bonaparte with the first lines of a frown creasing his brow. A close-up of his face dissolves onto the previous shot. Bonaparte looks from the drawing of St Helena to that of Corsica, before fixing his pensive gaze back on St Helena. Cutting between the places of Bonaparte’s birth and death, Gance creates a ‘shortcircuit of the two boundaries of his life’ (Mourier 2012: 48). Recently discovered footage reveals the final close-up of Bonaparte in this sequence originally included a superimposed image of a milky-white expanse of water, quivering in a gentle breeze, surrounding Bonaparte’s face. This haunting image evokes his final oceanic isolation, his face an island in

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a mysterious, dream-like sea. Davis’ score is perfectly judged in this scene, the music suddenly fading into a slow, mournful melody as Bonaparte gazes intuitively but uncertainly at his destiny. This same leitmotif is also used for the scenes when he returns to Corsica as an adult, reaffirming the connection between self and geography that the historical Bonaparte felt: From a Napoleonic perspective, the whole world is nothing but islands, a constellation of rocky promontories, barely holding back the engulfing ocean […] [By] the age of eighteen he fully identified with islands, seeing Corsica and himself alike as islands buffeted by tremendous storms and assaulted by the elements on all sides […] Napoléon lived and died in accordance with the fate of islands. We forget his place of origin and his geography only at the risk of obscuring his whole mentality (Martin 2000: 35).

The close-up and final dissolve into the image of trembling white water at the end of Gance’s geography lesson are extraordinarily beautiful moments of visual narration, capturing the mournful revelation of the child’s fate. As the screenplay puts it, he ‘sinks into a dream’ (Gance 1927b: 15), not aware of the precise significance of St Helena but sensing its profound importance. This illustrates Gance’s distinction between intellectual and emotional knowledge: ‘thought provides logic, but feeling provides intuition. Let us not forget: intuition is the memory of the future’ (1930: 124). The humour of the first part of the classroom scene emphasizes the sudden shift to a sombre tone at its close. Such a powerful instance of dramatic irony plants the knowledge of downfall at a very early stage in the narrative, destabilizing our expectations of Bonaparte’s legendary successes. The tension between the child’s innocence and our knowingness creates a poignant glimpse of Bonaparte as a human being before he is dragged into his mythic future. Though we already possess factual knowledge of Bonaparte’s destiny, Gance’s scene induces an emotional reaction by triggering our collective ‘memory of the future’. For this scene, Gance took inspiration from a line the young Bonaparte wrote in a notebook: ‘Sainte-Hélène, petite île’ (1791: 367). (The film reproduces this in the document visible on the child’s desk.) Prophetically, the original manuscript suddenly breaks off after these words. Yet again, Gance tweaks historical chronology to suit his film – Bonaparte’s words were written at the artillery school at Auxonne, seven years after leaving Brienne. The film transforms a tiny piece of historical evidence into a brilliantly effective moment of emotional resonance.

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Gance’s concern with erasure and the inevitability of decay echoes that of Victor Hugo, an author often quoted in the screenplay for Napoléon. The starting point for Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris was a single word: ananke, Greek for ‘fatality’ (also meaning force, constraint, and necessity). The author’s preface begins by recounting how he found this word carved on a wall of the eponymous cathedral: Since then […] the inscription has disappeared […] The man who wrote this word on the wall has been erased, several centuries ago, from the midst of the generations, the word has in its turn been erased from the wall of the church, the church itself will soon perhaps be erased from the earth. This book was written about that word (Hugo 1831: I/iii-iv).

In Napoléon, the ‘petite île’ signifies a similar link with the past. The name of St Helena is written in chalk on a board that will soon be wiped clean by the teacher and recorded by Bonaparte in a notebook that ends mid-sentence, a historical document that only survives incomplete – its author himself long since erased. Hugo also wrote of the young Napoléon at Brienne reading three inscriptions on the wall above his bed and making his own: [He drew] a rough sketch of his house in Ajaccio; then, by the side of that house, – without suspecting that he was bringing nearer to the Island of Corsica another mysterious island then hidden deep in the future, – he wrote […] ‘The end of all is six feet of earth.’ (1864: 464).

This concern with the fragility of the physical world (both the written word and life itself) is echoed in Gance’s visual language. His last image of the geography lesson is Bonaparte’s face being slowly eroded by the eerie waves.

2.6

Iconic isolation

Gance’s intertitles describe how pupils and staff share an antipathy towards Bonaparte, who lives ‘in a kind of savage isolation’. In the next scene, Bonaparte’s enemies tattle on him and he is confronted by one of the Fathers. Bonaparte is visually isolated – the dark tones of his bed and curtains frame the child in the left half of the screen; the large priest looms in the centre, whilst the light-toned right of the frame contains a view of the other beds and pupils in their white pyjamas.

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After being rejected by his classmates, Bonaparte leaves the dormitory to visit ‘his only friend’ – a semi-wild eagle (a gift from his Corsican uncle) that is kept in a cage in Tristan’s garret. The bird will become a key leitmotif, recurring throughout the film – serving as a symbol of Bonaparte’s future empire. (The eagle was used during his reign to echo the Roman Empire, another republic with an emperor as head of state.) At this early stage of the narrative, the eagle is a natural double for the lonely child. Roudenko was himself an isolated youth, the son of Russian immigrants who divorced when he was an infant, and grew up stalking Parisian film studios instead of going to school. On set in 1925, Gance was struck by ‘the affinity between the boy and the bird. Apart from his trainer, the young eagle allowed only Roudenko to touch him, and the boy spent his spare moments talking to it’ (Brownlow [1983] 2004: 56). Along with the momentary touch of Tristan’s hand, Bonaparte’s stroking of the eagle is the only physical gesture he makes during the whole prologue, which isn’t one of violent defence or aggression. As an adult, he is similarly brusque – to a more varied effect on those around him. Most prominently, Bonaparte is comically uneasy with Joséphine later in the film, failing hopelessly to control his wildly enthusiastic gestures in private or match his lover’s suave social ease in public (see chapter 7). Though Dieudonné’s performance encompasses a greater range of styles and situations than Roudenko’s, the latter possesses an ideal embodiment of the young Bonaparte’s fierce independence: [Roudenko is] wholly without winsomeness. His eyes are glassy, his nose beaky, his mouth narrow and snapping. His rare smiles are like icicles. It’s not till you see him with his caged pet and alter ego, the mountain eagle […] that you realize the perfect match. This is the complete eaglet, armed with a man’s will (Holmstrom 1996: 39).

Gance aff irms the link between the two by superimposing the young child over the eagle – illustrating Bonaparte’s symbolic embodiment of the animal’s natural power (Figure 4). Phélipeaux and Peccaduc sneak into the garret while Bonaparte is fetching the eagle a bowl of water. They open the cage door and make the eagle fly out of the window and into the snowy night. When Bonaparte returns, he sees the empty cage and rushes to the open windows, still trying not to spill the water. He stands on tiptoes and scans the darkness before turning back towards the camera to give one final sweep of the room. Bonaparte’s run, tiptoed pause, turn, and final scan is balletically choreographed – especially

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Fig. 4: Child and eagle

the use of his free arm, carefully held out to one side as he moves. There is a cut to a wider shot of the garret space. The scene’s lighting is brighter around the window in the right of the background; the table and stool in the left foreground mark a darker area of the space. As Bonaparte takes several slow paces towards the camera, he becomes partially silhouetted against the lighter backdrop. Bonaparte pauses – the first moment of stillness since he was alone with the eagle at the start of the scene. Suddenly, he hurls the bowl of water to the ground, and arcs of water shoot through the air. Following this ferociously violent gesture, he pauses again, leaning on the table as if to control himself. Apparently having decided on his course of action, he rushes to the rear of the room, throwing himself at the door, which he flings aside as he leaves. The suddenness and physical violence of these last gestures contrast with his tenderness toward the eagle and the graceful circuit of the room he makes on discovering its loss. His reaction and movement intensify the rhythm of action that is carried into the next scene, where the camera and editing become ever more dexterous in reflecting Bonaparte’s emotional state. We cut to the interior of the dormitory, as Phélipeaux and Peccaduc enter through the doors in a mid-shot – the camera then rapidly tracks

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back along the whole length of the dormitory, preceding them as they rush back to their beds. As the camera comes to a halt, the deep-focus image allows us to see the other pupils hiding behind their bed curtains before we cut back to another mid-shot of the door, which Bonaparte slams shut after he enters. Following reaction shots from Phélipeaux and Peccaduc, we see a close-up of the young Bonaparte. This remarkable shot is a blur of concentrated movement – like Bonaparte, the camera is shaking with rage, his features seeming to warp in the violently unstable frame. ‘Who set my eagle free?’ he demands. The camera now tracks behind Bonaparte as he advances between the two lines of beds. Gance cuts from this tracking shot to handheld close-ups that seek out each boy as they peer from behind the curtains, shaking their heads in denial or simply yawning with indifference. Having completed his interrogation (much like he will inspect ranks of soldiers later in the film), a static medium shot shows Bonaparte at the end of the rows. When no culprits come forward, he shouts: ‘Then you’re all guilty!’, hurling objects from the cabinet behind him into the room. Gance cuts to a closer shot as the camera tracks rapidly forward towards him. This cut suddenly compresses the deep space of the dormitory and its central corridor into a close-up dominated by Bonaparte’s vividly lit face. The shot’s quick movement creates a dramatic visual tightening around Bonaparte, a concentration of his angered energy within a narrower frame – the high-angle lighting casts the child’s face in vivid contrast, the camera’s immediate proximity intensifying the impact of his furious expression. Bonaparte attacks his whole dormitory in revenge, going from bed to bed and punching every occupant – the camera now tracking backwards as he does so. When the camera cuts to a wider shot of the scene, Bonaparte is still framed within a constricted space: he is surrounded by cadets, their white pyjamas mobbing the dark tones of his uniform. They bombard him with punches and pillows, which start to burst open and shower the room with white feathers. Just as the image seethes with this snowy texture, the single frame suddenly splits into four images, the four then splitting into nine (Figure 5). Gance’s visual polyphony offers a variety of separate viewpoints within a single frame – a different orchestration of images than in the layering of superimposition. Swirling restlessly around this multiplex arrangement, the viewer’s eye is now forced to keep track of the composition and cutting of a nonuple surface that teems with the self-perpetuating energy of cellular division. The splitting screen

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Fig. 5: The nine panels of Gance’s split-screen

‘metaphorically [tears] the boys to pieces’ (Abel 1984: 434) but visually compresses Bonaparte into one-quarter, and then one-ninth, of the frame – externalizing his rage as it denies the possibility of his escape. This first mosaic split-screen prefigures the triptych Polyvision later in the film: there, instead of multiple images within one frame, the frame itself will be trebled. The sudden halt to the f ight returns us to the regulation of a single screen: visual orthodoxy accompanies the religious authority that now takes charge of the cadets. The chief priest enters and separates the dishevelled Bonaparte from the other boys. The feather-covered room now rhymes with the snow-covered landscape in the film’s first sequence, reiterating the child’s predilection for combat. After an eye-bulging scan around the wreckage of the dormitory, the priest turns to Bonaparte and demands: ‘Who d’you think you are?’ ‘A man’, he replies, folding his arms in a defiantly assured pose. Already, the child dons his adult identity. The priests force him from the room, Bonaparte fighting every inch of the way to the door. Even as he is manhandled downstairs, he claws at the arms of his guardian. The intensity of his fury is illustrated by a tracking shot that keeps Bonaparte’s face in close-up, screwed up in rage, as he descends the

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staircase. (A scene in Autour de Napoléon reveals the elaborate slide mechanism that enabled this shot to be filmed.) Unlike the tracking shot that rushes towards him before he assaults his comrades in the dormitory, this shot moves without reframing its subject – the intensity of the child’s rage is forcibly contained. Bonaparte is exiled outside. In this final scene of the prologue, he settles down on the carriage of a cannon to cry. Only Tristan is sympathetic enough to bring him a warm coat and hat. This second exchange between the two, one expressed through a wordless gaze (Tristan almost afraid of touching Bonaparte again), is the last moment of closeness they will share. For the rest of the film, Tristan may wait at Bonaparte’s table or serve under his command in the army – but no moment of real human contact takes place. There is a lengthy close-up of Bonaparte’s tear-stained face. His gaze, never far from the lens, eventually looks right into the camera and at the audience. Rather than create a sense of distance or artificiality to the scene, this instance of direct address increases our emotional involvement with the character: suddenly, an iconic figure from history stares straight back at us with the utmost vulnerability. Gance self-consciously uses the nature of the filmic image to explore the tensions between past and present, presence and absence, artifice and reality. Again, Davis’ poignant score transmits the emotional significance of the moment – a live orchestra bridges 200 years of historical distance. This shot lasts for over 30 seconds, at the end of which Bonaparte senses something off to the right of frame and begins to turn his head. There is a cut to a shot of the eagle, landing on a branch outside. Returning to its master, it then lands on the gun barrel itself – a medium-shot uniting the symbolic figure of empire with the child destined to lead it (Figure 6). From making direct eyeline contact with the audience, the child reconnects to the world within the film – turning from us to face the embodiment of his future. The last moment of the child’s pre-Revolutionary life is shared with the audience through the close-up before he is drawn back into the film’s predetermined historical narrative. When experienced live in a cinema, accompanied by Davis’ emotive score, Roudenko’s magnetic yet tender gaze makes the eagle’s return all the more emotionally satisfying. Gance’s stunning final tableau encapsulates the aura of fatalism that pervades the opening. The wheel takes up a quarter of the screen, capturing Bonaparte and the eagle between its form and that of the window above. Both window and gun carriage are precedents of a prominent symbolic leitmotif that has a central place in Napoléon and Gance’s work

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Fig. 6: The final scene from Bonaparte’s childhood

as a whole: the fatalistic wheel. His previous film, La Roue, was visually and thematically obsessed with its titular form. Drawing from sources as diverse as Buddhism, Nietzsche, and Rudyard Kipling, Gance’s symbolic form of the wheel represented the eternal cycle of existence, a fatalistic chain of material formation and destruction. Peppered with abundant literary references, the opening title of La Roue quotes Hugo: ‘creation is a great wheel, which does not move without crushing someone’ (1847: 54). The striking appearance of this symbol in Napoléon at the end of the prologue signals the ambiguous nature of the audience’s expectations of Bonaparte. Whilst the promise of future glory is uplifting, we have been made very aware of his eventual fall: the wheel will raise the child up to success and power but must inevitably crush him.

2.7 Summary The prologue of Napoléon introduces the audience to complex formal strategies and a network of visual motifs. The shared subjective space of the film liberates audiences to participate in collective events and sympathize with

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individual characters; yet this freedom operates within the predetermined frame of the historical past. We are shown the most famous of historical figures on the cusp of adulthood, our sympathy with his isolation greatly aided by Roudenko, who offers ‘the greatest child performance of the silent screen, and one of the most moving in all cinema’ (Holmstrom 1996: 40). Napoléon’s modulation between involvement and detachment produces a far more ambiguous engagement with the film’s central protagonist than critics have often assumed.

3.

Civilization and savagery: Visions of the French Revolution

Behold the World-Phoenix, in fire-consummation and fire-creation: wide are her fanning wings; loud is her death-melody, of battle-thunders and falling towns; skywards lashes the funeral flame, enveloping all things: it is the Death-Birth of a World! (Carlyle 1837: I/206).

3.1 Introduction Despite his commitment to Napoléon as a work of ‘education’ (1923a), Gance’s f ilm transcends factual authenticity. The blend of historical fidelity and glaring deviation has infuriated critics, most of whom have been unwilling to navigate its tortuous succession of fact and fabulation. Albert t’Serstevens compared Gance’s screenplay to the work of Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, saying it was ‘very beautiful’ but also ‘perilous’. He chastised Gance for being seduced by ‘reductive details’ and losing sight of ‘the larger structure’: the filmmaker was ‘far more of a poet than a novelist’ and must eliminate anything that didn’t ‘contribute directly to the whole’ (T’Serstevens 1925). Watching the completed film, Léon Moussinac felt he was being made to wade through ‘a mediocre library of badly compiled material’; Gance had wallowed in ‘romantic, sentimental lyricism gleaned from obscure correspondences and anecdotal gossip’ and ‘blown [details] out of all proportion for purely literary purposes’ (1927a: 4). Writing half a century later, another outraged Marxist saw Napoléon as ‘the apotheosis of distortion’: ‘it strives to make the presentation and understanding of history an unintelligible act’ (Pappas 1981: 8). Gance’s reshaping of evidence has bothered film critics more than it has genuine historians. As Emile Le Gallo argues, Gance’s ‘intemperate ingeniousness’ and ‘marvellous illegitimacy’ are nothing next to the ‘masterful intensity’ that enables him to ‘animate characters’ and ‘translate an epoch’ onto the screen (1929: 56). As I outlined in chapter 1, Gance inherited a messianic conception of history that had been developed throughout the nineteenth century. The conceptual logic of Napoléon must be seen in light of these earlier accounts, as well as within the contemporary context of the post-war period. My central concern of this chapter is therefore to explore Gance’s representation of the French Revolution, providing a close analysis of how the imagery

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of Napoléon articulates his interpretation of history. I argue that Gance saw this period as a paradoxical force of creation and destruction, and that Napoléon demonstrates his desire to re-evaluate world history in light of the Great War.

3.2

Reasoning with chaos

The Romantic historiography evident in Napoléon can be traced back to the philosophy of history developed by Hegel in the 1820s. Conceived in direct response to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, his system was based on the idea of a dialectic process of succession: an idea is created, its opposite is formed, and from the struggle between these two forces emerges the ‘universal’: The transition from one phase of the spirit can only take place in so far as an earlier universal is overcome […] The higher universal which supersedes it is, so to speak, the next variety of the previous species, and is already inwardly present within it, although it has not yet come into its own (Hegel [1830] 2002: 82).

Each of these stages was a step towards human freedom, the ultimate goal which had been signalled in 1789 and defeated in 1815. The same logic, differently expressed, can be found in Thomas Carlyle’s masterpiece The French Revolution (1837). He viewed the era’s events as a carnivorous cycle of effacement and renewal: French Revolution means here the open violent Rebellion, and Victory; of disimprisoned Anarchy against corrupt worn-out Authority: how Anarchy breaks prison; bursts up from the inf inite Deep, and rages uncontrollable, immeasurable, enveloping a world; in phasis after phasis of fever-frenzy; – till the frenzy burning itself out, and what elements of new Order it held (since all Force holds such) developing themselves, the Uncontrollable be got, if not reimprisoned, yet harnessed, and its mad forces made to work towards their object as sane regulated ones (Carlyle 1837: I/295-6).

A decade later, Alphonse-Louis Constant reworked this idea using similarly metaphorical language: ‘[the] violent extremes of absolutism and liberty are like the oscillations of a pendulum that cannot rest at the point of

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equilibrium’ (1848: 181). He summarizes the competing forces within historical progress as genies of action and passivity: The Angel of Revolution and the Angel of Conservation both lay claim to the empire of the world with equal force; their unresolved struggle results in an agonizing hiatus. The Spirit of Revolution accuses the Spirit of Peace of compromise: it is the cause of moral cowardice, of the misery of the working classes, of the corruption and selfishness of the rich, of boredom and universal discouragement. This violent Spirit defies the other to name a single peaceful revolution, reminding it how much blood has already flowed in the name of Christianity, whose humanitarian reform began in the name of brotherhood and peace (ibid.: 199).

In the wake of the revolutions of 1848-9, Hugo’s messianic interpretation of the French Revolution was as the ‘turning-point climacteric of humanity’; 1789 was God’s mouthpiece for history’s second ‘Fiat Lux’ (1864: 509). As well as being the source of all Romantic literature, the Revolution was ‘the first foundation of that immense edifice of the future: the United States of Europe’ (Hugo 1851: 334-5). Perhaps his most enthusiastic articulation of this idea is in Quatrevingt-treize (1874), a novel which was one of the chief literary influences on Napoléon. Written after Hugo’s return from exile and the establishment of France’s Third Republic, it was an attempt to reassert the relevance of the Revolution to the modern world. The novel concerns the civil war in the Vendée, where Catholic royalists fought the republican armies throughout 1793-6 – a pertinent subject in the aftermath of the socialist Commune of 1871. Arguing that the trajectory of social evolution was divinely orchestrated, Hugo had to justify the seemingly chaotic outbursts of violence that continued to delay mankind’s ultimate utopia. In a marvellous passage of authorial exculpation, he summarizes the limits of man’s historical understanding: The Revolution is an action of the Unknown. Call it good or bad, according to whether you aspire toward the future or the past, but leave it to the power which caused it. It appears to be the work of great events and great individuals mingled, but in reality it is the result of events. Events dispense, men suffer. Events dictate, men sign […] The great and mysterious writer of these grand pages has a name, God, and a mask, Destiny […] The Revolution is a form of the immanent phenomenon which presses upon us from every quarter, and which we call Necessity.

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Before this mysterious complication of benefits and sufferings arises the Why? of history. Because. This answer of he who knows nothing is also the response of he who knows everything (Hugo 1874: II/58-9).

The desire to conciliate history’s paradoxical trends was part of a wider project to demonstrate that ‘history was not a set of random events, but reason actualizing itself’ (Burt 1990: 973). Hugo stated: ‘Up to the present time, history has nearly always been written from the petty standpoint of fact; it is time to write it from the standpoint of principle’ (1864: 540). Using their guiding ‘principle’, true poets maintain a god-like overview to find detailed (and obscure) evidence to support their wider argument: ‘One of their eyes is a telescope, the other is a microscope. They investigate familiarly those two frightful inverse depths: the infinitely great and the infinitely little’ (ibid.: 349). Hugo therefore replaced ‘the crude narrative imposed by clocks and calendars with the more illuminating coincidences of heart and history’ (Robb 1997: 172). Using this logic was itself a kind of divine excuse to override contradictions: Hugo saw antithesis as ‘God’s favourite stylistic trope’ (1842: II/259). Rather than insist on its logical order, mankind must learn to accept that oxymorons ‘litter’ the whole of creation (Hugo 1877: 81). Indeed, art was the ideal means by which to embrace and reconcile antithetical impulses: ‘Contraries are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they complement each other’ (Hugo 1864: 228). When he began his research in 1923, Gance was reluctant to reorder historical evidence in the way Hugo suggested: ‘I am bound to follow closely along historical lines and am not allowed to swerve in the slightest degree from the truth […] [I mustn’t] change so much as a comma from history’ (1923a). However, a few months later, he worried that what he had written was ‘the recitation of a historian, nothing more. It must have a plot.’ (Gance 1924g) The narrator of Gérard de Nerval’s Angélique faces a similar problem; he confesses to being ‘a rather poor historian’ in his haphazard methodology but insists that ‘I am inventing nothing’ (1854: 85-8). Gance may have said that he made ‘the minimum of concession to the novelistic [or] to anecdote’ and wanted ‘to try and prove […] that a story was not necessary in History’ (1927f), but his claims are as dubious as Nerval’s authorial denial. He offered a more accurate assessment of his method when he proclaimed that ‘reality is not enough’ for cinematic storytelling (Gance 1927c: 90). Just as it had been for Hugo, Gance believed that understanding history meant embracing the incongruities it threw together. In near-identical terms, he wrote that nature was ‘in love with paradox’, and any coherent

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philosophy must confront endless incoherences (Gance 1930: 86). His interpretation of history in the aftermath of the Great War required an imaginative leap of faith similar to the one Hugo made after 1871. As I mentioned in chapter 2, Gance’s favourite philosophical symbol was the wheel, which for him represented the fatalistic entrapment of human destiny in the cycle of material existence. Whilst La Roue exemplifies this deterministic outlook, he was too idealistic to accept the full implications of his belief in the eternal repetition of mankind’s misfortune. In Prisme, Gance recorded his youthful dreams of a new ‘miracle’ art that could realize ‘inextinguishable joys’ for humanity. This ideal state may have had aesthetic origins, but its effects would be moral and physiological: art could ‘metamorphose the mineral into the vegetal, the vegetal into man, man into God, and god himself into a higher species.’ (Gance 1930: 35) The geometric symbol Gance associated with this form of evolutionary idealism was the spiral: a form that was circular but which maintained a logical impetus of ascension. He had faith that the wheel would ‘slowly give way to the spiral’: ‘my whole life and work turns not according to the Wheel, but according to the Spiral’ (ibid.: 262). The Great War may have been an articulation of mankind’s cyclical selfdestruction, but Gance saw an artistic means of pulling its survivors into a better future. Like Quatrevingt-treize, Napoléon was an effort to salvage meaning from the chaotic demolition of modern history. This struggle between spiritual (spiral) progression and the material cycle (wheel) of repetition is evident in the symbolic vocabulary Gance uses, cinematizing the ideas of earlier accounts of the Revolution. Carlyle and Hugo repeatedly weld compound words into paradoxical images, just as Gance uses the visual grammar of superimposition and quick-cutting montage to juxtapose antithetical ideas. This stylistic response was the best means at the historian’s disposal to adequately confront the ‘huge blind Incoherence’ of the past (Carlyle 1837: II/155). Equally, Hugo ‘funnelled’ the ‘rising tide of [historical] disorder […] into the beautifully co-ordinated irrigation system of his prose’ (Robb 1997: 273), coping with antitheses through a glorious horde of aphorisms and metaphors. As this chapter will proceed to demonstrate, Gance transforms the images of Carlyle and Hugo throughout Napoléon.

3.3

Community and spectatorship

The first scenes following the prologue of Brienne in Napoléon are set in June 1792 and take place at the Club des Cordeliers in Paris. This was

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the meeting place for the ‘Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ and its lead members were Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins. The Club had popularized ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ as the motto of the Revolution’s aims, and Gance’s sequence portrays the formation of a new national force of social and spiritual rejuvenation – culminating in the crowd’s remarkable rendition of La Marseillaise. The location of the scene in the church is of paramount importance to the sequence, which depicts the assimilation of religious faith by the secular state. Though he broke with the Church in the 1790s, Robespierre ‘detested atheism as a destroyer of morality’ (Furet 1988: 253-4) and attempted to fashion his own state religion. Many Revolutionaries felt this need ‘to replace God in the workings of human society with something else that would motivate people in the desired direction’ (Zamoyski 2000: 449); yet they often linked their mission with established religious narratives to connect with the popular imagination. Desmoulins himself declared: ‘I am 33, the age of the sans-culotte Jesus; fatal age for revolutionaries!’ ([1794] 1825: 25) (In fact, Desmoulins was 34.) His popular appeal in Discours de la lanterne aux Parisiens begins with the Biblical motto: ‘Qui male agit odit lucem’ (‘He that does evil hates light’ – words from John, 3:20, which Desmoulins erroneously attributes to Matthew) (Desmoulins 1789: n. pag.). Gance adds his own spiritual discourse to this historical trend. In Napoléon, the ‘Three Gods’ of the Revolution – Danton (Koubitzky), Marat (Antonin Artaud), and Robespierre (Edmond van Daële) – are sitting in a wing of the Cordeliers’ church, surrounded by disused religious paraphernalia. Their argumentative discussion is interrupted by Desmoulins (Robert Vidalin), who brings them a song sheet being distributed in the hall outside. Only Danton seems interested in its contents, and leaves his companions behind as he exits the vestry and enters the main hall – crowded with hundreds of followers. He is introduced to the composer of the hymn, Rouget de Lisle (Harry-Krimer), who is made to climb up to the pulpit to teach the song to the gathered crowd. Reaching the top of the stairs, de Lisle turns to the hundreds of anxious faces awaiting his delivery. Gance uses a remarkable handheld shot to demonstrate de Lisle’s perspective: the camera shakily looks about in all directions, enabling the audience to share the nervous expectation of the moment. This is neatly encapsulated by the subsequent title: ‘The crowd sensed the imminent eruption of a flame in world history.’ De Lisle steadies himself before launching into the song. As yet, Gance has named neither the music nor its composer to the audience; this revelation is made tangible in each screening of the film by the theatrical orchestra, which must now begin a rendition of the French national anthem.

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Behind de Lisle is a tricolour flag, hanging in front of a headless statue of Christ whose decapitated bust lies in the church vestry. As he sings, de Lisle’s outstretched hand tenses in the air – rhyming with the one hand upon the crucifix that is visible behind the tricolour. During the climax of this first rendition, there is a sudden cut to a close-up of the church window, through which we see the sun shining; this moment also signals a sudden switch from black-and-white to a dazzling golden tint. Gance’s script describes how: ‘the sun shares in this great enthusiasm and floods in through the glass; it spreads over the people’s faces, which are at once lit up from within and from without.’ (1927b: 34) (In the original manuscript, the phrase ‘the sun enters the hall’ is underlined in red crayon for emphasis [Gance 1924c].) The realized sequence is dominated by this living symbol, which is both a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment and a literal presence within the mise-en-scène (Figure 7). When the sun reaches de Lisle, he is ‘transfigured’ by its illumination, just as Danton’s face is ‘flooded with sunlight’ and he squints in its glare. This natural apparition is a pantheistic endorsement of the crowd’s revolutionary impulse: ‘the sun fills the immense hall, shining in their souls and on their faces’ (Gance 1927b: 34-8). The tense concentration of the crowd during de Lisle’s solo rendition of the song is released when they finally burst into energetic applause. Gance uses a series of rapid, rhythmic cuts to show the gathered crowd from different angles and distances – high, low, close, long; there are quick tracking shots where the camera races past the tightly packed assembly, a kinetic expression of the crowd’s mounting excitement. Printed copies of La Marseillaise are distributed to the assembly, and de Lisle then teaches them to sing it. De Lisle acts as conductor and vocal coach; his gestures create, release, and rebuild tension; the rhythm of Gance’s images becomes musical in its modulation of tempo, anticipating the final burst of editing later in the sequence. After the crowd complete their first performance of La Marseillaise, de Lisle steps down from the pulpit and makes his way to the wings of the church. He passes a soldier who is leaning on a pillar, his back turned to the camera. The man is looking down at a printed copy of La Marseillaise, and unexpectedly grasps de Lisle’s arm as he passes. De Lisle stops and stares at the stranger with a look of intense concentration. The man speaks: ‘I thank you on behalf of France, monsieur. Your hymn will spare many a cannon.’ De Lisle responds: ‘Thank you lieutenant. What is your name?’ ‘Napoléon Bonaparte’, the stranger replies. They shake hands and part company. The casualness with which Gance reveals one of the most famous men ever to have lived is a marvel of understatement – this is surely one of the

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Fig. 7:  Rouget de Lisle sings and sunlight pours into the church

greatest introductions to any lead character in cinema. There is an economy to his exchange with de Lisle which instantly establishes the reality of Albert Dieudonné’s incarnation of Bonaparte. The actor’s facial similarity to the historical figure is immediately apparent, and his authority is emphasized through the self-assured underplaying of his first screen appearance. De Lisle may need to ask for his name, but the audience recognizes the stranger before he answers. As with many other such encounters in the film, the characters in this scene seem to be half-aware of the significance of their meeting. Continually predicated on dramatic irony, the narrative of Napoléon becomes a kind of fatalistic path that both the characters and audience try to discern. De Lisle’s anthem has already begun to forge a new sense of republican identity, and his subsequent encounter is with the man who will lead the Revolution to glory. Visible behind the two men is a bust of Thomas Jefferson (or possibly George Washington), over whose plinth the American flag is draped – symbol of another recent revolution. The meeting between Bonaparte and de Lisle, and La Marseillaise itself, is thus linked to international events and society’s movement towards the ‘Universal Republic’ envisioned in Bonaparte’s speech near the end of the film.

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Fig. 8: Danton leads the crowd from the pulpit, standing in front of a beheaded Christ and the billowing tricolour

At the pulpit, Danton now leads the crowd in the final rendition of La Marseillaise. As he sings, the tricolour flag comes to life behind him, animating itself in a gust of wind to billow and lift away from the wall – revealing the crucifix behind it (Figure 8). Without using the technical device of superimposition, this single shot unites its three layers: Danton, tricolour, and Christ. The Revolution becomes a form of religion; the church no longer represents an exclusive dogma but universal values that are embodied by the tricolour: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Gance wrote: ‘Forced to open one’s arms to embrace mankind, one ends up resembling a cross’ (1930: 36); the gesture of Christ’s open arms behind the tricolour is an embrace for all humanity – a benediction from the first ‘idealist republican’ in history (Gance 1927f). This is the third rendition of the sequence: La Marseillaise is first vocalized as a solo performance, then as a hesitant recitation, and finally as a communal chorus. Each version therefore marks a step from individual to collective expression, as well as providing the sequence with a musical structure in its modulation of tempo: allegro (de Lisle), andante (teaching the crowd), allegretto (introduction of Bonaparte), and accelerando (rapid

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montage). The editing at the climax of this communal performance fulfils the tremendous anticipation that the scene’s rhythmic ebb and flow has established. There are a series of close shots focusing on individual members of the crowd, some of them weeping with performative emotion. Here, the editing externalizes the exhilaration of the on-screen crowd in order to induce a similar expectation for the off-screen audience. Shots succeed one another with dizzying rapidity; in the final fifteen seconds of the sequence, 100 close-ups are gathered into an electrifying montage of single-frame shots: visually transforming a horde of individuals into a single, pulsing face of the multitude. After this blur of imagery passes, the personification of Liberty (Maryse Damia) appears: she is first superimposed over the shot of Danton/tricolour/crucifix at the pulpit, then over the established long shot of the whole assembly. This tableau is vivified by the strength of the wind that makes Liberty’s dress and the flags and pennants around her flutter so strongly; she raises her sword to spur the Revolution onwards, and a huge superimposed flame erupts through the centre of the image before the scene fades to black. As well as his partial recreation of François Rude’s relief sculpture on the right face of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris (Le Départ des volontaires de 1792), Gance also takes inspiration from the work of Jacques-Louis David. The Cordeliers sequence contains a reference to Le Serment du jeu de paume (1791), an iconic image depicting France’s parliamentary representatives swearing an oath to remain united in pursuit of political justice (Figure 9). The portraits of the individual members may be extremely detailed, but the most striking feature of the illustration is the compositional void above the crowd. In the top left of the image, a large curtain billows inwards – gesturing to the invisible subject occupying this huge empty space. The gust of air blowing into the court is a manifestation of the wind of change, whilst the raised hand of Jean-Sylvain Bailly (the central figure) points upwards into this emptiness – a void that represents the unknown future, waiting to be filled by the ideas of the Revolution. There is a parallel situation in Napoléon: de Lisle stands at the centre of events and his gestures inspire the communal crowd; the singing of La Marseillaise is greeted by a sudden eruption of nature’s approval when sunlight floods into the hall and the wind lifts the tricolour. David and Gance both use natural forces as metaphors for social change as well as literal agents that provide enlightenment and provoke movement. As I will discuss in chapters 4 and 5, flame and wind become key recurring motifs in Napoléon: each subsequent appearance not only refers back to this first communal expression of the Revolution’s solidarity but also develops their cumulative meaning and emotive impact.

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Fig. 9:  Jacques-Louis David, Le Serment du jeu de paume à Versailles le 20 juin 1789 (1791)

The Cordeliers sequence becomes precisely the ‘transformation of the crowd into a people’ about which Hugo wrote with such conviction; the ‘profound task’ of poets was to ‘permeate civilization with light’ (1864: 400, 407) – an image realized in Gance’s sunlit sequence as well as in the projection of his images in the cinema itself. The scene is not only a recreation of historical community but a vision of how the cinematic experience can inspire modern audiences with the same ideals. De Lisle and Danton are doubles for the filmmaker; their projection of enthusiasm through interactive performance unites the crowd into a single entity: ‘[individual spectators] pile up, crowd, amalgamate, combine, and knead themselves in the theatre; a living paste, which the poet will mould’ (ibid.: 415). Gance undertook the filming of this sequence with similar means: his cast was made to sing La Marseillaise so many times that they were whipped into a state of hysteria. According to Emile Vuillermoz, Gance was himself ‘a conductor of men’, and his direction for this sequence produced a ‘magnificent and terrifying’ apparition of collective willpower: if he had ordered his extras to overthrow the government, they would have willingly obeyed (1926: 2). René Jeanne thought that this display was the first genuine ‘manifestation’ of communal enthusiasm ever to overcome the usual grievances of a studio-bound cast (1926: 48). At the premiere of Napoléon, Gance made a great effort to engage his off-screen audience with on-screen chorus. At the start of the scene, Koubitzky (a fully-fledged opera singer) theatrically synchronized his

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voice with de Lisle’s on-screen performance of the song. For the climactic rendition, Koubitzky’s voice was joined not only by the theatre’s full choir and orchestra but by the f ilm spectators themselves. Gance had distributed copies of La Marseillaise to his audience and the theatre was invited to join in with the on-screen crowd. (For a subsequent screening at the Maison Pleyel, Gance used sound recordings of the song to achieve synchronization [1927h].) In a note in the margin of the 1924 screenplay, Gance writes: ‘Make the spectators sing and communicate with the screen’ (1924c). The sequence was to be an attempt to realize his vision of interactive cinemas where ‘the soul of the spectators will merge with the soul of characters and objects [on screen]’ (Gance 1929d: 289). Even without direct audience participation, this sequence has a tremendous impact in live screenings. Both the anticipation and the fulf ilment of La Marseillaise is rendered palpably real: through the presence of an orchestra, the on-screen song is brought to life in the off-screen space of the cinema with every performance. The sequence still motivates modern spectators: during a performance of the film in Amsterdam in June 2014, a row of French audience members spontaneously began singing along to de Lisle’s instruction! If there is a temptation to view La Marseillaise and the flurrying tricolour behind de Lisle and Danton as purely French symbols, the image of the light bursting through the windows and the statue of Christ behind the flag seek to transcend cultural boundaries. As was the trend among earlier Romantics, Gance saw the Revolution as a universal movement; La Marseillaise was an internationalist anthem, not a nationalist one. Prior to their release of Napoléon in Germany, Gance reminded the executives of ufa to insist on theatre orchestras playing La Marseillaise during the Cordeliers climax. He reported that his friend Albert Thomas, head of the International Labour Office attached to the League of Nations, had assured him that Germans ‘love and appreciate’ La Marseillaise not as a nationalist ode but as a ‘Hymn of Revolution’ that heralded the ‘emancipation of the German peoples’ (1927e). Gance always believed that his film could overcome any national prejudices; prior to production, he tried to commission a survey on the public’s view of Napoléon in Germany to increase his chances of popular success (1924d). Every audience of Napoléon, not just those in French theatres, can be (and usually are) swept away in the fervour of the Cordeliers sequence. It is an attempt to realize the idea that cinema was ‘destined to become the principal instrument’ in orienting ‘the collective rhythms of social movements’:

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If the cinema can be used to serve a unanimous social effort capable of delivering us from individualism by exalting and utilizing every spiritual resource of the individual to ensure the development of this effort, then we have reason to see in it the most supreme instrument of communion at mankind’s disposal since the age of great architecture (Faure 1934: 172-6).

Gance sought to mobilize this transformative energy through cinema; La Marseillaise becomes a musical-cinematic call for social reform. Thanks to his direction of actors in 1925, the orchestration of his montage in 1927, and the performative element of each live screening in the present, Gance achieves a powerful rendition of communal enthusiasm. It is no wonder that Jean Arroy believed the sequence to be ‘the most powerful paroxysm of a crowd’s collective expression ever seen on the screen’ (1927a: 67).

3.4

Fire and phoenix

Several close-ups of Bonaparte feature in the rapid montage at the end of the Cordeliers sequence. For perhaps the only time in the film, he is a member of the crowd – though his face never shares the same frame as any other individual, the blur of successive images visually unites him with the nation. In the script (though not in the film), the subsequent scene is set in the Tuileries Palace, where King Louis XVI is about to sign Bonaparte’s commission for captain. He pauses over the name, looking up as ‘the wind makes the heavy curtains dance sinisterly’. The positive natural presence of sun and wind in the Cordeliers sequence now announces the violence of this ‘final act of the Royal Tragedy’ (Gance 1927b: 42-3): the events of 10 August 1792. By that summer, France was being invaded by the combined forces of Austria and Prussia, and the royal family was suspected of colluding with other European monarchies. On 10 August, a force of insurrectionists and republican soldiers attacked the royal palace of the Tuileries to depose King Louis. Napoléon witnessed the storming of the Tuileries from a nearby building, keeping clear of the savage murder of the royalist regiment of Swiss Guards that took place. He later recounted to Emmanuel de Las Cases: I rushed to the [Place du] Carrousel and a furniture store owned by Fauvelet, Bourienne’s brother […] Before my arrival there, I had been met in the street of the Petits-Champs by a group of hideous men, parading a head on the end of a pike. Seeing me passably dressed, and having the air of a

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gentleman, they came over and challenged me to shout ‘Vive la nation!’, which (as you can well imagine) I hastened to do ([1822-3] 1842: I/33).

For safeguarding, the King and his family were brought to the Legislative Assembly (France’s parliament) – but this body demanded the abolition of the monarchy. The next month, the Assembly became the National Convention of the First French Republic. The scenes of 10 August in Napoléon are not as elaborate in the film as they are in Gance’s screenplay. The same historical event had featured prominently in both Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame DuBarry (1919) and Rex Ingram’s Scaramouche (1923), but this may not have been reason enough for Gance’s changes in Napoléon. To gauge the significance of their differences, and to understand the importance of the sequence in the realized film, I want to compare the two versions of these scenes. Gance’s original draft starts with a title: ‘The sun of the Monarchy rises for the last time’ (1924i). King Louis observes the morning light and predicts a beautiful day, but whilst he is being shaved the bells chiming the hour take on a menacing volume. The royal household soon realizes that this is a tocsin and the signal for an insurrection. Whilst Danton gathers a mob of sans-culottes (the nickname of the poorest Revolutionaries) in a blacksmith’s forge, Gance’s cameras were to illustrate the gathering momentum of the crowds outside in a series of tracking shots. As the armed rebels prepare to storm the Tuileries palace, the crescendo of the tocsin culminates in shots of ‘100 bells in four seconds, blending into one another’ (ibid.). As throughout the planned sequence, Gance aimed to align the audience with the perspective of both sides of the fight between royalist Swiss Guards and the Revolutionary militia. After rushing 30 metres in front of the insurrectionists, the camera would suddenly ‘pause for a moment, as they continue to rush ahead’ before turning and charging rapidly towards them ‘as if it represented the Swiss Guards’ (ibid.). Gance planned a dialectic viewpoint: embodying both sides of the fight, the cameras simultaneously rush towards the attackers and defenders. After the two sides of the fight collide, mobile cameras would capture the vicious hand-to-hand fighting in detail. The royal family escape and find refuge in the Assembly, but the fight rages throughout the palace and its grounds. Bonaparte enters the Tuileries and witnesses it being ransacked by the mob: ‘a future Emperor was observing the Agony [of Royalty] through the eyes of the Revolution’ (Gance 1924j). Superimposed over a shot of ‘two enormous eyes which fill the whole screen’ would be an astonishing array of rapid cutting and multiple images, utilizing every conceivable camera mounting and movement to portray

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events across the whole of Paris – Gance wanted to ‘vanquish any possibility of [rational] analysis’ (ibid.). This visionary condensation of time and space would be interrupted when Bonaparte is challenged by a group of bloodcovered sans-culottes. They have been slaughtering the Swiss Guards and now demand whether he is for or against them. ‘Neither for nor against’, Bonaparte replies, ‘I am watching’ (this latter title ‘in huge letters that fill the screen’). As in Napoléon’s historical recollection, he is made to shout ‘Vive la nation!’ However, he then warns the mob: ‘All that results from carnage is worth nothing. If no one restores order, the finest fruits of the Revolution will be lost.’ This reply angers the sans-culottes. One of them reaches out with a pistol to shoot Bonaparte, but before he can fire his hand is cut off by the blade of a soldier. The mob retreats and Bonaparte asks the name of the man who has saved his life: it is Jean-Baptiste Kléber. Just as de Lisle asks of him in the Cordeliers scene, Bonaparte here demands this stranger’s name ‘so that I can remember it’ – alerting the audience to the historical importance of this figure. Kléber would later become one of Napoléon’s generals and (in a fittingly ironic contrast to his appearance here) would be stabbed to death by a fanatic in 1800. His action in Gance’s scene may save Bonaparte, but the massacre continues in the palace courtyard. The sans-culottes strip the corpses and throw the naked bodies onto a huge fire. They dance around this hideous pyre in a scene which Gance wanted to be ‘indelibly engraved on our eyes like a page from Goya’, its close-ups of individual faces disfigured by disease and hardship – their eyes ‘aflame’ and ‘made epic by […] horror’ (1924i). Inside the King’s abandoned office, the figureheads of the Revolution have gathered: Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and Saint-Just stand together in silence. Through the open windows they ‘can hear the howling and screaming’ of mass murder – these leaders remain ‘stupefied and struck dumb by the excesses outside’. Danton says: ‘The Revolution is a furnace!’ Robespierre adds: ‘A furnace, but also a forge! We must shape the Republic now!’ These men group closer together and a ‘transfiguration’ takes place: ‘the great holy Face of the [National] Convention’ emerges from behind ‘the horrifying mask [of terror] it must wear’. A new dawn seems about to break: ‘the features of these fearsome men who, a moment before, seemed still to have blood in the corner of their mouths, become idealized.’ Each leader takes their turn to proclaim France’s new civil and moral code: The glacial Saint-Just, the impassive Robespierre, the sarcastic Couthon, and the hideous Marat himself will, as they lay the cornerstones of the new social cathedral, take on expressions we never knew they had. And

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these powerful souls climb the ladder of idealism, as the infernal dancing round of cut-throats grows in intensity and Louis XVI gradually sinks down in the little box in the Assembly where he is now imprisoned (Gance 1924j).

Bonaparte witnesses this scene in the Tuileries, unnoticed. He picks up the royal crown which is lying on the floor and his body becomes ‘more luminous’. Gance next planned to cut between four different spaces: Bonaparte in the antechamber, the Revolutionary leaders in their office, the sans-culottes outside the Tuileries, and the trial of the royal family in the Assembly. The rhythm of this huge crescendo increases in time with the mob’s dance around their gruesome bonfire: This time the visual style will again take on one of its grandest apparitions. The camera will move exactly in time with the dancers. The two feet of the camera will be two human feet, caught in the same frenetic madness. If the rhythm is sustained, the impact on the nervous system will be considerable (ibid.).

Meanwhile, ‘Bonaparte, surrounded by an aura of light, lets the crown drop to the floor’. The farandole reaches a paroxysm of intensity, and the sequence would draw to a breathless finish: One, two, three, four simultaneous sinister dances. The rhythm of the previous scene accelerates and overspills, mad, tumultuous, multiple, incredible. Like a fire spreading. Louis XVI, crushed, bent double, head in hands. Bonaparte surrounded by a halo. Long shot of [the King’s] chamber. All the [Revolutionary] leaders stand poised in earnestness for their shared cause. A miraculous moment. A growing supernatural light gradually transforms the atmosphere. The rhythm reaches the peak of its intensity. Are all the giants of the Revolution dancing in this red darkness, making it take on such fantastic dimensions, as if millions of fireflies danced in the hope of an eternal night? Long shot of the chamber. Apogee. The dead Swiss Guard in the corner, who had earlier had an expression of horror, now has an expression of bliss... Close-up of the royal crown, broken. Panoramic shot of Bonaparte’s ecstatic expression.

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The diaphragm plays with the light as if it were a violin. Rapid fade to white (ibid.).

Following the creative spirit of the Cordeliers scenes, this original 10 August sequence signals the destructive side of the Revolution’s nature. The positive symbolism of illumination is destabilized by the sequence’s apocalyptic atmosphere of fire and frenzied rhythm. Danton has led the crowd in an expression of fraternal union, but now he ‘has never [appeared] more terrifying’; sparks ‘fly all round him’ and the blacksmith’s becomes a ‘vision of the Apocalypse’ (Gance 1924i). This setting directly echoes Carlyle’s view of Danton as ‘fiery-real, from the great fire-bosom of Nature herself’ (1837: III/360). In Napoléon, the superimposition of Danton’s face over the burning coals and flames is also highly ambivalent: is this an affirmation of his passion or a warning of uncontrolled rage? This written sequence for Napoléon can also be seen in relation to similar scenes in J’accuse and La Roue. The opening sequence of J’accuse shows a fire-lit farandole: the close-ups of Jean Diaz and his lover Edith (Maryse Dauvray) are dramatically lit by the flickering of flames from the bonfire. The rapid cutting of the villagers’ dance around the pyre transforms their celebrations into an unsettling premonition of the war, emphasized by its subsequent rhyme with a visual danse macabre of circling skeletons. The film’s lead characters are pulled into the rhythm of the editing, just as they will be drawn into the oncoming conflict. As with the 10 August scenes, this joyous dance has intimations of disaster; Gance describes the bodies in the former sequence being immolated ‘as in J’accuse, on an ecstatic fire’ (1925?). Another appearance of the fatalistic wheel appears in La Roue, where motifs of dance and flame are equally important. During the opening scenes of a train wreck, a bright flickering light passes over the close-ups of Sisif (Séverin-Mars) and the infant Norma. In the final sequence of La Roue, the adult Norma (Ivy Close) joins the farandole of the villagers along the mountain pathways. Their dance ends with them circling a burning tree, its trembling flames reflected on Sisif’s face as he watches from his lonely cabin window. This last effect of distant fire matches the film’s opening scenes, illustrating the completion of its cyclical narrative: whilst the elderly Sisif dies, Norma is still bound to the wheel of existence. In Napoléon, Gance’s imagery is concerned with the relationship between individuals and the predetermined path of history. As Carlyle wrote: ‘Volition bursts forth involuntary-voluntary; rapt along; the movement of free human minds becomes a raging tornado of fatalism, blind as the winds’ (1837: III/169). In the draft version of the 10 August sequence, the Revolutionary leaders

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(like Jean and Edith in J’accuse) are being pulled into the mobs’ terrifying dance. This fatalistic cycle reflects Carlyle’s imagery of a self-devouring Revolution, whose cannibalism revealed the most primitive instinct of historical progress: ‘That I can devour Thee’ (ibid.: I/53). The 10 August sequence in the realized editions of Napoléon reduces the extraordinarily complex account of the original draft into a simpler set of scenes. Cutting all reference to the build-up to the events, Gance’s opening title concentrates on the notion of (physical) distance and (symbolic) proximity between Bonaparte and the fall of royalty: ‘The night of 10 August exploded suddenly, bringing to Bonaparte echoes of the tumbling throne.’ A long shot introduces us to a small space defined by chiaroscuro lighting. Bonaparte holds a flickering candle in the far corner of the room, whilst the large window on the right of the frame opens out onto a view of the tumultuous streets below. A title announces: ‘Fragments of a great event, seen from a tiny room.’ The red tinting creates a sinister ambiance, whilst a close-up of the wall and ceiling now shows a series of hallucinatory silhouettes that move across the plaster. The passing mob is armed with halberds, pikes, and scythes, whose macabre shadows glide surreally up the flat surface of the chamber in an evocation of Death as the ‘grim reaper’ – matching the imagery used in J’accuse to signal the approach of war. After this strangely disorienting shot, we see an image of the crowd gathering around a tolling bell outside, followed by a close shot of Bonaparte sitting at his writing table by the window. This latter image isolates him in profile against a black background, and the flickering light alternately overexposes his face with light and cloaks it in darkness – Bonaparte becomes an almost impassive sculpture onto which the shadow play of events is projected. In reaction to the swelling violence outside, we see him write: ‘All that results from carnage will be worth nothing. If we are not careful, the finest fruits of the Revolution will be lost.’ These are the same words used in the screenplay version of 10 August, but in the film only the off-screen audience is privileged to see them. At this point, we see for the first time the trial of King Louis XVI (Louis Sance) and his wife Marie-Antoinette (Suzanne Bianchetti) in the Legislative Assembly: an intertitle explains that we are witnessing ‘the death-throes of Royalty’. The king is pleading for his life, the queen sitting anxiously by his side. Gance now cuts back to a crowd in the street and then to our first glimpse of Danton in the blacksmith’s forge; overhead is a huge pulsing bellows, on the left are the sparks of the smith’s hammer on a red-hot iron. He is surrounded by the faces of sans-culottes, lit dramatically from below in the same way as the mesmerized villagers summoned by Jean Diaz at

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the end of J’accuse. Danton exclaims: ‘If the Revolution is a furnace, it is also a forge! Let us build the Republic now!’ Gance reallocates lines given to Robespierre in the original draft to Danton in the film, removing the former figure’s role in the 10 August entirely. (As I explore further in chapter 4, this has significant implications for our relative sympathy for either figure.) After a close-up of Danton’s face superimposed over the burning coals, Gance cuts back to Bonaparte witnessing a decapitated head on a pike pass by his balcony. After reinforcing the impact of these macabre images by cutting back to the violent climax of Danton’s speech, we see Bonaparte writing: ‘How cowardly and vile men are! People are hardly worth such trouble. Each man seeks to advance his own interests and wants to use horror as a means to success.’ This seems to be a near-direct critique of Danton, whose laughing mouth (shot in extreme close-up) reveals bared teeth and darkened lips – as if conjuring the image in Gance’s original draft of men with ‘blood in the corner of their mouths’. The film continues with a view of the street, in which there is a lynching. We then see Bonaparte’s fiercely concentrated face in close-up, vividly lit by the eerie light of the torch-lit street. There is a close-up of Bonaparte’s hand reaching for the pistol on his table, but it stops short and withdraws. In contrast to this rejection of violence, we see the lynchman’s bloodied hand clutching at the rope from which his victim hangs and another close-up of the latter’s boots lifting up from the ground and twitching in his death throes. This powerful set of shots is all the more shocking because of its fragmentation – the images work through suggestion. There is a cut to a large document pinned to Bonaparte’s wall: it is the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’. This is followed by a dissolve out to a wider shot of the poster, and the camera pans right to the window where the lynchers are laughing. Gance cuts back to Bonaparte, who moves his gaze back to the poster on his left. This eye-line reveals that the panning shot was actually a subjective one that allowed the audience to share Bonaparte’s view and thus his train of thought. He laughs bitterly at the ironic contrast between this document and the violence, reinforced by the subsequent burst of five rapid shots that switch between the declaration and the bloody hand of the sans-culotte. Gance cuts from a shot of Bonaparte, sunk in despair, to Danton at the blacksmith’s – he rips apart a horseshoe and cries: ‘This is the monarchy!’ The rapid montage that follows contains shots of Danton and the burning coals, his laughing mouth, the close-up of the lynchman’s hand, and the close-up of Bonaparte. This frenetic burst welds these incongruous and opposing images together so that they are almost simultaneous. Gance’s

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metaphor of the forge is brilliantly appropriate for the cinematic technique of his sequence: fusing the disparate and irresolute into a single moment of creative expression. This climax is followed by a visual coda: Gance cuts between King Louis, jeered into a state of collapse, and a close-up of Bonaparte that is radiantly back-lit. The title at this point reads: ‘And from second to second, as the Monarchy crumbled, Napoléon had the vague feeling of a source of light growing within him.’ The brightness of the halo effect in Bonaparte’s close-up increases – a rising sun to the sunset of royalty, as Louis falls ever lower in the centre of the Assembly. This final montage reflects the thematically antithetical nature of the sequence: a violent transition whose savagery contains the hope of a new society. As Hugo wrote in Quatrevingt-treize: ‘At the same time as it emitted revolution, this assembly produced civilization. Furnace, but forge. In this caldron where terror bubbled, progress fermented’ (1874: II/78). Gance described cinema as ‘a forge of light’, linking his own ambition of creative energy with that of his characters (1929d: 290). The last moments of 10 August foreshadow Bonaparte’s embodiment of the order that will contain the Revolutionary disorder. Carlyle wrote that the chaotic forces of Revolution are loose reins Napoléon must pick up and ‘harness’: To bridle in that great devouring, self-devouring French Revolution; to tame it, so that its intrinsic purpose can be made good, that it may become organic, and be able to live among other organisms and formed things, not as a wasting destruction alone: is not this what he partly aimed at, as the true purport of his life; nay what he actually managed to do? (1841: 387).

3.5 Summary Having written the draft of the 10 August scenes, Gance felt obliged to admit that he had deliberately strayed from the historical narrative he had spent so many months researching. In a note appended to his script, he wrote: I know that the immense creations of the [National] Convention were not drawn up during the night of 10 August; I know that Saint-Just wasn’t there, that Favière was too stupid to make the proposal I make him propose, but it was necessary to establish a concise summary of the great, primary aims of the Convention, and psychological truth does, I think, amply justify deliberate historical inaccuracies (Gance 1924j).

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By allowing such ‘inaccuracies’ at the level of detail, Gance enables a complex set of rhetorical imagery to articulate much broader historical themes. In his realized film, the imagery of flame, wind, and sunlight visible in the Cordeliers and 10 August scenes evidences the ‘theology of fire’ formulated by Jacob Böhme, who cited fire as both ‘giver of heat and light’ and ‘destroyer and transformer’ in human affairs (Waterfield 2001: 28). This conjunction between destruction and creation provides the narrative basis of much of Napoléon; it is also an idea all the more apparent in Gance’s next film, La Fin du Monde, in which the impact of a comet allows humanity to start society anew from the ashes of the old world. Gance’s science fiction harked back to Carlyle’s vision of the French Revolution as the ‘death-birth’ of the universe (1837: I/206), an image apparent in Hugo’s vision of this era as the grand chaos before spiritual reconstruction: ‘Progress demolishes with the left hand; it is with the right hand that it builds’ (1864: 395). Hugo admitted that the sans-culottes mobs were ‘savages’ but insisted that they were ‘the savages of civilization’: The French Revolution had its reasons. Its anger will be pardoned by the future. Its result is a better world. Its most terrible blows are a caress for the human race […] Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, one recognizes this: that the human race has been mistreated, but that it has advanced (1862: VI/78, I/103).

In depicting both abstract historical processes and the collective identity of the protagonists, Gance’s cinematic language of montage and superimposition becomes the equivalent of Carlyle’s compound words (death-birth) and Hugo’s paradoxical axioms (furnace-forge). The issue of how Gance vindicates this rhetorical resolution of historical ambivalence is an issue I will develop further in chapter 4.

4. Mortal gods: Voices of power and of providence Even when fallen, especially when fallen, august are those men who, all around the world, with eyes fixed on France, struggle for the great work with the inflexible logic of the ideal; they give their life as a pure gift for progress; they accomplish the will of Providence; they perform a religious act. At the appointed hour, with all the disinterestedness of an actor reaching his cue, obedient to the divine scenario, they enter the tomb. And this hopeless combat, and this stoic disappearance, they accept in order to lead to its splendid and supreme universal consequences the magnificent movement of humanity, irresistibly begun on 14 July 1789. These soldiers are priests. The French Revolution is an act of God (Hugo 1862: IX/174).

4.1 Introduction The imagery and logic of Gance’s fantastical historicism derives from the methodologies of the Romantic era. Carlyle’s The French Revolution is a prime example of how narrative and stylistic technique shapes factual evidence into a visionary account of the past. For Léon Bloy, the ‘intensity’ of this writer’s ‘evocation’ seemed to derive from direct experience: ‘assuredly, he saw what he tells’ (1874: 125-6). As I suggested in chapter 1, the Romantic historian is both a narrator and a participant in their resuscitative account of events. Carlyle wears multiple ‘masks’ of the dead with the dexterity and ‘impersonality’ of ‘an actor of genius’; his crowd of reincarnated personalities produces ‘a vision’ that was more real for readers than any purely objective account (ibid.). Such an approach necessarily meant inhabiting the dramatis personae of all historical positions and allegiances. This ubiquitous perspective on events is also evident in the dramas produced by Hugo, in which ‘a situation will commonly trigger two or more conflicting sympathies at different levels’: [There is an] unusual […] intensity [in] the poet’s emotional involvement in both sides of the antithesis […] He enters so wholeheartedly into the hidden currents and countercurrents that move within his characters,

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‘good’ and ‘evil’ alike, that they seem to breathe and feel and live from the inside, from the very depths of their being – however extreme their beliefs may be, and however superficially implausible their situations (Blackmore/Blackmore 2000: xviii-ix).

This interpretation is equally apt for Gance in Napoléon. In this account of the Revolution, the author’s experiential involvement with historical figures extends to his audience, which could be induced into a collective hallucination through cinematic technique. He wrote that the viewer ‘must be an actor, as he is in life – simultaneous to the actors of the drama’ (Gance 1924a). This actor-spectator should be ‘propelled into the action’ and ‘carried away by the rhythm of images’ (Gance 1927d). Though this multiple subjectivity is often mistaken for narrative and/or stylistic incoherence, its ambivalent perspective is far from accidental. Gance himself becomes an actor in the scenes of the Terror, but his own role is only one of many deeply complex and engaging portraits. The audience is invited to relate to a range of political figures in Napoléon, each of whom is given a vivid characterization that challenges any simple interpretation of their leadership and morality.

4.2

Communicating authority

France’s Revolutionary government was the National Convention, an assembly elected by universal male suffrage in 1792. It consisted of two groups: the Girondins (moderates) and the Montagnards (radicals). The latter party was dominated by three personalities: Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre. In Napoléon, these figures are called ‘the Three Gods’ – an epithet taken from Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize. Whilst Gance incorporated numerous elements of this novel into his screenplay, the film draws on original sources as well as later Romantic-era depictions of these figures. Each possesses different facets of political communication and power that have wider significance in Gance’s representational scheme. Antonin Artaud viewed his character in Napoléon as ‘a figure who seemed to incarnate a force of nature, who was disinterested and indifferent to all that was not the force of his passions’; Marat was an ‘effervescent saint, paroxysmic, and perpetually tearing himself apart’ (1929: 733). Such was clearly Gance’s interpretation too: he costumes Marat in a mêlée of different layers, from the disorganized lapels and collar of waistcoat and

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jacket to the leopard-skin garment thrown over his shoulders and the grotty handkerchief around his head (Figure 10). This outer dishevelment suggests the hidden physical disorder of his skin diseases and the fractious workings of his mind. The real Marat saw himself as an embodiment of the nation’s fury, telling Robespierre that he relied not on ideas but on ‘the impetuous outbursts of my soul, my cries of rage, despair, and fury [that are] the most instinctive and the most sincere expression of the passions which devour my soul’ (1792 cited in Lamartine 1847: II/283). It is this sense of inner paranoia and torment that characterizes the portraits of Marat to be found in much Romantic literature. Carlyle describes him as ‘a man unlovely to the sense, outward and inward’, and wonders if nature had ‘kneaded’ Marat together out of ‘leavings and miscellaneous waste clay’; this almost inhuman figure was ‘a living fraction of Chaos and Old Night’ who ‘croaks’ a ‘continual harsh thunder’ of ‘indignation, suspicion, incurable sorrow’ (1837: I/228; III/201; II/149). Similarly, there is a ferocity to Artaud’s appearance and performance that isolates his character from our sympathy. His body is in a permanent state of physical tension, rendering his gestures sudden and the mimetic form of his speech disturbing and aggressive. The Robespierre of Edmond van Daële is also an unsympathetic leader. The first close-up of the character in Napoléon always evinces an audible reaction in the theatre, as his small, dark spectacles make him instantly and irresistibly sinister. Even though he hides behind these opaque shades, the audience is able to glimpse his personality in the slightly lopsided sneer that crosses his face. When Robespierre cautiously lowers his spectacles, his eyes are narrowed into a guarded and suspicious squint (Figure 11). His first line (addressed to his colleagues) is terse and unendearing: ‘Chatterers!’ He wears an immaculately brushed velvet coat and carefully powdered wig, but the smallpox scars on his cheeks provide a wonderfully subtle suggestion of frailty to Robespierre’s inhumanly pristine façade. Gance perfectly captures this ‘unworldly’ figure, a man who was ‘contemptuous of or indifferent to all the social pleasures’ and kept ‘his innermost self carefully shielded by ancien régime manners’ (Jordan 1999: 17). Carlyle describes Robespierre as ‘the sea-green man’ whose ‘feline eyes’ are ‘excellent in the twilight’ (1837: III/11), and van Daële’s cool and controlled performance is pleasingly adumbral. In contrast to the other Gods, Gance shows Danton in a more positive light. Koubitzky’s physical bulk gives his character’s gestures more emotive articulacy than Marat’s violent outbursts or the reserved secrecy of Robespierre. When we f irst see Danton at the Cordeliers’ Club, he slams

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Fig. 10:  Antonin Artaud as Marat

a pile of papers onto a table before roaring with laughter; a scrawny coiffeur is trying to apply irons to his locks, but Danton loses patience and hurls him across the room. This robust disinterest in dandif ication provides an impression of practicality; the easy casualness of his open shirt and mass of hair is the antithesis of the impeccable tailoring of Robespierre, which cannot countenance rearrangement. A close-up of Danton later in the f ilm is back-lit to give his hair the appearance of a f iery lion’s mane (Figure 12), and reviewers of Napoléon echoed Carlyle and Hugo in their descriptions of Danton having a leonine presence on screen. The differences between these Gods are strongly articulated during the sequence of La Marseillaise. Marat and Robespierre are segregated from the crowd in the vestry, where they are observed by a severed bust of Christ that sits in a patch of light on the floor. Marat describes the assembly’s singing as the ‘braying of donkeys’ and, in a scene now lost, ‘trips over Christ’s head’ whilst crossing the vestry (Gance 1927b: 34-8). Whilst the anthem is sung outside, Robespierre is seen standing on his own in front of the large brass eagle of a disused lectern – a tableau which Gance very slowly encloses with a tightening iris. It is one of the longest, and most

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Fig. 11: Edmond van Daële as Robespierre

unusual, shots in the film. Robespierre’s expression denotes a surprised (perhaps reluctant) succumbing to emotion – yet his awkward posture and lack of mobility undermine any sense that he is truly participating in the communal event in the hall. Gance’s emotive rendering of La Marseillaise is characterized by a superabundance of movement and energy within the camerawork and montage – qualities Robespierre absolutely lacks. Compared to the gloriously mobile eagle associated with Bonaparte, Robespierre’s avian statue is a lifeless monument whose outspread wings seem almost comically inert. Regardless of their intellectual association with the Revolution, neither Marat nor Robespierre interacts with the community they supposedly represent. Robespierre may have boasted that ‘I embody the nation!’ (1792: 311), but in actuality his ‘inflexible’ nature and inadequate speaking voice made him permanently ‘ill at ease in public’ and entirely lacking in ‘the common touch’ (Jordan 1999: 17). As I argued in chapter 3, the performance of La Marseillaise replicates the process of spectatorial involvement that Gance saw as the central function of filmmaking. Danton’s ability to enthuse (and involve himself with) the crowd therefore denotes his possession of the cinematic/cinematizing qualities that his colleagues lack.

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Fig. 12:  Koubitzky as Danton

Different modes of authority and communication are evident in the scenes set on Corsica. Historically, these scenes offer a hiatus from the events on the mainland: the execution of Louis XVI and the invasion of France’s borders take place whilst Bonaparte visits his family during late 1792 and early 1793. However, after the initial idyll of homecoming, the Bonapartes’ friend Santo-Ricci (Henri Baudin) announces that Corsica is about to break with France and side with England. Bonaparte swiftly vows to protect his island, and Gance fashions this moment into a messianic tableau: Bonaparte stands in profile by the fireside whilst Santo-Ricci and another local shepherd kneel either side of him like disciples from Christian iconography. The scene ends with a close-up of Bonaparte, over which is superimposed a blazing flame (Figure 13). We have already seen this symbol in the Cordeliers sequence, when it appears over the united crowd; on Corsica, it now signifies Bonaparte’s embodiment of the Revolutionary ideals. A dissolve slowly reduces his profile to an outline etched in relief, his face like the imprint of a coin. (One day, the image proclaims, his face will appear on coins – an effect heightened on those prints which use amber tinting for this scene.) The flame flares up, blazes, and dies – leaving his profile visible against the encroaching darkness until it too fades to black.

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Fig. 13: The ‘flame of revolution’ superimposed over the adult Bonaparte

This image is weird, thrilling, frightening. It is a perfect example of how Gance uses established techniques of low-key lighting and makes them entirely his own. Subsequent scenes introduce us to two key figures of local royalist power. Corsica’s political establishment is led by the elderly Pasquale Paoli (Maurice Schutz) and his younger lieutenant Pozzo di Borgo (Acho Chakatouny). Paoli is introduced to us in his cavernous office, hunched over an empty table. He is isolated from his people, representatives of whom stand under guard at the rear entrance to his chambers. Paoli’s pale brow seems permanently creased into an expression of fearful confusion, and his eyes distractedly avoid any contact with others. His clothes are those of an earlier decade, and his powdered wig gives him the appearance of a dusty fossil. When we see him stand up later in the film, his movement is awkward and stiff – just as his expression of shock at Bonaparte’s defiance resembles a man being woken from a deep sleep. Though he may once have been the hero of Corsica, his enfeebled appearance suggests that Paoli has become an outmoded member of the ancien regime, incapable of action or originality. Pozzo is introduced through a medium close-up that shows him standing with crossed arms in front of a spiky thicket. His expression is one of sullen

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Fig. 14:  Pozzo di Borgo, a snake slithering over his right shoulder

ill humour, whilst his fluffily brushed top hat gives his obvious villainy an air of suave self-satisfaction. Over Pozzo’s right shoulder slivers a snake – a detail made all the more delicious by its initial camouflage within the image (Figure 14). When cinema audiences eventually spot the creature as it begins to curl over Pozzo’s tunic, there is always a frisson of laughter and several gasps of surprise. His association with a land-borne creature forced to drag itself through the dirt is the antithesis to the airborne majesty of Bonaparte’s eagle. When we see Pozzo in Paoli’s office, he is whispering suggestions into the old man’s ear in a perfect continuation of this snakish characterization. Similarly, when Pozzo incites a mob to attack the Bonaparte family, his weapon of choice is revealed to be a dagger – suggestive of the extreme close range of his blows and capacity for treachery. The Bonaparte family are forced to flee from their home by a royalist mob, and their escape is aided by the community of local shepherds – evidence of Bonaparte’s engagement with the common people of the island (a connection no doubt made more apparent in much of the footage missing from the Corsican section of Napoléon). However, the islanders are still divided about their collective future. At the Moulin du Roy inn, we see groups of men clustered round various tables – arguing whether Corsica

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should ally itself with Spain, Italy, or (as Pozzo angrily demands) England. Suddenly standing up and addressing the room, Bonaparte shouts: ‘No. Our fatherland is France! // …with me!’ Gance shows a series of reaction shots of the crowd: all ages and sexes are mesmerized, almost afraid, of Bonaparte’s stare. These images of open-mouthed spectators verge on being comic, but they are capped by a magnificently dramatic, extreme close-up of Bonaparte’s face: his features are swathed in shadows, leaving his eyes gleaming with light in the centre of the image. Pozzo urges his soldiers to shoot Bonaparte down, but the latter transfixes them with his gaze and they freeze. Stepping closer to Bonaparte, Pozzo seems to be fighting his own attraction to his rival’s eyes; he stares directly into the camera, drawing closer and closer in absolute fascination – it is as if the cinematic apparatus is itself part of the Napoleonic spell. In a lightning-quick interruption of the subsequent close-up of Bonaparte, there is an extreme-close-up of the eagle – its beak flashing open. The suddenness of the bird’s appearance is thrilling, and the precision with which its own eyes are then overlaid with those of Bonaparte in another superimposed shot is a miracle of composition (Figure 15). At Brienne, the small child had been superimposed within the animal’s imposing form; now, the adult encompasses its power within his gaze. Hugo wrote that a great man has ‘a f lame in his eyes’, a light that renders visible his willpower (1866: II/73-4). As elsewhere in Napoléon, Gance cinematizes this idea: Bonaparte can transmit the Revolutionary flame that fluttered within him in superimposition, just as he holds the eagle’s piercing glare. Gance was also influenced by Schuré’s depiction of religious leaders in Les Grands Initiés. Here, the Hindu prophet Rama’s eyes repel his enemies: ‘when they met his gaze, they had felt petrif ied with fear’ (Schuré 1889: 32). Schuré also describes Moses’ ‘piercing black eyes, f ixed as an eagle’s and of a disquieting depth’, and Orpheus’ eyes which ‘radiated force, tenderness, magic’ (ibid.: 168, 228). At various moments in Napoléon, the dissenting crowd is mesmerized, frightened, controlled, or pacif ied when it recognizes the visionary authority of the hero: Bonaparte’s eyes evidence the power of his primal, animal magnetism. This happens on Corsica, when the patrons of the Moulin du Roy inn are won over and joyfully surround Bonaparte; only Pozzo is able to tear himself away – he is emblematic of Gance’s critique of those who refuse to ‘see what is before their eyes’ and resist the lure of cinematic power (1927c: 97). Bonaparte’s subsequent speech again draws on the imagery of enlightenment established in earlier scenes:

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Fig. 15:  Adult and eagle

If you could understand the dream that fires my soul, you would all follow me! // You must understand that France is the mother of us all! // Believe me… A man will come who will unite in himself all the hopes of the nation, and then…

We are given a medium close-up in which Bonaparte is shown against an entirely black background; as he speaks, an increasing level of backlighting gives him a halo – a glorious image whose hallucinatory effect is increased by the soft focus lens through which it is seen (Figure 16). In the margin of the manuscript screenplay at this point, Gance’s note (double underlined) reads: ‘First visible radioactivity of Bonaparte’ (1924c) – evidence of the spiritual, even chemical/physical, energy that is being conveyed. The last line of Bonaparte’s speech is left incomplete: the rising backlight grows in intensity before we cut back to reaction shots of the crowd and a f inal tableau of Bonaparte united with the people. The scene fades to white, literalizing the effect of enlightenment. Bonaparte reveals himself as a true prophet because his ideas are articulated through cinematic means: light unites ideological content and f ilmic expression.

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Fig. 16: Bonaparte’s luminosity on Corsica

4.3

Chaos and providence

Pozzo returns to the inn with reinforcements. Inspired by Bonaparte’s words, the crowd help him escape – he jumps from a bridge onto the saddle of his horse and gallops away, pursued by a squadron of cavalry. Outpacing his rivals, Bonaparte heads back into Ajaccio and steals the huge French tricolour that hangs outside Paoli’s headquarters. The old man is still slumped at his table but reacts with baffled shock when the flag disappears from the pole outside and reappears being brandished by Bonaparte: ‘I am taking it away’, he exclaims to Paoli’s men, ‘It is too great for you!’ Aided once more by shepherds, Bonaparte resumes his flight from Pozzo’s men. The subsequent sequence is a demonstration of bravura technical and artistic imagination: Gance mixes breakneck tracking shots, rapid cutting, and striking camera placement; saddle-mounted shots turn the audience into cavalrymen, bent down over the reins; low-level tracking shots trample us with images of horses’ legs and hooves; close-ups of Bonaparte and his pursuers let us share the thrill of pursuit. Portions of the sequence resemble the subject matter of Eadweard Muybridge’s proto-cinematic zoopraxiscope, a device from 1879 that projected a sequence of photographic

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frames of a galloping horse; in Napoléon, Gance’s recording of physiological motion is allied to the rhythmic potential of the film medium itself. As throughout the film, Bonaparte is here a paradigm of movement and energy – qualities that distinguish him from the film’s other figures of leadership, especially Paoli. The chase is capped by a breathtaking, extreme long shot: along a dark strip of land at the bottom of the frame, the riders are silhouetted against a sliver of gleaming sea; on the far side of the water, the rugged landscape becomes lost in a darkly luminous cloudscape; in the top right of the frame, the moon seems half-dissolved in the thickening night sky. This Turneresque (or even Hugoesque) image marks a gateway into the visionary nature of the forthcoming ‘Double Tempest’ sequence, its painterly overtones preparing the audience for the mythical artifice ahead. Reaching the sea, Bonaparte escapes from his pursuers in a small boat, using the tricolour flag he has taken as an improvised sail. Hoisting it atop the mast, he cries: ‘I shall bring it back to you!’ As throughout the film, Gance is simultaneously literal and symbolic: the image of Bonaparte being drawn out to sea by the huge tricolour is so stunning that it ‘transcends cliché’ (Abel 1984: 438). His billowing flag fulfils the promise made in the Cordeliers sequence when the tricolour was lifted from the crucifix by the wind; now this same force of animation propels the hero into the heart of the storm. An intertitle states that Bonaparte is about to undergo an ‘epic battle with Fate’. Remarkable handheld and boat-mounted shots of him at sea are intercut with close-ups of waves crashing into the camera and images of the darkening sky. Another title then announces the second half of this ‘Double Tempest’: ‘That same night, at the same time, another mighty storm was unleashed at the Convention.’ Gance now depicts the moment when Robespierre and his Montagnard associates purged the government of its moderate elements in the Girodin party, causing a chaotic outburst of violence in the assembly’s hall. As credited in his screenplay, Gance took inspiration from a passage in Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize: To be a member of the Convention was to be a wave of the Ocean. This was true of the greatest there. The force of impulsion came from on high. There was a will in the Convention which was that of all and yet not that of any one person. The will was an idea, an idea indomitable and immeasurable which swept from the summit of heaven into the darkness below. We call this Revolution. When that idea passed, it beat down one and raised up another; it scattered this man into foam and dashed that one upon the reef. This idea knew where it was going, and drove the

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whirlpool before it. To ascribe the Revolution to men is to ascribe the tide to waves (1874: II/57-8).

This is an example of Hugo’s ‘tidal wave syntax’, which ‘sweeps up small details until the horizons of the page are filled with a single mighty metaphor’ (Robb 2002: xix). Gance takes Hugo’s central image and produces an astonishing sequence of literary-cinematic transformation. After the first series of shots within the Convention, Gance begins to intercut medium- and long-shots of the assembly’s reactions with close-ups of waves crashing into the camera. These latter shots were filmed by sealing a motorized camera in a glass box and allowing it to sit on a beach and be pummelled by the tide – the resultant images were then printed in negative to increase the visual impact of their abstract aesthetic. Commenting both on Hugo’s metaphor and his own pantheistic vision of cinema, Gance said that these images were not the perspective of ‘a person looking at the waves, but rather that of one wave seen by another’ (Brownlow 1968: 551-2). The white faces, wigs, and hands of the Convention members contrast with their dark surroundings like the white foam of the cresting waves; their oscillating movement in the hall rhymes with the gathering force of the tide at sea; as their anger rises, they respond like choppy waves that swell and fall under their own momentum – a visual connection reinforced by those shots of the sea crashing into the camera that punctuate the sequence. As well as their metaphorically oceanic reaction, their movement is also a response to the real waves of the sea: the Convention may generate energy, but it is vulnerable to more powerful forces. The fighting in the assembly grows more intense and Gance’s handheld cameras are in the midst of the mêlée: squeezing past ranks of terrified onlookers; looking down at the brawling mass spilling over the benches; looking up at the Gods conducting the chaos; alternating between startling close-ups and extreme long shots. The dominantly low-key lighting (combined with amber tinting) renders the swarming crowd all the more feverish and vivid; when the camera suddenly tilts the frame on its side, it is as if the whole Convention was being bowled over by the sea and pitched into a dimensionless darkness. Similar techniques were used for the shots of Bonaparte at sea: the rolling, convulsive high-angle views of his boat were created by a ‘gyroscopic tripod head’ that enabled cameras to ‘duplicate the rise and fall of the sea’ (Brownlow [1983] 2004: 113). Yet the most spectacular transposition of Hugo’s metaphor is the climactic pendulum-mounted shots of the Convention. On set, Gance said: ‘Since the studio can’t go into the Mediterranean, I’m going to bring the Mediterranean into the studio’ (Arroy 1926: 399). To create a wave’s viewpoint,

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the camera was mounted on a platform at the end of a trapeze-like system of beams, allowing it to swing down whilst keeping parallel to the floor with the crowd constantly in sight. Cameras were strung-up at different heights to provide a threefold perspective of a wave crashing down into space. Seen on an appropriately large screen, these shots are a revelation: the momentum of the swooping camera induces an astonishing sense of vertigo in the viewer, one which must have been all the stronger in the (now lost) triptych version of this sequence. Conceptually, the shot is also magnificently original: we are viewing the scene through the perspective of a metaphor! Gance aligns his audiences with the ‘mysterious orientation’ of the ‘eye of the storm’ (Hugo 1866: II/136), an effect that is both intellectually marvellous and emotionally thrilling. The climax of the storm is signalled by a huge convulsion of the sea, creating a dark circular crater encircled by foam that resembles the eyes, mouths, and abstract orifices of Hugo’s graphic art – particularly the illustrations incorporated into editions of Les Travailleurs de la Mer. The cutting between Convention and ocean having become quicker and quicker, both strands of the narrative – like mighty contrapuntal musical motifs – are finally united through a series of multiple superimpositions. Images of the waves at sea sweep into the rioting Convention just as the crowd rushes at the central dais in the hall; the Three Gods appear in the middle of the frame: they are rocks being pummelled by the thundering of this double ocean. Gance adds image after image, until sixteen layers of superimposition blend into one another: pendulum shots pulse behind handheld views of the Convention whilst close-ups of the Three Gods, Bonaparte, and the eagle intermingle in the centre of the frame. Intertitles announce: Thus all the Giants of the revolution were swept, one after the other, into the raging whirlpool of the Reign of Terror. // And a man, the defiant sport of the Ocean, his tricolour sail opening to the wind of the Revolution, was being triumphantly carried to the heights of history.

As in Romantic paintings, where ‘French artists expressed the shock of the individual’s encounter with personal or collective history, if not destiny’ (Sala 1993: 37), Gance pitches the individual against an outburst of natural power. Like Théodore Géricault’s Le Radeau de la Méduse (1819) or Eugène Delacroix’s La Barque de Dante (1822), the spatial setting of Gance’s Double Tempest is both literal/physical (the Mediterranean around Corsica) and metaphoric/abstract (the condition of historical turmoil). Bonaparte enters into the whirlwind of history and emerges triumphant, ship unsunk, to take his role in the furtherance of the Revolution. In the final superimpositions,

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Fig. 17: The climax of the Double Tempest: Bonaparte looms over the Revolutionary chaos and its instigators

Bonaparte’s head dominates the centre of the frame: visually, his profile encapsulates the close-ups of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. Gance’s imagery suggests Bonaparte’s embodiment of the Revolution (both its greatness and its turmoil) but also his effacement of its central figureheads (Figure 17). Historically, the political insurrection in Paris was carefully organized and planned, taking place across several days in late May and early June 1793; Napoléon’s flight from Corsica was therefore only an approximate coincidence. Gance’s f ilm condenses these events into a single night (26 May), and elides the meticulous planning that enabled Robespierre’s allies to eliminate their opposition. In the manner of Romantic narrative, Napoléon presents history as a series of providential happenings in which man is ‘at the mercy of events’: Consciousness is a straight line, life is a whirlwind. This whirlwind unpredictably casts down on man’s head black chaos and blue skies. Fate isn’t skilled at transitions. Sometimes the wheel turns so quickly that man can barely distinguish the interval between one event and another or the line between yesterday and today (Hugo 1866: II/225).

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Only the logic of destiny can rescue meaning from the chaotic disorder of reality. Hugo claimed: ‘A tempest always knows what it does’ (1874: III/287); man’s fate may be obscure to the individual, but a higher order of reasoning was at work: ‘Geometry deceives; the hurricane alone is true’ (1862: III/40). His drawing Ma destinée (1867) links such natural imagery with the idea of the fatalistic wheel: a huge rolling wave takes the form of a circle on the brink of completion, its white foam and inky water uniting visual antitheses. As ‘planet, eye or […] the trough of a wave or a twister’, the image of the sphere recurs throughout Hugo’s poetry; this shape ‘expresses a concentration of energy [from which] comes either excess darkness or blinding light’: An irrepressibly violent core that sweeps everything before it in its path, the whirlwind or squall, constantly revolving about its own centre, unites opposites in a single movement as it fragments, scatters and reassembles; and finally, by always returning to its starting point, assures the world’s perpetual return and unity (Rodari/Prevost 1998: 140).

The Double Tempest demonstrates Hugo’s belief that ‘this entire globe is a phenomenon of permanence and transformation’ (1860: 16). As well as being visually present in the convulsing sea, the wheel of creation-destruction is conceptually evident in Gance’s sequence: its violent concentration of images articulates the simultaneous processes of demolition and reconstruction, citing ‘destiny’ as the unaccountable progenitor of history. The Double Tempest does not simply affirm Bonaparte as a replacement for the Three Gods; the symbolic violence of the storm synthesizes a whole series of conflicting images and ideas, uniting each leader with the chaos rather than letting them resolve or escape it.

4.4

Orchestrating murder

The Double Tempest announces the start of ‘the Terror’, the name given to a year-long effort in which any and all internal resistance to the French Revolution was brutally suppressed. Napoléon shows its consequences through scenes set at the Battle of Toulon (September-December 1793) and in Paris (early 1794). At Toulon (discussed further in chapter 5), the French army is besieging a mixture of foreign forces that have occupied the city in the wake of a royalist rebellion. As a newly appointed lieutenant of artillery, Bonaparte falls out with the incompetent military authority of General Carteaux

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(Léon Courtois) before having his talents recognized by the superior General Dugommier (Alex Bernard). However, these military authorities are overseen by army commissioners who have been sent from Paris to oversee the performance (and political loyalties) of the officers. Chief among them are Barras (Max Maxudian), Stanislas Fréron (Daniel Mendaille), and Antonio Salicetti (Philippe Hériat). Barras plays a relatively minor role at Toulon, whilst the scenes involving Fréron are missing from surviving prints. (Gance’s screenplay describes him as a ‘sinister figure’ who ‘cracks jokes in the midst of massacres’ and is at once ‘Don Juan and Torquemada’ [1927b: 227].) Salicetti is a more prominent figure in extant material, and his presence is all the more memorable thanks to his outlandish costume and Hériat’s mannered performance. Grandiose plumage spills over his wide-brimmed hat, seeming to mimic the lengthy arches of Salicetti’s dark eyebrows, which are often raised in an expression of louche calculation. The character’s villainous deportment is further emphasized by a large dark cape, an accessory that makes him appear both comic and lugubrious when standing with his hands on hips or with arms folded over his chest. In scenes (now lost) set after Bonaparte’s victory at Toulon, Bonaparte is shocked to learn that Fréron and Salicetti demand reprisals against the civilian population of the city for their recent insurrection against the Republic. He refuses to obey their orders, reiterating the language used during the 10 August sequence: ‘If we continue to dishonour the Revolution, people will be ashamed to be French!’ (Gance 1927b: 236). Bonaparte is dismissed and the executions go ahead. Jean Arroy’s detailed account suggests that the subsequent sequence was perhaps the most daring of the entire film: The frenzied crowd. The soldiers raising their guns. Fréron’s signal. The officer’s command. The soldiers firing. The decimated crowd. Soldiers firing, seen from behind the thinning crowd. The mounting pile of bodies littering the ground, seen from behind the soldiers. Descriptive close-ups. The soldiers reload. The camera races along the line of soldiers, who fire one after the other, each shot seeming to hit the lens. The camera travels rapidly along the line of people. The lens is now a gun firing and people fall with every shot. An enormous gun fills the screen: fire, flame, smoke. A face distorted in terror: impact, a gush of blood, the eyes roll upwards. Vertiginous whirl. Another face. An enormous, mesmerizing gun. Fire. A shattered skull. Pitch forward, backward, forward, fall. Another gun, another face in paroxysm. Fire. A slide into a bottomless abyss.

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Now the lens becomes a bullet and hurtles towards a victim, then another, and embeds itself in their flesh. Face. Fire. Flame. Smoke. Roll. Face. Fire. Blur. Face. Fire. Vertigo. Gyration. Roll. Gyration. Roll. Slide. Blood. Gyration over a roll, over a slide. Fire. Superimposition of every camera movement, intercut with red flashes, in a montage that gets faster and faster. Ten-three, eight-three, five-two, three-one, two-one, one-one. Images crackling like sparks. A vanishing cloud of smoke. Three motionless shots: the dead on the ground; the soldiers leaving in the distance; Fréron, wrapped in his black cape, immobile, gigantic (shot from below), contemplating the hecatomb (1927c: 49).

Simultaneously embodying the perspective of executioners and their instruments and the victims and their fear, this sequence was evidently a horrifying antithesis to the collective expression of joy in the rendition of La Marseillaise. The loss of all the scenes following the capture of Toulon produces an imbalance in the tone of this section of the film: the glory of Bonaparte’s military triumph was originally juxtaposed with a visceral depiction of state-sponsored murder. Thankfully, many of the scenes set in Paris immediately after these events do survive. Marat is murdered by Charlotte Corday (Marguerite Gance) in revenge for his persecution of the Girondins. He is sitting upright in a bathtub, writing, when his maid (Blanche Beaume) tells him that a woman from Caen has important information. Meanwhile, Corday is waiting elsewhere with a knife concealed in her dress. She is seen in a medium shot, framed against an entirely black background, and stares distractedly out of frame to the right. The shot resembles the medium close-ups Gance used in his films of the 1910s, where characters’ faces were isolated by a black curtain behind them; this technique blocks off the surrounding mise-en-scène, creating a sense of subjective interiority. Such appears to be the case with Corday in Napoléon, but the backdrop is suddenly wrenched aside by the maid, who steps out into the left of frame. Corday (and the audience) jump with this sudden revelation of spatial context: the assassin has been in the adjoining room to her victim for the whole scene, hidden by a dividing curtain. The two women approach Marat, who is comically immobile in the bathtub, gesticulating wildly when he dismisses the maid. She leaves him with Corday, hesitantly closing another curtain behind her. The audience’s view of the scene is once more obscured; just as this second curtain is closed, a section of the material at the far end peels back under its own momentum

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– revealing a tantalizing glimpse of the space beyond. A moment later, Corday herself tears the curtain open to reveal the gruesome sight of Marat with her dagger plunged into his chest – mimicking the composition of David’s famous painting La Mort de Marat (1793). Gance’s sequence ends with a stunning close-up of Marat in which his face, eyes blank but still open, is cast half in darkness and half in light: an ambiguous visual eulogy that captures its subject in a state of mortified inaction. From this political assassination, the film’s subsequent scenes concentrate on the ‘Committee of Public Safety’: the organization responsible for expunging royalist or other undesirable political enemies from the French Republic. It is led by the familiar figure of Robespierre, accompanied by Georges Couthon (François Viguier) and Saint-Just (Abel Gance). As ever, Gance shapes figures with even the slightest amount of time on screen with vivid detail. Couthon is paralysed and confined to a wheelchair, in which he is accompanied by a large white rabbit that he fondles with a manic grin (revealing his own leporine teeth). Like other figures of authority, Couthon’s lack of physical mobility denies his interaction with the outside world: he seems confined to the small interior space of the Committee’s office. Gance introduces his own character with a rather self-conscious title: we are told Saint-Just is ‘the most awe-inspiring figure of the Terror’. The director’s performance may be knowing, but it is fascinatingly subtle: he utilizes none of the overtly villainous posing of Pozzo or Salicetti nor the maniacal gestures of Marat. At first glance, he resembles Robespierre in the immaculacy of his dress; however, his costume doesn’t act as an elegant form of impersonal armour as it does with his colleague. Saint-Just’s tunic isn’t stiffly restrictive, nor does he wear an artificial wig; his lace cuffs and silk cravat are precisely arranged, yet loosely flowing; his hair is powdered and swept back without losing its natural volume. He possesses dark, accentuated lips and carries a silver pocket mirror with which he monitors the delicate application of powder to his face. Unlike Marat’s pistol or Pozzo’s dagger, Saint-Just’s only weapon is a red rose he carries and occasionally presses to his lips (Figure 18). In Les Misérables, the youthful revolutionary Enjolras is compared to Saint-Just, but Hugo warns us ‘not to confuse Beaumarchais’s dashing cherub with this fearsome cherub of Ezekiel’ (1862: V/197). Similarly, there is deeper significance to the feminization of Gance’s Saint-Just. The filmmaker allied Nietzsche’s idea of moral evolution to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s belief in physical evolution: ‘the spirit pulls the body in its wake’ (Gance 1930: 145). Gance wrote that the desire to ‘transcend’ inherited instincts and intellectual conventions could trigger physical transformation: ‘Desire creates the

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Fig. 18:  Abel Gance as Saint-Just

need, need creates the function, function creates the organ’. He goes on to postulate that mankind would ultimately achieve ‘total hermaphroditism’: ‘Who will take over, Sparta or Athens?’ (ibid.: 287-8). Saint-Just’s androgyny suggests the stirrings of this strange resolution of the biological antitheses of male and female. This idea was prominent in many Romantic ideologies, where the figure of the hermaphrodite is ‘a symbol of the glorious ideals of the French Revolution’ (Busst 1967: 32). Gance’s Saint-Just continues the tradition articulated so grandly in Ganneau’s Eve-Adam composite of the 1830s. The director’s own successor to his portrait of Saint-Just can be seen in La Fin du Monde, where he plays the prophet Jean Novalic. Jean is distinguished by his dark lips, light voice, swept-back hair, and bathetic femininity. Gance’s two characters are reflections of one another: Novalic is pacific victim, Saint-Just active executioner. Dominating the room in which the Committee meets are two life-size paintings: one of Robespierre and the other of Saint-Just. These ‘two exterminators’ face each other ‘like two mirrors’ (Gance 1927b: 244). Like Pozzo’s relationship with Paoli, Saint-Just’s suggestions seem to be taken as orders by Robespierre: the latter looks up for approval before he signs the death warrants of each victim. Saint-Just casually condemns André

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Chénier (saying poets are ‘of no use to the Revolution’) and Joséphine de Beauharnais (‘she would seduce the most virtuous’) whilst toying with his rose. The macabre charm of Saint-Just is heightened by a comic and grotesque detail Gance reveals in this scene: on the other side of the room, a servant files the punitory paperwork in an open coffin! Their activity is interrupted by noise from outside: a crowd has gathered to beg clemency for Danton, who has been condemned by the Committee and is on his way to the guillotine. Robespierre hesitantly goes to the window to watch. Danton is unloaded from the tumbril and calls out: ‘Infamous Robespierre, the scaffold is calling for you. You’re next!’ In a series of reaction shots, we see Robespierre hiding behind the shutters of the window: he has visually barricaded himself in the office but figuratively closed the door of a cage he cannot escape. Danton faces death with aplomb, calling for the executioner to show his head to the crowd (‘it will be worthwhile!’), whilst his former colleagues look on from their isolated room. Robespierre senses his own fate; the audience already knows it. Back inside, Robespierre distracts himself with the music of a hurdygurdy player. This instrument is cranked into life with a similar action to that of Couthon’s wheelchair, which operates by a winding lever on one side. Both characters’ mechanized, repetitive gestures suit the enclosed space of the office as well as the bureaucratized process of condemning victims. Robespierre now sits at his desk, distractedly trying to read. Sitting opposite, Saint-Just makes him look at the front of his book. Robespierre cranes his neck around and sees the silhouette of a guillotine on the cover, an illusion created by the shadows of an open inkwell and a cockade ribbon on his desk. He angrily swipes everything away, and sinks into moody silence. The title of Robespierre’s book is ‘Cromwell’: Gance is making a clear allusion to the fate of that famous English Republican tyrant, whose body King Charles II subsequently ordered to be disinterred, hung in chains, and decapitated. It is significant that Saint-Just draws attention to such a detail: the actor-director points out this moment of importance to the character within the drama and to the audience in the theatre. He is also careful to observe the warrant for Bonaparte’s incarceration, spitefully solicited by Pozzo and Salicetti and now signed by Robespierre. Saint-Just himself confronts the spectre of the guillotine in a later scene set in the documentation room, where lists of the condemned are copied out and the orders sent on to the executioners. The title for this scene evokes a sinister metaphor: ‘The “thermometer” of the guillotine’. We see a wheel-like rose window, whose circular shape is emphasized by an iris out; the camera then cranes down from the window to reveal a towering set of pigeonholes

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with four columns: ‘On trial’, ‘Beheaded’, ‘Innocent’, and ‘Next batch’. Gance’s metaphor is completed by the number of files in the ‘beheaded’ column, visually resembling a rising bar of mercury. Tristan, one of the clerks, comments: ‘France has never had such a high fever!’ In charge of the files and the roomful of clerks is ‘Green-Eye’ (Boris Fastovich-Kovanko), a one-eyed man with a barbaric appearance and gruff manner. The sudden arrival of Saint-Just causes a flurry of panic across the room. After examining the work of various clerks, he walks over to the pigeonholes and looks up at the files. A macabre smile spreads over his face as he observes this edifice of documents, the elongated shape of which is emphasized with vertical masking. A folder near the top of the display has slid out of place, and its gleaming white shape turns the thermometer into the outline of a guillotine. Gance’s screenplay uses a different image, as Saint-Just is confronted by ‘the shadow of a cross’ spreading over the wall (1927b: 272-3), but both are symbolic manifestations of state execution: Jesus, the angelic prophet, was killed on the cross; Saint-Just, the demonic prophet, will meet his end on the guillotine.

4.5

The rhetoric of the Terror

Though Robespierre is considered ‘the mouthpiece of the Revolution’s most tragic and most pure discourse’ (Furet 1978: 87), he is given relatively little dialogue in Napoléon. Instead, Gance’s own character of Saint-Just gives voice to the most elaborate justification of the French Revolution. In the sequence set during the events of Thermidor in July 1794, Robespierre and Saint-Just are overthrown by the National Convention. The crowd accuses both men of being no more than murderers; Robespierre is overwhelmed by their violent clamour, but Saint-Just steps forward and silences them. His ‘cold prophet’s face radiating with lofty exaltation’ (Gance 1927b: 279), he makes the following speech: Yes, we had to have victims, but is not the Revolution a great beacon lit upon tombs? // Have you forgotten that during this time we have forged a France that is new and ready to be lived in? // …passed 12,000 decrees, of which two thirds were dedicated to human ends? // And we have done all this with that vulture, the Vendée, at our flanks, and on our shoulders that mass of tigers, the Kings… // You can now scatter our limbs to the four winds: Republics will rise up from them! // I despise the dust of which I am made and which speaks to you. I give it to you!

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Despite Gance footnoting several ‘historical’ sources for these titles, SaintJust never delivered this gloriously inspired piece of oration: he was interrupted part way through the reading of a pre-prepared report and dragged away. Gance not only gives Saint-Just the final word but cuts, collates, and reshapes various sources to provide his character with majestic rhetorical imagery. Much of this speech in Napoléon is taken from Quatrevingt-treize, where Hugo lists the achievements of the Revolutionary government (1874: II/48-50). Yet even supposedly direct quotations contain deliberate and/or accidental changes, such as the substitution of a ‘vulture’ for Hugo’s ‘hydra’. This is also the case when Gance quotes from Quatrevingt-treize during the Double Tempest, where his screenplay conflates a heap of epigrams and images from two non-chronological chapters into a continuous block quotation (1927b: 123-4). Gance’s method replicates Hugo’s own habitual plundering of dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Hugo refused to acknowledge any errors made in the process, inventing his own strange etymologies to justify the ‘orgy of spelling mistakes’ in Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Robb 1997: 417). Just as Gance’s eclectic quotations in Prisme are often unreferenced or inaccurate, so his screenplay for Napoléon is symptomatic of this assimilative method: chunks of literature are cut from their original source and pasted into his own work. Gance shared many of his literary tastes with the historical Saint-Just, and was just as habitual in quoting from his favourite authors. Whilst critics of La Dixième Symphonie and La Roue felt Gance’s voice was subsumed by excessive literary references, many of Saint-Just’s most frequently cited axioms (such as ‘The vessel of Revolution can arrive at port only on a sea reddened by torrents of blood’ or ‘a nation can only regenerate itself on a mound of corpses’) in fact belong to other historical authors (Desessarts 1797: 74-5). What harmonized such quotations with Saint-Just’s original statements was a shared rhetoric designed to render its speaker accountable to no-one: ‘I have left all weakness behind me’, he declared, ‘I have seen in the universe nothing but the truth, and I have proclaimed it’ (1793-4: 494). The voice of Gance’s fictional characterization is equally unapproachable. His thrillingly macabre image of ‘a great beacon lit upon tombs’ has its origins in a historical speech made long before the events of Thermidor: ‘Truth burns in the silence of every heart like a lamp blazing within a tomb’ (SaintJust 1792b: 399). In Napoléon, Saint-Just’s metaphor transforms the detail and complexity of argument into a single, ambiguous image: Gance alters historical context and content to form an unanswerably rhetorical question. In a parallel situation at the end of Quatrevingt-treize, the commander

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Gauvain is about to be guillotined and his last words justify the Revolution in similar terms: ‘The visible work is savage, the invisible work is sublime […] Beneath a scaffolding of barbarism, a temple of civilization is built’ (Hugo 1874: III/279). As I suggested in chapter 3, the Romantics’ answer to the ‘why’ of history is ‘because’; Hugo’s Gauvain and Gance’s Saint-Just are both implacably fatalistic, acknowledging antithetical ideas whilst seeking to reconcile them through symbolic imagery. Another key depiction of Romantic ambivalence towards revolutionary violence is Hugo’s Torquemada, a play written in 1869 and published in 1882. Its central protagonist is the eponymous high priest of the Spanish Inquisition, a prophet consumed by the desire to save the world through fiery purgation: One step more and the world is lost. But I have come. I am the carrier of zealous furies. My pensive breath awakes the fires of salvation. Earth, for the price of your flesh, I redeem your soul. […] I will cover the universe with pyres, and launch the profound cry of Genesis: ‘Light!’ You will see the dazzling furnace! I will sow fires, flaming brands, lightnings, embers, and everywhere, above the cities, I will set ablaze the supreme auto-da-fé, joyous, living, celestial! – O God, I love the human race! (Hugo 1882: 62-3)

Just like Gance’s Saint-Just, Torquemada expresses ‘the paradox of the human Messiah whose abstract love of humanity can express itself in cruelty as well as charity’ (Robb 1997: 432). Hugo wrote that when ‘a sense of the infinite enters a man in high dosage, he becomes a god or a monster: Jesus Christ or Torquemada’ (1856-9: 1207). Torquemada mobilizes the same imagery found in Gance’s conceptualization of cinema, and Hugo makes this character perversely beneficent in the same way that Saint-Just appears in Napoléon: I am the healer with bloody hands. Calmly he saves, yet seems horrible. Dreadfully, I throw myself into this terrible mercy, this compulsive truth; and my love is an abyss […] [I will] save those lost souls with pitchforks,

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and drive them into paradise! (Hugo 1882: 91-9)

Hugo himself suggests the parallels between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries through Torquemada’s republican declamation of royalty – he warns Ferdinand II of Spain: ‘The hellish depths are paved with the skulls of kings’ (ibid.: 178). The priest echoes Hugo’s own description of the Revolutionary mob in Les Misérables: They wanted, even if through fear and trembling, to force the human race into paradise […] They seemed barbarians and they were saviours. They demanded light with their mask of night […] In the sacred shadow there is latent light. Volcanoes are filled with a darkness capable of blazing flames. All lava starts as night (1862: VII/78; VI/56).

The flames of Torquemada’s pyres are glimpsed in the human bonfires of Gance’s original 10 August sequence, and his screenplay also contains a much more complex iteration of Thermidor than realized in the film. This involves illustrating the content of Saint-Just’s speech with a rapid montage and multiple superimpositions, including shots of volcanoes – an allusion to Hugo’s contrast between the hellish fury of righteousness and the serene light of peaceful progress: ‘No doubt a fire can cause a dawn, but why not wait for the break of day? A volcano illuminates, but the morning illuminates better’ (ibid.: V/200). In Napoléon, Saint-Just’s final speech is watched from the public gallery by Violine and her young brother Marcellin. She has come armed with a pistol to kill Robespierre, but Saint-Just’s words overwhelm her and she cannot shoot: ‘They are too great for us’, she says. The convenience of historical fact (Robespierre was not and cannot be shot by a fictional character) allows the spectator to retreat in awe and leave these figures to step into their destiny, effectively silencing any debate about the morality of an assassination. Violine seems to agree with Hugo’s own fearful admiration of men like Saint-Just: Probity, sincerity, candour, conviction, the idea of duty are things that, when in error, can become hideous, but which – even when hideous – remain great; their majesty, unique to human conscience, persists in horror. They are virtues with one vice: error. The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic whilst committing an atrocity preserves some strange radiance which is lugubriously venerable (1862: II/353-4).

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If there is a temptation to criticize Gance’s sequence for being overwrought, it is important to note the deft inclusion of ironic humour. Whilst Violine looks on with awe, we see Marcellin by her side – he is munching on an apple, completely unconcerned with the import of surrounding events. This moment echoes a scene in the screenplay of the 10 August sequence, in which a child is blowing ‘big soap bubbles up into the sky’ through a straw; he is ‘aware neither of the great historical drama that is being played out nor of the thousands of menacing shadows that pass by on the white wall behind him’ (Gance 1924j). In both written and realized scenes, Gance juxtaposes childish innocence with adult monstrousness. The scene after Saint-Just’s speech is set in the documents room and contains further elements of ironic comedy. Here, Green-Eye is handed a file that names Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their entire bank of supporters for execution. He looks up towards the camera – instantly aware of his own death sentence. Guards bursts in and drag away the clerks amid a cloud of paperwork that now flies about the room, gathering on the floor as redundant litter. Whilst Saint-Just delivered his own grandiloquent eulogy, Green-Eye sums up history’s chaotic transition with a marvellously concise punch line: ‘Quelle salade!’ (‘What a mess!’).

4.6 Summary Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of Robespierre’s ‘cool ferocity’ in pursuing a goal which ‘appeared to him grand and beautiful’ but criticized him for having ‘fixed his eye on it with such intense eagerness as to neglect the foulness of the road’ (1795: 10-11). A century later, Hugo’s Torquemada would retort: ‘The doctor is not the master of the remedy’ (1882: 70). Napoléon echoes this fatalistic acceptance of history’s creative destruction. Gance’s political figureheads may be (at best) ambiguous or (at worst) monstrous, but they nevertheless voice the providential necessities of progress. Saint-Just claimed that ‘the whole politics of our revolution’ was contained in a single word: ‘Dare!’ (1794: 240). Like Danton’s famous exclamation that ‘we must dare, dare again, always dare’ (1792: 173), this political motto could well serve as Gance’s own artistic credo. Elsewhere, Saint-Just described the Revolutionary mission using the director’s favourite metaphor for cinema: ‘Legislators who would enlighten the world must pursue their course with the same inexorable tread as the sun’ (1792a: 383). Yet Gance’s protagonist is given a profoundly ambivalent representation; if there is a sense of admiration, it is the same reluctant awe of ‘lugubrious’ fanatics that Hugo describes

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in Les Misérables. Beyond Gance’s performance, there is also the fact that Saint-Just is given only the power of linguistic rhetoric: that his final speech uses none of the spectacular cinematic devices suggested in the screenplay limits his communicative power. The filmmaker curtails this character’s potential for persuasion in order to foreground the ‘radioactive’ presence of Bonaparte. It is this latter strategy of representation that I want to explore in chapter 5.

5.

The dark light of Napoleonic cinema

When a man moves into the light he casts a shadow: to become a source of light is to create darkness. Where is the man who does not cast a shadow? What god alike doesn’t throw his giant shadow over the other gods? Where is the new god who would not cast a shadow? And isn’t it in the sun itself that we must find ourselves? (Gance 1930: 36)

5.1 Introduction The iconic protagonist of Napoléon continues to invite bizarrely divergent interpretations. For Norman King, Gance never questions ‘the unity of [Bonaparte’s] character’ (1984a: 137); conversely, Richard Abel argues the film continually ‘tests’ its hero ‘to the brink of incoherence’ (1984: 441); whilst for Pauline Kael, Napoléon is merely ‘fantasist […] gush’ – inspired not by politics but by creative ‘lunacy’ (1984: 142-5). This chapter counters such claims and aims to demonstrate the operation of a coherent ideology throughout Napoléon. After providing a historiographic context for the debate, I proceed to explore Gance’s representation of Bonaparte across the film. From the boyhood fights at Brienne to the adult victories at Toulon and Montenotte, I argue that Gance’s extensive range of leitmotifs produces a deliberately ambiguous and antithetical portrait of its cinematic hero. By counterbalancing moments of breathtaking involvement with contemplative sequences, Napoléon also offers audiences a range of perspectives from which to view the historical narrative. This chapter concludes with an analysis of the triptych finale, evaluating the aesthetic and experiential impact of the most radical technological innovation in Gance’s Napoleonic saga.

5.2

‘Bonaparte’ and ‘Napoléon’

Historical sympathy for Napoléon often hinges on the transition from Revolution to Empire. After the Terror ended with the fall of Robespierre in 1794, executive power in France was held by a panel of five ‘directors’. During 1798-9, this ‘Directory’ government entered a period of crisis: abroad, the nation’s military exploits in Egypt, Holland, and Switzerland were failing; internally, there were royalist revolts in the south and west of the country

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and political division in Paris. Napoléon returned from Egypt in 1799 and was encouraged to restore order by force. Following a swift coup d’état on 18 Brumaire (9 November), he abolished the Directory and thus effectively ended the era of the French Revolution. As the ‘First’ of three executive Consuls, he created a new Senate and a new constitution; these were ratified by a public referendum in February 1800. After assassination attempts later that year and in 1804, the issue of Napoléon’s succession became widely discussed. In May 1804, a bill was passed that proposed to end the Consulate and establish the French Empire; in December that year, Napoléon became the Emperor of France. Though the Pope officiated at the ceremony, it was agreed in advance that Napoléon should place the crown of laurels on his own head as a sign that the state bore no subservience to the Vatican. The Emperor’s rights came from the people, not from God; France was not a kingdom but an imperial republic like ancient Rome. Despite these careful political distinctions, many were outraged that the Revolution had been consolidated by such means. Discontent went further in subsequent years when the Emperor Napoléon placed his brothers on the thrones of various satellite states that neighboured France: Jérôme became King of Westphalia; Louis, King of Holland; Joseph, King of Naples, then of Spain. Likewise, he made his sister Elisa the Grand Duchess of Tuscany and titled himself the King of Italy from 1805-14. Intended as a means of solidifying the new order in Europe, this flagrant nepotism has remained a permanent source of historiographic condemnation – even for those who support the ideals of the Napoleonic era. Napoléon’s loyalty to his family has consistently been deemed his greatest fault. Elie Faure wrote that the imperial period saw the Emperor ‘going from concession to concession, from weakness to weakness, from mistake to mistake’ – a fatal chain of events that was ‘entirely due to clan superstition’ (1921: 39). For a century after his death, writers sought to distinguish between the man who fought for Revolutionary ideals and the leader who became an autocrat. The great hero of the age thus assumed a split identity: whilst ‘Bonaparte’ was worthy of adoration, ‘Napoléon’ was not. Historians were forced to confront both halves of an antithetical figure, a ‘monster with two faces’ who was simultaneously Christ and Antichrist (ibid.: 9). Hugo reflected that in 1802, the year of the writer’s birth: ‘Already Napoléon could be seen through Bonaparte, / And the brow of the Emperor was breaking / Through the First Consul’s narrow mask’ (1830: 3). In another poem written early in his career, Hugo addresses the fallen Emperor with profoundly ambiguous admiration: ‘You dominate our age; angel, demon, what matter? / Forever you throw your giant shadow across our vision; / […] dazzling

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and sombre, / Standing on the threshold of the century’ (1829: I/380-1). In Les Misérables, this rhetorical logic is taken further: ‘[Napoléon’s Empire] spread across the Earth all the light which tyranny can give: sombre light. Let us say more: obscure light. Compared with real day, it is night. This disappearance of night had the effect of an eclipse’ (1862: III/126). In this account, the Battle of Waterloo is seen as a divinely orchestrated chaos that finally casts a corrupted Christ into darkness. Napoléon’s divided legacy is a warning against the dangers of holding power: The light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, consisting of light as it does, and precisely because it is light, often casts a shadow just where we saw radiance; of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, and the darkness of the despot struggles with the dazzling glare of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgement of peoples […] Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form (ibid.: III/32-3).

In the 1920s, Gance followed the nomenclatural distinction between ‘Bonaparte’ and ‘Napoléon’. It is important to note that Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance is strictly speaking the title of the six-part series rather than the single film that survives. The subtitle of his published screenplay for the first film defines itself as the ‘First Epoch: Bonaparte’. Equally, Gance’s proposals for a uk edition of the film divide the text into two: the first half was to be called ‘Bonaparte’ and the second half ‘In the Shadow of Napoléon’ (1927g). In France, he felt obliged to remind his audience that ‘you won’t see Napoléon [in this episode], but Bonaparte’ (Gance 1927a). He reiterated this claim on several occasions, as if hoping to pre-empt the criticism he would receive for celebrating a man who would become the tyrant ‘Napoléon’: [In this film,] I have not set out to judge or to prejudge Bonaparte’s evolution after the Italian Campaign. It could be that after 18 Brumaire, I would be among his detractors. I do not know, and what is more I do not wish to know it in this film. My Bonaparte, up to the point at which I present him to you, remains in the great line of idealist republicans, the first of whom was Christ (Gance 1927f).

Gance’s words clearly signal his long-term strategy for this central characterization across the multi-part biopic. As it stands, Napoléon shows

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Bonaparte’s potential as ‘idealist republican’; as originally intended, the six-film cycle would reveal his corruption as messianic leader. The historical inevitability of this destiny lies at the heart of Gance’s film: as I have already suggested in previous chapters, it informs much of the tension between spectators’ subjective involvement and objective distance. In pointing out the context of his first episode, Gance also commented on the clash between the will to change and the knowledge of defeat inherent in his biopic. As he explained in an interview during the first months of the production: In La Roue, I studied the case of a man who was caught by an ancient force of Fate, but in a mechanical medium […] – an ‘Oedipus of the railroad’. Today, I am applying all my passion and my faith to reconstitute a broad and impartial study of the sublime, Romantic adventure of a hero whose genius appeared, for a few years, to break the forces of Destiny’s equilibrium! (Rivolet 1925: 4).

Gance’s pertinent observation that this ‘breakage’ of fate only lasted ‘for a few years’ reinforces the temporality of the Napoleonic project. He deemed that Bonaparte succumbed to ‘bourgeoisisme’, embodying those qualities of complacency and moral compromise that he saw as the principle weaknesses of post-war Europe. The Emperor’s personal hubris was exacerbated by that of the Bonaparte ‘clan’, to which he remained loyal in spite of their inadequacies as heads of state: His gravest mistake was to turn his family into kings; he loved them dearly, but with too small a heart, and Napoléon perverted his destiny partly by being the bourgeois head of his tribe, when he was born to be the great man of the Revolution (Gance 1925a: 1).

In Prisme, Gance suggests that those who fight to transgress their era are corrupted by the power they forge for themselves: ‘Egotism, this form of moral masturbation, arrests their qualities the moment they manifest themselves’ (1930: 113). The terms in which he assesses this issue are those of darkness and light: a man who seeks illumination must step into the sun, but in so doing turns himself into a silhouette. His striking maxim that ‘to become a source of light is to create darkness’ (ibid.: 36) directly echoes the language of Hugo as well as that of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. In the latter text, the prophet is repeatedly associated with solar imagery: we are told that he ‘rose with the dawn’ and ‘stepped before the sun’; moral enlightenment will be achieved ‘only when he turns away from himself [to] jump over his

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shadow – and verily, into his sun’ (Nietzsche 1883-5: 121, 229). For Gance, the contrasts of Napoléon’s career resulted directly from this desire to ‘move into the light’. In the same manner as Hugo’s literary texts, Gance’s visual language makes Bonaparte a ‘Luminous Shadow’ for the screen (Lévy 1928). Through the dialectic nature of its imagery, the film reveals the nascent qualities of the adult ‘Napoléon’ in the young ‘Bonaparte’.

5.3

Visual antitheses

In Napoléon, the snow-covered mountains that overlook Brienne College mark a geographic similarity with the final sequence of La Roue. After the dramatic setting of soot-covered railyards, the latter film’s last scenes signify the re-absorption of Norma and Sisif into the natural cycle of death and renewal: a circle of villagers dances over the plateau of Mont Blanc; clouds slowly turn around the dark peaks; a ring of pipe smoke dissolves into the air; a negative superimposition shows train wheels moving silently across the Alpine panorama. This last image of negative/positive reversal is significant in its foregrounding of the photographic process: Gance reuses one of the opening shots of his film as a closing image, antithetically transforming his ‘symphony in black’ into a ‘symphony in white’ (Gance 1930: 175). The sight of the child Bonaparte’s black hat rising above the white wall of the parapet in Napoléon offers a stark challenge to the serene snowscape of the last images of La Roue. As I discussed in chapter 2, the discordant image of this ‘black sun’ (Gance 1927b: 3) is a bold summation of Bonaparte’s dual role as creator and destroyer. Gance noted the importance of achieving this startling vision even before he had written the ensuing sequence (1924?), and his description in the screenplay has an important precedent in the work of Hugo. In the poem ‘Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre’, the poet has a vision of ‘a dreadful black sun radiating darkness’ (Hugo 1855: 356) – an image embodying antithetical poles as well as a fatalistic circular form. In 1918, Gance’s original title for Ecce Homo was ‘Soleil Noir’, and the film’s theme of a new prophet emerging to lead humanity hints at a similar ambiguity to Hugo’s visionary text. In the snowball fight sequence of Napoléon, another image of duality is seen in the form of the child’s shadow cast over the white ground: as an opaque source of light, Bonaparte enacts his future role of (in Hugo’s terms) ‘dazzling’ soldier and ‘dark’ despot. Gance’s development of this paradoxical motif punctuates the narrative, manipulating familiar iconography of the past into the film’s own cinematic language. The adult Bonaparte is associated with radiance (fire, lightning,

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Fig. 19: Bonaparte witnesses the sunset on Corsica

haloes, sunlight) and with darkness (shadows, silhouettes). The latter is particularly evident when the film offers an opportunity for Bonaparte to reflect on his future. On Corsica, he is surrounded by his large family, but the joy of homecoming is short-lived. In the Bonapartes’ garden at Les Milelli, surrounded by blossoming trees and the smiling faces of his mother and siblings, Bonaparte stands in solitary contemplation. Intertitles ask: ‘Should he choose a quiet family life, away from political turmoil? // Or, sacrificing his individual happiness, should he try to become one of the leading actors on the world scene?’ This question is entirely rhetorical: we already know the answer. The poignancy of this scene comes from the fact that Bonaparte has no real choice: amid the lyrical beauty of the sunlit garden, Gance signals that his character is predestined to forgo personal peace. Similar moments of reflection occur in grander locations on Corsica. At the grotto of Casone, Bonaparte sits at the entrance to the cave. We see him in a medium shot from the perspective of the dark interior, silhouetted against the sunlit landscape; then, a long shot from the perspective of the meadow dwarfs his tiny f igure against the giant slabs of rock behind him. These images transform Bonaparte into a cross between the mythical Prometheus (forced to push a boulder uphill for all eternity) and

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Fig. 20: Casper David Friedrich, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818)

the Romantic images of Caspar David Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren. Gance directly echoes the latter paintings in the scene set at the headland of Les Sanguinaires. Here, an introductory intertitle states that Bonaparte visits this site every day ‘to discuss the future with his friend, the Ocean’. In a perfect cinematic example of Friedrich’s ‘meditative abstractions’ (Sala 1993: 37), Gance shows Bonaparte as a solitary figure, back turned to the camera, silhouetted against the epic natural spectacle of sea and sky (Figure 19).

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Fig. 21: Bonaparte standing in the eye of the sun

This ‘discussion’ of the future is entirely visual: the scene contains no other titles but narrates a complex set of ideas. Like Friedrich’s solitary figure in Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818) (Figure 20), Bonaparte stands at the centre of the frame on his rocky promontory, remaining motionless as huge waves crash around him (Figure 21). His tiny black form is silhouetted against the sun, which breaks through the huge banks of cloud gathered on the horizon: this stunning composition places Bonaparte (as Gance describes in Prisme) at the centre of the sun – he has stepped into the light and become a shadow. As well as referencing the work of Friedrich, this composition also suggests J.M.W. Turner’s painting War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet (1842) (Figure 22). Turner depicts the exiled Emperor on the island of St Helena, isolated in the frame against a sky reddened by the sunset. In the screenplay, Gance writes that Bonaparte’s pose at Les Sanguinaires should resemble the image of him on St Helena ‘at the end of his life’ (1927b: 96). The film fashions a dialectic image of Bonaparte as romantic wanderer and fallen idol, an intensity of light and dark; images of sun, sky, and waves from this Corsican setting reappear in the f inal montage, reaff irming the fatalist importance of this brief sequence.

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Fig. 22:  J.M.W. Turner’s image of the fallen Emperor on St Helena, War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet (1842)

Devices like solitary rocks or storms at sea are not simply ‘stylistic effects’ in Romantic painting but ‘the means to an intellectual and spiritual end’ (Sala 1993: 46). Gance’s cinematic Rückenfiguren on Corsica provide a chance for the contemplative interaction of character and spectator, each of whom must consider the fatalist path of history. Having pursued his role as ‘leading actor’ in the fight against Paoli on Corsica, Bonaparte is then plunged into the Double Tempest – another encounter with the ‘natural sublime’ so favoured by Romantic painters. This sequence affirms Bonaparte’s role in the future of France but also signals the role of abstract forces over which he has no control. As I argued in chapter 4, Bonaparte is one of the many leaders who become victim to historical chaos: we see him engulfed by tumbling white waves; silhouetted against the tricolour of his sail; and finally in dramatic profile, his dark form a window through which we see multiple layers of visual meaning pulse, seethe, and convulse in irresolute union. In contrasting ‘Bonaparte’ with ‘Napoléon’, Gance used the metaphor of the storm to define their relative agency:

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Fig. 23: Bonaparte during the storm-filled night of the Battle of Toulon

Bonaparte is in the eye of the storm, a lucid observer, whereas the Emperor is in the spinning hurricane, trapped therein, his self-control torn away. Bonaparte is not dragged off by this current. He watches, he observes; he is master of his fate. He can halt it if he wishes; Napoléon cannot – he has neither the time nor the means; he is in the abyss; he cannot control it, he must go where fate leads him: that is his tragedy (1925a: 1).

At Toulon, Bonaparte’s pivotal role in the victory is an intriguing mixture of condonation and condemnation: it is a display of his military prowess, but it also foregrounds the terrible suffering his wars will inflict in the future. When planning his attack, Bonaparte’s face is seen in an extreme close-up. Unlike Robespierre, whose narrow eyes are hidden behind dark spectacles, Bonaparte’s open eyes flash with light. The map he observes becomes animated: instead of static paper arrows, the paths of troops are illustrated with moving symbols – and superimpositions of live-action soldiers flicker alongside diagrammatic signs. As so often in the film, Bonaparte embodies cinematic qualities of energy and luminosity. However, Gance offsets this dazzling evidence of conceptual genius in his depiction of the battle itself. The assault on the Allied positions at Toulon takes place at night and in a

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thunderstorm. When the initial French assault is repelled, Bonaparte insists that they strike again. He goes back to the army’s headquarters to confront the political agents, Barras and Salicetti: stepping forward out of the rain, he appears in a terrifying close-up. Gance uses low-key lighting, angled from below up onto Bonaparte’s face; combined with the pouring rain and red tinting, the effect gives this figure a monstrous appearance (Figure 23). The young officer convinces his superior, and the attack is renewed. By the end of the battle, soldiers are fighting hand-to-hand in the mud and slime of the water-logged terrain. From the snow of his childhood at Brienne, the adult Bonaparte now stands amid the horrifying reality of battle. The Fleuris cheer on their hero from the window, triggering a flashback to the snowball fight sequence: from the innocent tussle of his boyhood, Bonaparte achieves glory as an adult in a hideous combat. The switch from the red tinting of Toulon to black-and-white of Brienne is a relief to the relentless hue of battle, just as the sudden cut back to red reinforces the profound contrast between the two scenes and their setting. At Toulon, we see men drowning in muddy quagmires; cadaverous limbs sticking out of slimy pools; corpses being hit by explosive shells and bursting apart. These images evoke the devastating battlefield footage from the Great War – a parallel that must have struck contemporary audiences with particular force. The Toulon sequence may demonstrate soldiers’ heroism, the joy of success, and even moments of poignant humour, but it never tries to obscure the price of victory: Gance acknowledges the courage involved in warfare, but leaves one in no doubt as to the obscene carnage that results. The violence of the hand-to-hand fighting at Toulon was the most graphic permitted on the screen since Intolerance [in 1916] and until the relaxation of censorship in the 1960s (Brownlow [1983] 2004: 145).

Once Toulon has been captured and the fighting subsides, an intertitle announces: ‘After the victory’. We are then given one of the film’s most haunting images: a long shot of Bonaparte standing in the darkened, ruinous remains of the battlefield (Figure 24). At the rear of the scene stand two trees, their shattered branches cut further by the top of the frame; below them is a heap of shadowy forms that may be shell-torn ground or the broken bodies of men; in the gleaming pathway further forward, wounded soldiers drag themselves through a slippery clearing; intersecting this horizontal line of light and standing atop a large mound of human and material wreckage in the foreground is the silhouetted figure of Bonaparte:

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Fig. 24:  ‘After the victory’: Bonaparte and the wreckage of battle

arms folded into a greatcoat, his pale face cast in the shadow of his hat. The relatively high position and angle of the camera makes his normally radiant face seem bowed in gloom, just as the lamp at his feet can hardly penetrate the slimy darkness. It is a breathtaking ‘victory’ tableau, held in a motionless frame long enough for the viewers to carefully absorb the horror of the scene. Gance’s lugubrious composition foreshadows the (now lost) image of Fréron after the execution of the hostages in Toulon, when he was ‘wrapped in his black cape, immobile, gigantic’, ‘contemplating the hecatomb’ (Arroy 1927c: 49). The sight of the rising sun emerging from the fog after the victory at Austerlitz in 1805 became an iconic moment for Napoleonic France; in Prisme, Gance observes the polarity of meaning this legendary image possesses: ‘The more dazzling a victory, the darker are the immense shadows it casts. Such death in the shadow of Austerlitz’s sunlight!’ (1930: 114) The moonlit aftermath of Toulon in Napoléon dwells on this ‘shadow’ of victory. After the establishing tableau, Gance cuts to a closer shot of a wounded soldier amongst piles of corpses, crying out in agony before collapsing back into the sea of decomposition; another close-up contains the horrifying image of two stiff arms reaching up from beneath the watery sludge, still being battered

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by rain. The image of Bonaparte to which we finally return is ambiguous: is he turned towards the camera to face our judgement or to shun the vision of slaughter that the audience sees behind him? This scene is followed by a vision of the harbour at Toulon, in which the French fleet has been set ablaze by Allied incendiaries. Finally, a temporal ellipsis allows the hellish presence of the battle to subside far enough to offer a visual apotheosis of Bonaparte’s achievement. The commissioners come to congratulate him, but the newly promoted general has fallen asleep amid the piles of captured standards and debris, his head resting on a drum. Dugommier announces: ‘This is the victor of Toulon!’ In these final shots, Gance mobilizes several recurrent visual leitmotifs to reaffirm the place of Toulon in the course of Bonaparte’s destiny: the eagle lands on a tree branch nearby, echoing its earlier appearance on the mast of the ship that rescues Bonaparte after the Double Tempest; the morning sun rises above the sleeping general, blazing ever brighter at the top of the frame’s circular masking; the gathered flags are caught in a sudden gust of wind and flutter as brilliantly as Liberty’s superimposed pennants in the Cordeliers sequence or the wind-lashed waves of the Double Tempest; and, in the lower left of the frame, a gun-carriage wheel replicates the last image of the young Bonaparte at Brienne. After the Terror (analysed in chapter 4), Bonaparte awaits a new command worthy of his talents. He refuses a role in helping suppress the revolt in the Vendée (a region of western France) and has his plans for the campaign in Italy rejected. Having been reduced to a state of near-poverty, he is finally summoned by the Directory when Paris is threatened by a royalist insurrection in October 1795. Gance’s depiction of the ‘events of Vendémiaire’ is one of the most concise sequences in the film, but among these short scenes and summative intertitles are a number of significant images that characterize Bonaparte’s rise to power. Instead of a battle scene, his tactical manoeuvres are illustrated by a single shot of his hat sitting over Paris on a map of France – an image that recalls our first glimpse of Bonaparte as a child at Brienne and denotes that this iconic symbol is now attaining its promised significance. As he enters the Convention to issue orders for the city’s defence, he pauses on the threshold to observe the tableau on which the ‘rights of man’ are inscribed. During the 10 August sequence, the silhouettes of the mob are hellishly cast over Bonaparte’s poster of this declaration; now, three years later, it is the general’s shadow that looms over the document (Figure 25). Nietzsche warned that a prophet must ‘run into the sun [at] every moment’ in order to dispel the ‘shadow’ of great responsibility (1889: 465). Does Gance’s spectral image imply that

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Fig. 25: Bonaparte’s shadow looms over the ‘declaration of the rights of man’

Bonaparte now embodies the ideals of the ‘rights of man’ or that he will efface their meaning? When the general then re-enters the Convention after the uprising has been quelled, he walks directly towards the camera; from the well-lit rear of the frame, he moves into the extreme foreground until he becomes a silhouette in the lens. Announcing to the assembly that ‘From this moment on, I am the Revolution’, Bonaparte wilfully subsumes his individual identity into a symbolic one – fulfilling the process of abstraction signalled by the preceding imagery.

5.4 Inheritance Bonaparte’s personification of the Revolution noticeably clashes with his romantic involvement with Joséphine de Beauharnais (discussed in chapter 7), but it is also through her that he is given command of the French army in Italy. When he is told this news, he manages to remain calm for some moments. Eventually, a close-up reveals his face brightening into joy and he exclaims: ‘At last!’ These words, spelled out in huge letters, are superimposed over a shot of foaming waves: an image taken from the Double Tempest

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sequence that reinforces the notion of his destiny being propelled by ‘the wind of Revolution’. Aesthetically, the close-up of rippling water beautifully encapsulates the energetic movement and natural power that characterize Bonaparte as a leader. The morning after his hastily arranged marriage with Joséphine, he leaves for the frontline. However, on his journey towards the military headquarters at Albenga, he visits the empty Convention in Paris. As a title explains, he is ‘mysteriously drawn’ to this ‘forge of the Revolution’ in order to ‘meditate upon the future’. The empty hall is (quite literally) a power vacuum, one which he is destined to fill. Bonaparte enacts the exact same process of historical recollection that Hugo describes in Quatrevingt-treize: Each time the Convention appears before the reflection of any man, whoever he may be – historian or philosopher – that man pauses and meditates. It is impossible not to be attentive before this grand procession of shadows (1874: II/60-1).

Gance begins the scene with an extreme long shot as Bonaparte’s tiny figure enters the vast hall. Cutting closer, we see the great doors snap shut behind him – he tenses with alarm. Bonaparte walks up to the central podium and stares out at the mass of abandoned benches. Almost imperceptibly, the faint outlines of figures begin to dissolve in over the stacked rows, rising like mist from the darkness and slowly coagulating into ranks. The sequential series of superimpositions that enables these ghosts to appear so fantastically is a tour de force of technical magic – for each of the multiple layers, the same strip of celluloid had to be painstakingly rewound and re-exposed. Seen on a large screen, the compositional precision and visual quality of these sepulchral translucencies are truly breathtaking: hundreds of ghosts fill the background of the frame, whilst the Three Gods, Saint-Just, and Couthon appear as giants in the foreground. Bonaparte fearfully heads for the door, but the spectre of Danton appears before him and raises his hand. Bonaparte stops. Danton glides closer to the camera and announces: ‘Listen, Bonaparte: the French Revolution is about to speak to you!’ Bonaparte returns to the podium and deferentially removes his hat. Robespierre begins the interrogation: ‘We have realized that the Revolution cannot prosper without a strong authority. Will you be its leader?’ In a striking close-up, Bonaparte responds: ‘Yes’. Next, Danton asks: ‘If the Revolution does not spread beyond our frontiers, it will die at home. Will you lead it into Europe?’ There is another emphatic ‘Yes’ from Bonaparte. Saint-Just issues the subsequent threat: ‘On the word of

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Fig. 26: Bonaparte’s radiant halo

Saint-Just. If you one day forget that you are the direct heir of the Revolution, we shall turn ferociously against you. Will you remember?’ Significantly, Bonaparte offers no discernable response to the question. Now Marat speaks: ‘What are your plans, Bonaparte?’ He answers: The liberation of oppressed peoples, the fusion of great European interests, the suppression of frontiers… // and… // …the universal republic. // Europe will become a single people, and anyone, wherever he travels, will always find himself in a common fatherland. // To achieve this sacred aim, many wars will be necessary, but I claim it here for posterity, victories will one day be won without cannon and without bayonet.

As this speech comes to a climax, the backlighting in the close-up of Bonaparte grows in intensity until his head is surrounding by a blazing halo (Figure 26). Gance cuts between this image and reaction shots of the ghosts standing and applauding. Finally, the assembled ranks sing La Marseillaise, and a shot of the personified Liberty is superimposed over Bonaparte. This sequence is a remarkable union of historical exposition and cinematic fantasy. The words of Bonaparte’s speech are a blend of various

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documentary sources, mingling genuine phrases with those paraphrased from the work of Carlyle and Faure. Gance needs to rearrange reality in order to produce the first and only scene in which Bonaparte can interact with the progenitors of the Revolution. This enables him to directly acknowledge the spiritual force he must inherit and to justify his future actions in its light. The visual marker of this progression is the appearance of Liberty and the singing of La Marseillaise – reconnecting the birth of the communal Revolutionary spirit with the man who will realize its principles in the future. Bonaparte’s words promise a point in time when ‘victories’ will be won without war, and the move from material destruction to peaceful construction is a central theme behind Gance’s projected cycle of films (see chapter 9). For Hugo, Revolution will be ‘the name of civilization’ only until ‘it can be replaced by the word Harmony’ (1864: 518) – the violence of wars (even those fought in the name of progress) must give way to another form of social evolution. His belief that ‘The universal Republic will be the last word of progress’ (Hugo 1848: 1080) directly predicts Bonaparte’s speech in Napoléon. In Gance’s terminology, society must move from the circle of repetition to the spiral of progression: ‘Hatred, like Fate, is a wheel; kindness, like Providence, is a helix’ (1930: 112). This idea is apparent in the unity of the ghosts of the Three Gods. No longer bickering or discordant, they stand as one with the pacified Convention: ‘all are there, serene, happy. Death, extinguishing their passions, has consolidated their ideas, and this cohesion, this visible fraternity of great shades who tried to devour one another when alive, is supremely moving’ (Gance 1927b: 391). Gance’s screenplay also specifies that the spirits of Oliver Cromwell and George Washington should be present in this sequence – these leaders of English and American revolutions signify the international status of the events occurring in France (ibid.: 397). Whilst Cromwell died in 1658, Washington was still alive in the year this scene is set – a curious blurring of cinematic and historical chronologies. However, the spectral interrogation in Napoléon is not a straightforward endorsement of a new leader. Despite appearing in the same physical setting, Bonaparte and the ghosts are subtly kept apart by cinematic means: the shot-reverse-shot editing scheme demarcates witness and apparition, a divisive effect made all the more striking by the tinting (blue for Bonaparte, amber for the Convention). This use of montage and colouring mirrors that of the Double Tempest, cementing the significance of those parallels made between Bonaparte and the Gods. It also mimics the pattern of the last scenes in J’accuse: when the fallen soldiers confront their civilian relatives, the living and the dead are never united in the same shot (or colour scheme).

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Like Jean Diaz in J’accuse, Bonaparte becomes a bridge between past and present; both men are confronted by a legion of spectres and charged with renewing society on their behalf. For Gance, cinema was uniquely capable of reanimating the dead in order to enrich the living. He believed that the ‘spirit cannot die’, for death is merely ‘an external’ change of state that signals the next ‘phase of evolution’ in human identity (Gance 1930: 144). The sequences in J’accuse and Napoléon suggest that the photographic image embodies the tension between life and death – and possesses the potential for their reconciliation. Gance’s positioning of the Three Gods as guardians is prefigured in Quatrevingt-treize, where Hugo introduces these figures as Minos, Æacus, and Rhadamanthus. In Greek legend, these three kings (all sons of Zeus) spent their afterlife as judges of the dead in Hades – a situation mirrored in Napoléon, where the ghosts of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre stand in judgement on Bonaparte. Seventy years prior to Hugo, one British writer formulated a similar resurrection to critique the Emperor’s coronation in 1804. Robespierre’s ‘grimly ghost’ rises from the tomb and asks what has become of the ‘rampant power of Liberty’: ‘Can it be true? / Does Bonaparte sit on Capet’s throne?’ (Hafiz 1804: 763-4). By referring to the tenth-century Frankish king Hugh Capet (from whom all branches of the French royal family claim descent), Hafiz condemns Bonaparte not only for insulting the hereditary monarchy but also for betraying his own republican cause. In Napoléon, Saint-Just’s threat of ‘ferocious’ retribution should Bonaparte ever prove unworthy of his Revolutionary lineage is similarly potent. Having made Danton voice this threat in his screenplay, Gance reassigned the dialogue during shooting so that his own character would issue the warning: Bonaparte is not only cautioned by the author of the Revolution but of the film itself. This brilliantly self-conscious touch is made all the more important by the fact that Bonaparte offers no response, an absence of affirmation that promises the fulfilment of the threat in a future episode of the series. Gance’s sequence therefore establishes the ideals to which Bonaparte aspires whilst simultaneously reminding us of his ultimate failure. We may be stirred by his promise of creating a nationless ‘Universal Republic’, but we know he will never succeed. After the extinct members of the Convention dissolve into darkness, Bonaparte is on the move once more. His carriage takes him towards his headquarters at Albenga, and he spends his time alternately writing letters to Joséphine and orders to his troops. This mental versatility is also embodied in the visual energy of the camerawork. We see Bonaparte preparing his document at the centre of the carriage interior, whilst a window on the left

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allows us to see the breathless horses galloping alongside and the flashing landscape beyond; cutting to an exterior perspective, we see Bonaparte reach through the window to hand his aide the scroll; the horse’s flaring nostril, staring eye, and flying mane bob wildly in and out of frame, before the rider and mount hurtle out of shot. The match on action that unites these two proximate spaces may be a standard continuity device, but the sheer speed at which the exchange takes place renders this moment extraordinary. After the rider exits the frame, the carriage suddenly sways across the road and then lurches alarmingly back towards the frame – a thrilling reminder of the scene’s locational reality and the danger of filming. Bonaparte’s succinct verbal orders to successive riders (‘Directory’, ‘Provisions’, ‘Powder magazine’, ‘Field hospital’) are superimposed over high-speed tracking shots of the roadside trees, providing formal momentum to the directive content of the words. Further such shots of the blurring landscape are inserted at regular junctions during the sequence, as if urging the narrative along. The alternation of interior, exterior, and titled shots is masterfully orchestrated but frustrates the rate of propulsion. A standard title (white text on a black background) suddenly interrupts the pattern of editing, informing us that ‘the carriage is not going fast enough’ for Bonaparte’s liking. He mounts a horse and gallops alongside two other riders. The camera now tracks backwards in front of this group, keeping enough distance to view the receding perspective of the road behind them: the dappled sunlight transforms this tree-lined avenue into a dazzling tunnel whose strong contrasts provide a natural way of measuring the marvellous speed at which characters (and audience) are moving. The beautiful compositional depth of this image is then intersticed by a series of increasingly brief shots of the roadside view; these swipes of horizontal movement juxtapose the forward momentum of the riders but match the flashing haloes around the frame’s edge – an effect of sunlight striking the diaphragm of the lens at split-second intervals. These multifarious visual strategies define Bonaparte as an agent of luminous mobility, one who inspires action in the world around him. It is as if he has recharged his ‘radioactive’ energy in the ‘forge of Revolution’ and carries its momentum towards the army in Italy and beyond. Gance similarly quickens the pace of the narrative, condensing the time between Bonaparte’s marriage (in March 1796) and his arrival on campaign in Italy (in April) into the space of a few minutes. At Albenga, the soldiers that await him are demotivated and immobile. We see them in tattered uniforms, their feet tied with rags; some lie asleep to conserve energy, others fight for scraps of bread. When Bonaparte gallops into view, there is an instant reaction: not only do

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the men slowly get to their feet but the camera jerkily pans to the right to follow his movement across the camp. The subordinate officers display more deliberate reticence. They detest the idea of an unknown general taking command and sit with their backs turned to Bonaparte when he arrives. His solution is simple: he throws his sword onto their table, making them spin around in surprise. By the force of his glare, he makes them stand and then take off their hats – a wordless routine that emphasizes his non-verbal power. Their show of respect before this silent gaze mimics Bonaparte’s own deferential gesture of removing his hat before the ghosts of the Convention – another form of continuity between the Revolution and its new leader. Bonaparte orders an inspection of the army. Titles relate the ‘miraculous’ restoration of confidence the general inspires, and after the parade they energetically cheer their new commander. After a night of rest, Bonaparte addresses his soldiers from the summit of the ridge overlooking the encampment. In a series of extreme shot/reverse-shot exchanges between Bonaparte and his troops below, he exclaims: ‘I want to lead you into the most fertile plains in the world… // Rich provinces and great towns will be in your power… // There you will find honour, glory, and riches…’ The next title announces: ‘And now, turning towards Italy, the tempter showed the Promised Land to which he would lead them.’ Paraphrasing Georges Lacour-Gayet’s words (1921: 28), this biblical image simultaneously compares Bonaparte to Moses leading the chosen people into Palestine and to the Devil’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness. In the latter passage in Matthew, Satan is cast as ‘the tempter’: The devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; / And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me (The Bible, Matthew 4: 8-9).

In Napoléon, Bonaparte stands in a similar position, viewing Italy’s rivers (as described in a title) ‘sparkling like yataghans of gold’ – the unspoken condition of ‘worship’ seems to presage his corruption as Emperor. Though Bonaparte is on a mountaintop, Gance’s written account of this scene describes him standing ‘on the edge of the precipice’ (1927?) – as if the moment contains the potential for a fall as well as flight. The filmmaker wanted to frame the general so that he ‘seems to grow larger against the sky’; as the sun rises behind him, he would ‘stand out, black, against the gigantic, pale globe’ (ibid.). Reiterating the metaphor used to describe the singing of La Marseillaise earlier in the film, Gance describes how the general ‘kindles’ the

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‘spark’ in the hearts of his men; just as the sun bursts through the window of the Cordeliers church, so ‘a caress of sunlight passes over the men like a benediction’ in Italy (ibid.). Whilst the general is both divine and satanic, the film positions his army in the familiar Romantic role of ‘Christ-People’ – a human surge that can redeem the world. A title announces that ‘the spirit of La Grande Armée’ is awoken: this will be the name given to the multinational army led by the Emperor Napoléon between 1805 and 1815. At its largest (in 1812), it numbered over 500,000 men, drawn not just from France but from Austria, Croatia, the German States, Holland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Prussia, and Switzerland. In the Romantic imagination, this force was ‘the avant-garde of the human race’ (Hugo 1877-8: I/274). The soldiers now march out of camp and Bonaparte leads them in a lightning attack on the Austrians at Montenotte. The battle is won in a flash, and the columns once more pour forward into Italy. In a series of amazingly energetic tracking shots, we see Bonaparte ride ahead of the army; he reaches the heights of Montezemolo, where he stands and overlooks the plains of northern Italy. A title reads: ‘Napoléon’s soul, soaring on a fantastic dream, plays with the clouds at destroying and at building worlds’. In the Apollo version of the film, this is followed by a rapid montage of fragments that blend Bonaparte’s past, present, and future: flashes of flame, crashing waves, eagle, suns, clouds; images of Joséphine, his mother, his young self, the Three Gods, Saint-Just; his silhouette in the clouds, his lightning eyes, strategic calculations, maps, ghostly legions racing across imagined battlefields. Through the vision of future victories, Bonaparte is given an affirmation; through the vision of the Convention leaders, he is given a warning. If the general is as luminous as the flames and suns, we also see his ‘gigantic shadow’ being ‘projected by a miraculous effect of inverse parhelion’ into the sky (Gance 1927b: 137). The parhelion effect is an atmospheric phenomenon that creates the impression of a halo around the sun, often accompanied by two bright spots on either side. Gance’s ‘inversion’ of such an instance defies any scientific rationale: it is a poetic conceit that turns Bonaparte into the ‘black sun radiating darkness’ of Hugo’s ‘Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre’. The film’s final whirlwind of images thus fuses Bonaparte’s antithetical identities: past and future, saviour and monster, Christ and Antichrist.

5.5

The expansion of visual language

Gance’s experimental cinematic language expresses the progressive values forged in the Cordeliers assembly, those same ideals that the Convention

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charges Bonaparte to realize and which he brings to the Army of Italy. As I argued in chapter 4, the various leaders in Napoléon are made sympathetic according to the degree of luminosity and energy they possess – the same qualities that define (Gance’s) filmmaking. One of the reasons Saint-Just’s final speech is not as elaborate as it appears in the screenplay is to emphasize Bonaparte’s own embodiment of cinematic expressivity. Yet the power of the film medium is not, as critics have argued, the prerogative of Bonaparte or of Gance. The title of the director’s most revealing theoretical text – ‘Autour du moi et du monde: le cinéma de demain’ – emphasizes that the world around the filmmaker is as important as any authorial subjectivity. This piece analyses Napoléon as an exemplar of cinema’s future, which Gance saw as nothing less than the experiential transformation of society. Envisioning huge stadium-cinemas and three-dimensional screens, he believed that instead of ‘merely’ seeing the ‘miraculous space’ of the projected world, ‘we will live there’: The soul of the spectators will merge with the soul of characters and objects; they will all participate in the drama through the magic of their hallucination, and will fight to stop themselves from crying out and answering the voices issuing from these beings, from this prodigious nature which is as real as they are (Gance 1929d: 289-90).

If this grandiose scheme would never be realized during Gance’s lifetime, the Polyvision ending of Napoléon offers magisterial evidence of the potential of cinematic expansion. These final scenes are not a case of primitive gigantism or unthinking spectacle (in David Thomson’s words, ‘a crude addition of image in preference to choice’ [1994: 273]) but a reinvention of film continuity: this ‘new alphabet for the eyes’ (Gance 1968) offers a profoundly innovative mode of experiential art. When watching Napoléon, audiences sit for several hours looking at a single screen, aware that large areas of the theatre’s proscenium space are shrouded in curtains. As the live performance comes to its climax, the anticipation of seeing the lateral screens revealed creates a wonderful sense of tension within the auditorium. When the curtains finally move aside, even the sight of a blank screen filling the entire width of the theatre is a marvellous spectacle. A moment later, the central image of the Army of Italy lined up on parade is suddenly joined by two flanking screens that complete a panoramic view of the camp and the cliffs overlooking the gathered soldiers (Figure 27). Even for those who have seen the triptych before, the shock of this visual expansion is a moment unequalled in

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cinema. The performance of Napoléon at the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam in June 2014 used a 40m-by-10m screen – the sheer size of this image and the auditorium in which it was shown marked a step towards the stadiums in which Gance wanted such films to be projected. So huge was the panorama that several thousand spectators simultaneously gasped: this is one of the few instances when the adjective ‘breathtaking’ is a literal description of art’s physiological effect. The reason audiences always break into rapturous applause when confronted with the full width of Gance’s triptych is not merely to do with the size of the image; rather, the sudden transition from fullscreen to widescreen offers an unparalleled chance for spectators to witness film form take an instantaneous evolutionary leap before their eyes. Bonaparte and his staff gallop from the background of the right screen, across the rear of the central screen, forward along the farthermost border of the left screen, and finally emerge in the panel’s extreme foreground; the cavalcade then rides across each of the three screens from left to right. At the Amsterdam screening, this choreography was given another huge round of applause – the audience instinctively appreciated how Gance was showing off the potential of the enlarged screen. Thus, the pleasure of seeing a new format born is compounded by seeing it being so swiftly and so absolutely mastered. To film these sequences, Gance placed three cameras one on top of the other, each angled so that their combined span would produce a panorama of the scene. The result of this awkward set-up is a minor disparity in visual continuity between the three images of the united screens. Whilst some might find such a glitch distracting, I have found my every encounter with this ‘parallax problem’ deeply moving. The presence of seams across Gance’s huge canvas is the most marvellous evidence of workmanship. Just as the texture of paint proves the presence of the artist’s brush and hand, so the parallax borders reveal the physical processes of art and the imprint of human creation through which it is realized. Similarly, the difficulty with which Gance’s aligned triptych panoramas move demonstrates the tension between the materiality of film production and the immateriality of its visible signature. When the army wakes the next morning, all three cameras tilt upwards to reveal the skyline of the mountaintop: we see soldiers scattered across this immense terrain, providing us with a sense of three-dimensional space on screen. The slowness of this vertical movement, the heaviness it reveals of the mechanism through which the tilt is achieved, suggests a new-born creature testing the strength of its legs before it learns to walk – each of the three frames trembles slightly with the exertion of their effort. The experience of the triptych in the cinema

Fig. 27: Carl Davis conducts the Het Gelders Orkest in a live performance of Napoléon at the Ziggo Dome (Amsterdam, 15 June 2014)

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reveals not only the power of projected images but also their fragility: this immense visual edifice is the result of three strips of celluloid hurtling through three projectors, linked by a miracle of technical synchronicity. During Bonaparte’s subsequent speech to the army, the three panels finally become independent of one another, able to flicker back and forth across space and time; close-ups jostle with extreme long shots; reaction shots coincide with their reversed perspective; we are at once everywhere, behind and in front and among those figures and objects on screen. Gance believed that the triple-screen could bestow ‘the gift of ubiquity’ on audiences, opening up an apparent ‘fourth dimension’ to transcend our notions of normal space and time – whereupon we ‘find ourselves everywhere and in everything in the same fraction of a second’ (1954: 5-9). In the finale of Napoléon, Bonaparte opens out his arms into the sky; the general’s gesture is carried through successive jump cuts into the mid- and far-distance whilst we see the clouds above and about him turn into the thousand faces of his army on the flanking screens; a horse and rider are silhouetted against the mountaintop whilst we simultaneously gaze up into the sun in the depths of the sky, gathering two ribbons of vapour into its brightness; the army marches, the two outward panels mirroring one another; the crowd has become a river flowing between two banks, gathering momentum in the central image that tumbles towards us. This extraordinary ubiquity dispels all doubt regarding the viability of Polyvision, drawing the spectator into the marvels of the world on screen. If Napoléon’s triptych might not trigger the existential revelations imagined by Gance, it certainly offers a profound example of how Romantic art sought to access ‘a different order of reality from any available to ordinary intellection’ (Kermode 1957: 152). It is possible to forget oneself sitting in the cinema and feel transported entirely elsewhere. Gance’s belief that cinema will one day ‘fly with its own wide-open wings’ (1929d: 285) is literalized in the expansive release of the triptych finale. It is here that the simultaneous operation of literal and metaphorical discourse in Napoléon attains its greatest power. When the eagle makes its last appearance in the film’s final moments, it forms a narrative and emotional link back to the prologue of Brienne. Most intertitles of the triptych sequence are presented on the central screen, but others are spread over all three. Such is the case with the introduction to the eagle: ‘And in the sky a strange conductor beats out the rhythm of the army’. The marching soldiers see the shadow of a bird on the ground before them. The orchestra swells into Davis’ soaring ‘eagle of destiny’ theme just as Gance cuts to the bird stretching its wings across all three panels of the screen (Figure 28).

Fig. 28: The 40-metre wingspan of Gance’s eagle at the Ziggo Dome screening

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It is an image of absolute sublimity – not because it is one of seamless perfection (the wingspan is broken by the parallax problem), but because it embodies both the entire drama of the film and of the cinematic frame. This overwhelmingly moving moment is the perfect example of how Gance orchestrates the cumulative importance of rhetorical motifs over the course of the film. Every appearance of the eagle thus far has been its return to Bonaparte – almost invariably landing next to him or visually superimposed over him. In this final reappearance, however, the eagle is soaring overhead – we do not see its destination; we do not see it land. Like the open-ended narrative of the film, the eagle is flying out into the future. The panoramic wingspan of this Napoleonic emblem is an ecstatic evocation of narrative and cinematic potential. At the recent Amsterdam screening, the eagle was endowed with wings that spanned all 40 metres of the screen; once viewed on such a scale, it becomes impossible to imagine such an image existing outside of the theatre. Napoléon attains its true life only in the cinema – its aesthetic power defies replication (or comprehension) in any other context. The rapid montage of the Apollo version (described earlier in this chapter) is even more elaborate and effective when orchestrated for Polyvision. In the Opéra ending, Bonaparte’s ‘destruction and creation of worlds’ bursts across three simultaneous screens: lateral and consecutive montage combine; shot scales collide; spatial and temporal context are intermingled (Figure 29). Finally, the screens are tinted blue, white, and red – the colours of the French tricolour. Davis blends and converges the themes for Bonaparte and Joséphine with La Marseillaise, and Gance simultaneously rewinds, fast-forwards, and suspends time. After this incalculable horde of images flies across their breadth, each of the three screens bears an identical close-up of rushing water. This is an image we first saw during the Double Tempest when Bonaparte sets out to confront his destiny – there, the water churns in the path of his vessel, borne by a sail fashioned from a huge tricolour; now, the screen itself has become a flag: the fluttering surge of the ocean is the spirit of the Revolution and of the cinema. The triptych holds this form just long enough for the spectator to lose any sense of the world beyond it, then vanishes with heart-wrenching suddenness. The elation of flight is followed by the sensation of falling to earth. For Jean Arroy, Gance’s triptych provoked ‘the most powerful, the most unexpected, and the purest aesthetic emotion that I have ever felt’ (1927b: 11). Whilst many spectators have concurred with this sentiment, it is not one that finds common expression in academic literature. As I argued in my preface, many feel the need to discount or discredit the emotive impact of Napoléon. Peter Pappas acknowledges Kevin Brownlow’s restoration

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Fig. 29: The simultaneous continuity of Polyvision: Bonaparte in the past, present, and future

as a ‘profound commitment to the idea that civilization is still possible in our times’ and praises Carl Davis’ masterful score against that of Carmine Coppola, which ‘consistently, and perniciously, acts against the intention of the film’ to the point of ‘desecration’ or ‘sabotage’ (1981: 13-14). Yet a preference for art that seeks ‘to distinguish, clarify, and distance itself from the world’ leads Pappas to perform just such an act of critical separation from the ‘monstrous subjectivity’ of Napoléon. He argues that the film ‘doesn’t make any sense, and isn’t supposed to’, thereby conforming to his definition of fascism as ‘the political expression of insanity’ (ibid.: 7-8, 12). Though not always drawing such a pathological line between ‘sane’ critic and ‘insane’ art/artist, this inflexible adherence to ‘objectivity’ is a common trait of evaluative methodologies. For some, any ‘acknowledgement of the writer’s subjectivity is feared to contaminate the impartiality of the “findings”’; drawing upon the ‘pre-ordained and restricted vocabulary’ on which formalist analyses so often rely, many writers are simply incapable of communicating the aesthetic experience of individual films (Clayton/ Klevan 2011: 4, 21). Richard Abel’s assertion that the triptych of Napoléon presents ‘several textual layers of incoherence suspended in a form of coherence’ (1984: 445) not only denies the possibility of the artist’s deliberate ambiguity but also creates an unfortunate divide between performative and critical evaluation. As I have argued, the live ‘form’ of Napoléon makes perfect sense – it is only the distortive analysis of distanced ‘objectivity’ that renders its meaning incoherent.

5.6 Summary Ludwig van Beethoven finished writing a symphony he named ‘Buonaparte’ in early 1804, but by the time of its first public performance in 1805 he had anonymized it to ‘Eroica’. This dedicatory change was wrought when he discovered that Bonaparte had become the Emperor Napoléon – Beethoven

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was convinced that the republican leader would now ‘think himself superior to all men’ and ‘become a tyrant’ (Ries/Wegeler 1838: 78-9). Discussing musical innovation in the Eroica Symphony, Maynard Solomon writes that it is precisely this aspirational conflict that drives great art: Idealism and simple faith alone […] are insufficient grounds for greatness. Conflict is absent from ideological statements, and the resultant artwork accordingly requires no formal containment, but merely craftsmanlike expression. For it is in the conflict between faith and scepticism – which Goethe regarded as the most important theme of world history – that creates those dynamic tensions which tend to expand and threaten to burst the bonds of form (1978: 142).

This chapter has argued that the ambiguity of Napoléon is both complex and entirely deliberate. As with Beethoven’s Eroica, Gance’s film is balanced between praise for ‘Bonaparte’ and concern regarding ‘Napoléon’; likewise, its stylistic experimentation has a tendency to ‘expand and burst the bonds of form’. In his written account of the finale of Napoléon, Gance’s language melts the distinction between metaphor and reality: this is a ‘conversation with glory’ that becomes ‘vertiginous like the abyss of light which opens at [Bonaparte’s] feet’; the sun ‘floods the army with the radiant conviction of the young leader’ and this ‘grandiose enthusiasm’ is extended by ‘multiple shots that act like waves whose length gradually increases with distance’ (Gance 1927?). The form of communication Bonaparte adopts is non-verbal: he doesn’t speak to the gathered soldiers, but ‘his silence breaks in great waves of mute exaltation’. Through a kind of ‘collective telepathy’, his will ‘subsumes’ the will of his men and ‘absorbs it to saturation point’. Bonaparte’s soul ‘speaks’ simultaneously to his soldiers, to ‘the armies of his dreams’, to the ‘transparent phantom of Joséphine’, to his eagle and his horse, to ‘the flame, to the sea, to the orbiting planets, and to his star’ (ibid.). The visual realization of this description adopts an even more compelling form of transformation: Gance’s leitmotifs of light and dark, fire and ocean, wind and eagle, are both literal and symbolic. This is the cinematic equivalent of Hugo’s ‘métaphore maxima’, a ‘grammatical oddity’ where ‘the direct juxtaposition of two nouns’ attributes ‘physical qualities […] to abstractions’ (Robb 1997: 331). Gance’s visual language similarly performs elaborate acts of juxtaposition and synthesis, transforming rhetorical devices into living symbols. The reason for this strategy is that the narrative voice of Napoléon is predicated on dramatic and historical paradox. Suspended between faith

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and doubt, Gance’s film demonstrates the legacy of Romantic irony by ‘striving for something perceived but out of grasp’ (Kolb 2005: 379). Rather than monocular enthusiasm, Gance produces a panoptic vision of Bonaparte and his promise of the Universal Republic. From the vantage point of the present, it is impossible for the hero to keep this vow: the film’s great achievement is allowing audiences to feel the validity of a dream we know to have failed, and to make its realization seem possible once again. Even as Gance subtly evinces Bonaparte’s shortcomings, we are asked to celebrate his potential: Very well, Beethoven tore out the dedication of the Eroica, and was right to do so, when he learnt that his hero had feet of clay. But he was also right to offer the dedication in the first place, and it is in the exhilaration of that truth that we emerge from [the] vast, dazzling, and profound experience [of Napoléon] (Levin 1984: 8).

6. A view from the margins of history Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul! […] The Art of History [is to] distinguish well what does still reach to the surface, and is alive and frondent for us; and what reaches no longer to the surface, but moulders safe underground, never to send forth leaves or fruit for mankind any more: of the former we shall rejoice to hear; to hear of the latter will be an affliction to us; of the latter only Pedants and Dullards, and disastrous malefactors to the world, will find good to speak. By wise memory and by wise oblivion: it lies all there! Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past (Carlyle 1845: I/9).

6.1 Introduction Gance’s desire for factual credence is highly visible in Napoléon, but his numerous historical citations have often been seen as ‘a misguided attempt to invoke the mantle of authority’ (Abel 1984: 432). Indeed, Gance later thought his fundamental ‘error’ in Napoléon was ‘the abuse of documentation’: ‘I lost popular appeal in trying to be accurate and searching for authentic detail. The power of La Roue and J’accuse resides in the absence of the authenticated’ (1928d). Yet these ‘unauthenticated’ elements of Napoléon were often the first targets of those wishing to reduce the film’s immense length. This was particularly the case with the fictional Fleuri family: the scenes involving Tristan, Violine, and Marcellin have suffered the most from deliberate excision and derisive critical consideration. After attending an early preview screening, Jean Arroy urged Gance to cut the majority of material involving the Fleuris (Brownlow [1983] 2004: 135). Gance followed this advice in preparing his film for the Opéra but later reinstated their scenes in the longer Apollo prints. Given the choice between these two divergent editions (and numerous other incomplete prints), modern restorers have often disregarded the Fleuris during the process of reconstruction. Despite the best efforts of editors and Bonaparte’s stubborn blindness to them, the Fleuris remain embedded in the textual substance of Napoléon – perennially struggling to make their presence known. These characters demonstrate the playful interaction of humour and pathos, of fact and

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fiction, which is so crucial to understanding Gance’s film as a whole. Their relationship with Bonaparte forms an important link between the ‘great man’ and the forgotten figures of history, as well as the connection between characters and audience. In Marco Ferro’s terms, Gance balances the lofty perspective of epic history with the ‘counterweight’ of an everyday history ‘seen from below’ (1977: 73). It is this relationship between the ‘great’ and the ‘little’ within Napoléon that I will explore in this chapter.

6.2

Oblivion and remembrance

For all that my study has thus far concentrated on grandiloquent conceptions of world destiny, it is essential to note Romantic writers’ concerns with the neglected levels of factual detail underpinning human history. Hugo fills an entire chapter of Les Misérables with a vast list of seemingly unimportant information relating to France in the year his narrative is set; he titles this section of the book simply: ‘The Year 1817’. Even to readers in 1862, this epic jumble of fragmentary evidence was utterly obscure. Hugo was making a deliberate point by interrupting his narrative for a chapter of pure ‘history’: History neglects all these minutiae: it cannot do otherwise; infinity would engulf it. Nevertheless, these details, which are incorrectly termed little (there being neither little facts in humanity nor little leaves in vegetation), are useful. It is the physiognomy of the years that makes up the face of the century (1862: I/292).

These ideas about the importance of ‘insignificant’ aspects of the past are as concerned with human beings as with abstract details. Though his work often vindicated the role of the ‘great man’ in history, Carlyle admitted that the ‘worthiest’ individual act is often ‘the least spoken of’ by historians and that ‘it lies in the nature of events to be so’ (1833: 586-7). Like Carlyle, Gance seeks to acknowledge the ‘worthy’ unknown figures of the past in Napoléon – the Fleuri family is exemplary of this desire. The importance of these characters is obvious from Gance’s 1923 outline for his six-film Napoleonic cycle. The Fleuris’ story is designed to humanize the grandiose narrative and to cement a relationship between audiences and the inhabitants of the past: While portraying great and recognized truths, I am also introducing a forceful human element into my film […] which will perhaps make an

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even greater appeal to the heart than the revealed truths will make to the mind […] [From their] humble positions […] two pairs of the most vigilant, attentive, and devoted eyes watch every phase of the great tragedy. [Tristan and Violine] will also serve as connecting links throughout […] the various events of the Empire, which might otherwise be rather confusing to the spectator (Gance 1923a).

Throughout the six films, Tristan and Violine were to honour Bonaparte with an admiration whose ‘strength and nobility’ were ‘to touch the deepest chords in the audiences’ hearts’ (ibid.). Having met the child Bonaparte at Brienne, Tristan develops a ‘profound spirit of love and sacrifice’ for his idol as an adult. Unbeknownst to him, however, Violine falls romantically in love with Bonaparte when she meets him in Paris. So deep is her infatuation that she attempts suicide after Bonaparte’s marriage in March 1796 – only to be rescued by the wife of her beloved. Whilst Violine becomes Joséphine’s maid in Paris, Tristan becomes Bonaparte’s valet during the campaign in Italy. As a servant, Tristan is shy and stammers hopelessly when addressing his master; however, at night he goes out in disguise to perform daring raids on the Austrian army. Always vanishing before his identity can be revealed, Tristan’s heroic alter ego becomes known as the ‘Phantom Grenadier’. He is eventually joined in Italy by Violine, whose romantic obsession with Bonaparte is discovered by her mistress. Just as Joséphine promises not to reveal Violine’s secret after her dismissal, so Violine now promises not to reveal that Tristan is the Phantom Grenadier. Gance planned for these two figures to follow in the footsteps of Bonaparte’s career, but always at a distance. Tristan is of too lowly a status to attend his hero’s imperial coronation in December 1804; instead, he watches a recreation-in-miniature of the ceremony – ‘weeping for joy’ as he beholds the marionettes on their decorative stage (ibid.). As the Phantom Grenadier, Tristan goes on to earn the prestigious Légion d’Honneur at the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, but he daren’t come forward to claim his medal – ‘Fate seems to be against him’ ever earning recognition. When Bonaparte divorces Joséphine in 1810 and marries the Austrian princess Marie-Louise, Violine is left distraught – her infatuation is ‘slowly killing her’ (ibid.). The ‘turning wheel of war’ once more drags both Fleuris into Bonaparte’s final military campaigns. During the invasion of Russia in 1812, Violine’s emotional and physical health declines. In what was to be ‘one of the most moving passages of the film’, she dies of exhaustion during the disastrous winter retreat: ‘her hopeless love finally fulfilled what had long

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been inevitable’. She wishes to see Bonaparte, so Tristan dresses as the Emperor and pretends to be her idol, ‘giving Violine the vision she craves’. Bonaparte happens to pass by and ‘his eagle glance falls on the figure of his double’; he is initially angry, but when he sees the emotion on Tristan’s face and the valet explains the situation, he realizes Violine’s devotion. He takes her hands and ‘kisses them reverentially’, allowing the girl to die happy (ibid.). At the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Tristan appears as the Phantom Grenadier in daylight. Advancing with the elite Imperial Guard at the climax of the battle, he is wounded in their last stand; his identity is finally revealed and Bonaparte decorates him in the dying moments of the battle. Tristan then accompanies Bonaparte into exile on St Helena, where the two men become close friends. In May 1821, Tristan dresses in his old uniform for the last time – it is ‘the supreme moment’ of ‘the dying eagle’. Knowing that Bonaparte is moments from death, Tristan breaks free of the British guards and rushes towards the island’s highest cliff. Crying out ‘Long live the Emperor!’, he throws himself into the sea at the very moment Bonaparte passes away (ibid.). When Gance began writing the full screenplay of his first episodes in 1924, he devoted more time to a third member of the Fleuri family: Tristan’s son, Marcellin. An important variation on the 1923 outline, this child was to provide a further level of emotional engagement with audiences. In one draft of the screenplay dealing with the climax of the Italian campaign in November 1796, Bonaparte’s victory at Arcole is offset by the death of Marcellin, who is killed during the battle. A miraculous military success would be poignantly undercut by Tristan and Violine mourning the loss of this small child (1924c). Clear from his plans of 1923 and 1924 is that Gance wanted to devote as large a proportion of the narrative to the Fleuris’ lives as to the biography of Bonaparte. When he cast the role of Tristan in 1924, he chose a figure who was very popular with contemporary audiences: Nicolas Koline. This highly experienced actor had built his career on the stage at the Moscow Art Theatre and earned the approval of its legendary founder, Konstantin Stanislavski (V.R. 1923: 9). Leaving Russia during the country’s bloody Civil War, Koline arrived in Paris and began working in the film industry alongside other émigrés, such as Viacheslav Tourjansky, Alexander Volkoff, and Ivan Mosjoukine. Though capable of dramatic characterizations, his most common part was that of a confidant/sidekick to the lead character; his ability to imbue comedy with pathos in such roles had earned Koline comparisons with Charlie Chaplin in the French press (Brownlow [1983] 2004: 39). Prior

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to Napoléon, Gance had earmarked the Russian to play Sancho Panza alongside the American actor Frank Keenan as Don Quixote in a cinematic adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’ famous novel (1924h). Tristan’s low social rank and marginalized relationship with the lead character would be an extension of such a part as well as of the actor’s earlier roles. Gance initially wanted to recruit the famous American actress Lillian Gish for the ‘splendid part’ of Violine (1925b), but when this proved impossible he sought another foreign star. The English actress Mabel Poulton had entered the film industry on the basis of her resemblance to Gish, playing Gish’s character in a live prologue to screenings of D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) in London. After meeting her in Paris, Gance felt that Poulton’s ‘virginal eyes’ were perfect for Violine; however, no sooner had he made his choice than his producers demanded the part should be played by a French actress (Brownlow 1994: 28). As a result of this confusion, Violine was still uncast when the production of Napoléon moved to Corsica in the spring of 1925. Among those present on location was Suzanne Charpentier, who had been cast as Bonaparte’s sister Eliza. When she was replaced in this minor role by Yvette Dieudonné (wife of Albert), Charpentier was sent back to Paris and discovered that Gance now wanted her to play the major part of Violine. Though he had been seeking a famous face for this role, he settled on an entirely unknown actress – Charpentier only turned eighteen in July 1925 and had never before appeared on screen. The director was clearly captivated by her beauty and would treat ‘his Lillian Gish’ with exquisite soft-focus photography (Brownlow [1983] 2004:  79-80). Indeed, Gance ‘rechristened’ Charpentier as Annabella in honour of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ – one of the filmmaker’s favourite poems (Kaplan 1994: 26). Gance’s idolization repeated his fixation with the English actress Ivy Close, whom he had cast as Norma in La Roue. This character inadvertently inspires the love of her adoptive father and brother – a situation later mimicked outside the film’s narrative when Gance proposed to Close. Included in Blaise Cendrars’s documentary Autour de la Roue (1923) is footage shot by Gance of Close as Norma; three shots linked by dissolves bring her face ever closer to the viewer, blurring the boundaries between fictional and authorial fascination. In Napoléon, the main character of Bonaparte is unaware of the peripheral Violine – only the camera pays attention to Annabella’s beauty. The actress’s namesake in ‘Annabel Lee’ is killed by a wind that ‘came out of the cloud by night’ and gives her a deathly chill (1849: 2), just as Violine would be destined for a wintery demise. The narrator of Poe’s poem also boasts that nothing can ever ‘dissever’ his soul from that of Annabel (ibid.); whilst this narrative denies any voice to the woman on

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whom it fixates, Violine’s tragedy is to be the focus of the audience’s attention and excluded from that of her beloved (discussed further in chapter 7).

6.3

Parallel lives

As witnesses of historical and fictional events in Napoléon, the Fleuris have the ability ‘to move at will through time and space, obeying no other logic than fantasy and coincidence’ (King 1984a: 153). Swapping between various ancillary jobs over the course of Napoléon, Tristan appears as a scullion, a street cleaner, an innkeeper, a prison guard, a book clerk, a waiter, and a soldier. The low-level nature of his employment brings him into regular contact with the minutiae of historical events and figures as well as with the documentation that attempts to record and control them. This improbable access to disparate narrative events replicates the privileged position of the film’s spectators; by using the Fleuris as witnesses in this way, Gance carefully emphasizes the tension between the desire to participate and the reality of distanced observation. The Fleuris’ interaction with the central ‘great man’ involves a mixture of intimacy and isolation: whilst constantly running into Bonaparte, they never manage to communicate their existence or their love to him. Tristan’s first appearance in the film is at Brienne College, but the rest of his family are not introduced until we have met the adult Bonaparte. Whilst close-ups of every Fleuri feature in the single-frame montage of the Cordeliers sequence, no evidence survives of their appearance in the preceding scenes. Also missing are the subsequent scenes in which Tristan and Violine find themselves as Bonaparte’s neighbours in an impoverished district of Paris. This excised material unfortunately contains the first meeting of Violine and Bonaparte as well as the establishment of their sharing the latter’s lowly social status. By the time we meet the Fleuris again at Toulon in September 1793, over a year has passed since the aforementioned scenes: whilst they still make a meagre living as servants, Bonaparte is now a lieutenant and will soon make his reputation. Tristan, Violine, and Marcellin have been displaced by the events of war and now run an inn on the outskirts of Toulon. In Gance’s screenplay, there are a number of striking scenes which he later cut from the film. Before we are introduced to the military aspect of the siege, we were to see Violine contemplating ‘the soul of Joan of Arc […] within her’ (Gance 1927b: 240). This famous medieval warrior and martyr had been invoked during the ‘Insurrection of women’ in October 1789, when thousands of French

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women marched on Versailles to demand more food. The press compared these modern heroines of the Revolution with both Pallas Athene and the ‘Maid of Orléans’ (Carlyle 1837: I/356-7). Joan was hailed as a ‘true saint in faith and in destiny’ in the nineteenth century (Guizot 1873-6: II/331) and would achieve beatification in 1909 and canonization in 1920. In Napoléon, Violine evokes Joan’s legacy in response to the crisis of war facing France. Her flower-strewn bedroom is covered with images of ‘heroic subjects’, and she even has a ‘crusader’s sword’ in a secret hiding place. Violine goes outside to pray, where she re-embodies Joan (Figure 30): A beautiful pastoral scene at dusk. An atmosphere of intense, profound poetry arising from the gloaming, nature, the people, and the surroundings. Hundreds of sheep are passing in the same direction. An old shepherd is sleeping. Near him, Violine is fervently praying on her knees, her hands clasped, her face raised towards a huge oak tree, through which filters light from the setting sun. A bird on a branch is silhouetted in the foreground […] Her expression is one of infinite purity and the fixed gaze of her eyes is extraordinary. Nothing moves. Only her prayer rises like incense, almost visible, so deeply does Violine feel it in her soul (Gance 1927b: 147).

Tristan approaches and sees Violine’s collection of books detailing the divine mission of Joan as well as her clothing and appearance. Tristan looks at one of the illustrations, ‘Joan of Arc at Domrémy’ (the site of her first heavenly visitation). Praying beneath an oak, distaff by her side, sheep gathered nearby, Violine exactly resembles the image. Tristan is profoundly moved; he calls to Violine and they embrace: ‘They embody the tragedy of France’. ‘At all costs someone must save France, Papa!’ she exclaims. Tristan asks if she has ‘heard the voices’ that Joan claimed relayed God’s word to her in 1424. ‘No, they haven’t come yet’, she replies, sadly. As they leave, both see a ‘white apparition’, but it is just a sheet drying between two trees. Like the pastoral scenes on Corsica, this sequence was to form a link between mythical nature and national feeling. Patriotic sentiments are pastoralized and universalized through the evocative natural setting – Violine prays before a divine nature, not simply before a nationalist icon. Gance may have abandoned these scenes for their potentially mawkish symbolism, for the first extant scenes involving the Fleuris at Toulon are characterized by comedy that satirizes martial solemnity. Their inn functions as the meeting place of the officers of the besieging French army. When General Carteaux enters, he is preceded by a swarm of lackeys who

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Fig. 30:  A lost scene from Napoléon: Violine as Joan of Arc

clear a path for their pompous commander by hurling any intervening furniture or patrons out of the way. With his bulky form, exaggerated strut, and overly plumed hat, Carteaux resembles a flightless bird whose lethargic movements will doom him to extinction. Whilst this gamy officer sits down at the only table deemed worthy of his presence, we see Tristan burst through the kitchen doorway – his wig is comically askew and his expression is somewhere between bafflement and enthusiasm. When he serves his guests, Tristan negotiates the field of debris left by Carteaux’s

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staff at high speed, desperately trying to keep stable his tray of drinks. Koline’s ability to disguise his own perfectly rehearsed balance, poise, and timing as clumsy improvisation is brilliant throughout this scene – and crucial to our sympathy for this well-meaning character who cannot help his own clownishness. Now Bonaparte appears in the doorway, his form outlined in striking silhouette as he pauses on the threshold before striding confidently into the inn. As if to emphasize the officer’s emblematic entrance, Gance cuts to the only figures who yet recognize his importance: the Fleuris. Bonaparte’s assertive appearance is a counterbalance to Tristan’s own entrance into the frame earlier in the scene, and the contrast between orderliness and confusion underpins the rest of the sequence (and the wider context of the Toulon campaign itself). Bonaparte reports to General Carteaux and reveals his radical plans for the storming of the English positions. Carteaux’s arrogant dismissal of the young man’s ideas is interrupted by shellfire; whilst Bonaparte keeps perfectly calm, the general and his staff flee the inn. Bonaparte is left alone and sits down at a table to study his maps. The whole Fleuri family are now left to attend him: Violine shyly keeps her distance, but Tristan and Marcellin approach the young officer. Determined to remind him of their first encounter, Tristan stammers that he was at Brienne. Without acknowledging the content of his words at all, Bonaparte replies bluntly: ‘Bread, olives, and silence!’ Tristan looks taken aback but dutifully obeys this command. Returning with a plate of food, he places it on Bonaparte’s map, but (thanks to the bombardment) the table has a missing plank in its centre and the plate falls straight through onto the floor. Tristan fearfully starts back – instinctively saluting as Bonaparte rises in irritation and walks away. Whilst he paces the room, lost in thought, Marcellin puts on Bonaparte’s discarded hat and takes up his sword. Mimicking the adult with marvellous accuracy, the child shadows Bonaparte up and down the room – delightfully replicating Bonaparte’s ponderous gait and thoughtfully clasped hands behind his back. Having tried to tidy up the mess, Tristan now spots his son’s actions and quickly lifts him out of the officer’s path – returning the hat and sword to the table. As Bonaparte reaches the bench and sits down once more, father and son hurriedly break off their routine to salute. The officer, absorbed in his calculations, is oblivious to their comic turn. Though Tristan is far keener to approach Bonaparte, the officer is hardly any less rude towards him than the self-absorbed Carteaux. The scene is a testament to the way in which Bonaparte will increasingly communicate to others through brusque commands rather than through an exchange

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of conversation. His words ‘Bread, olives, and silence’ are echoed in a later scene at Toulon when he demands ‘calm, order, silence’ from the other officers. Bonaparte’s coldness towards Tristan is part of the military orderliness that characterizes him as a military leader. By devoting so much time to his unsympathetic treatment of the sympathetic Fleuris, Gance reveals Bonaparte’s growing distance from ordinary human contact. Aside from its humorous play on Bonaparte’s iconography, Gance’s scene at the Toulon inn also foreshadows the repeated attempts of Marcellin and Tristan to don uniform and enact military heroics. In a scene set at Toulon called ‘The mobilization of Tristan Fleuri’ (now missing from prints), Tristan’s hopes of a glorious military career are dashed: A gendarme delivers an envelope to Tristan. He calls Violine and Marcellin, who run to his side. He trembles with joy. He doesn’t dare open it. He eyes it greedily, and as he does so he sees: The letter. Superimposed, a tiny general, Tristan Fleuri, capering absurdly. His bliss. His hands are shaking too much he can’t open the envelope; he asks Violine to do it, who reads in astonishment: ‘Citizen Tristan Fleuri is appointed cook to the armies of the Republic and…’ Fleuri. Expression like Don Quixote’s on realizing that Mambrino’s helmet was a barber’s basin, and two tears well up in his poor eyes. He is too despondent to speak (Gance 1927b: 170-1).

Marcellin emerges from his room ‘dragging a long sabre’. He stamps his foot in indignation at the news and then leaves. Tristan breaks down in tears and Violine tries to comfort him. Such a poignant tension between comedy and tragedy is typical of Tristan’s increasingly desperate attempts to aid his country and his hero. Marcellin also tries to involve himself with the army at Toulon. He is present in one of Bonaparte’s inspection parades, where he stands in line wearing a grenadier’s bearskin. Passing along the line, Bonaparte sees the child’s tiny face peeking out from under this huge hat. He stops and lifts up the bearskin, thumping it down again so that the boy’s whole head disappears. ‘Too short!’ Bonaparte bellows. He marches away, leaving Marcellin to cry in humiliation as the other soldiers laugh. Later, on the night of the battle, Marcellin has become a drummer and stands with his older comrades in the midst of a flooded mire. He asks Moustache (Henry Krauss): ‘How old was the little drummer boy Viala when he died?’ ‘Thirteen’, the older man replies. After counting on his fingers, Marcellin gleefully announces: ‘What luck! I’ve still got six years to live!’ This bleakly ironic humour undercuts the

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naïve enthusiasm of his participation in war and foreshadows the child’s death at Arcole, as planned in the 1924 draft screenplay. During the battle of Toulon, Tristan and Violine remain more detached from the fighting. They help load muskets in their inn, and from their window overlooking the town Tristan links the fighting back to the snowball fight he witnessed at Brienne. This joyful recollection of childhood innocence is interrupted by the savage fighting coming ever closer to the Fleuris’ distanced observation – finally, reality (in the form of armed men) spills through the window frame and transforms the spectacle into nightmarish proximity. Though the surviving montage does not show how or where the Fleuris move in/around the battlefield, we later see Marcellin trying to take part in the fighting. In a flooded field, he hides under a drum and frightens two English soldiers by moving eerily though the morass; when a drunken officer then comes and sits down on top of his instrument, Marcellin pricks the man’s backside with a bayonet. Such humorous touches provide a stark contrast to the increasingly vicious scenes of hand-to-hand fighting. Tristan manages to extricate Marcellin, and he and Violine appear at the climax of the battle to witness Bonaparte’s bravery. On the fringes of this momentous occasion, the Fleuris endow the officer’s actions with historical value. Long before General Dugommier announces Bonaparte to be ‘the victor of Toulon’, it is Violine who prophesizes: ‘I believe that man will save France!’

6.4

Documentation and survival

The scenes at Toulon demonstrate the ways in which the Fleuris both observe and interact with the history around them, and these ideas are developed in the subsequent scenes set during the Terror. Among the missing scenes after the fall of Toulon, Violine narrowly escapes being executed along with hundreds of other civilians (detailed in chapter 4). Having been saved from an unwanted involvement in the events they witness, the Fleuris next appear in Paris – yet again negotiating the perils of participation. At Les Carmes prison in 1794, Tristan appears as a prison guard who announces ‘the roll call for the condemned’. His presence gives the scene an added level of emotional irony: the words of this gentle character spell imminent death, and he gulps back tears as he pronounces the name of each victim. Tristan subsequently appears as a clerk in charge of copying out the lists of the condemned. The strange underworld of this documentation room is a gloomily lit space where Tristan and his co-worker La Bussière

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Fig. 31: Green-Eye oversees the listing of condemned names

(Jean d’Yd) go about their morbid task (Figure 31). Tristan’s companion is a historical figure whose life and deeds exist somewhere between fact and fiction. His actions during the Terror were entirely forgotten until 1802, when two journalists mentioned his story in a history of the French theatre (Etienne/Martainville 1802: III/146-8). After growing interest from the press, La Bussière published his own account in 1803. According to this, he hid the files of prisoners due to be executed and later disposed of them by soaking the papers in water, rolling up the remains into balls, and jettisoning these pellets into the river Seine. In this way, he claimed to have made 1153 files disappear (La Bussière 1803: 3-4). In Napoléon, Jean d’Yd’s character uses a more visually striking method. A title announces: ‘Fortunately, La Bussière is on the lookout, this strange character who, out of humanity appointed himself an eater of documents.’ We see him find the dossier on Joséphine de Beauharnais. Relaying our own curiosity about what La Bussière is about to do, Tristan watches with mounting interest as his friend carefully tears up the paper and feeds the strips into his mouth. Whilst La Bussière laboriously chews and swallows this documentation, he lowers his head below a pile of files on his desk and checks to see if the ferocious Green-Eye is watching. Tristan tries to

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mimic this method on his own dossiers but bites off too large a chunk – he chokes on its cardboard sleeve and has to spit out the remains. He smooths out the chewed corner on his desk and continues to copy down the details, whispering to his neighbour: ‘You’re lucky you can digest them. I just can’t manage it.’ Tristan’s despondency quickly changes to eagerness when he sees Bonaparte’s file: ‘Eat this one as well’, he pleads. La Bussière motions that his throat is too dry, so Tristan starts tearing up the file and furtively slipping pieces under his collar, whilst busily chewing others. This brilliant scene has a delightful sense of comic absurdity, one sharpened by the horrific circumstances in which it is set. The actions of these two characters are interrupted at the height of their hilarity by the arrival of Saint-Just and the threat of discovery. This sequence was lengthier in early drafts of Gance’s screenplay but also more verbal. Violine arrives in the documents room and asks La Bussière what he is eating. ‘An old man of 92’, he replies. Violine turns to her father: ‘And you, Papa?’ Tristan ecstatically exclaims: ‘I’ve rolled a young girl of seventeen up into little balls!’ (Gance 1924i) In a later revision, Gance changed these lines; here, La Bussière first replies: ‘An old man of 92 and a beautiful woman called Joséphine, aged 30.’ Tristan then says: ‘I’ve rolled up Napoléon into little balls!’ Later, La Bussière comments on Tristan’s grumbling stomach: ‘Your old man’s giving you trouble! Drink something!’ (Gance 1924j) Though these individual lines are wonderfully funny, Gance wisely chose to concentrate on the possibilities of visual humour in the realized film. After the fall of Robespierre, the soldiers who ransack the documents room scatter the files across the floor. For once, Tristan’s habit of going unnoticed serves him well: he hides under his desk and covers himself in a big pile of documentation. Like the semi-mythical deeds of La Bussière, Tristan manages to get (quite literally) lost in the paperwork. As befits characters whose lives have been written into (or out of) existence by curious historians or authors, Gance’s scene suggests that individuals can be preserved or destroyed through their presence on paper. Hugo famously declared: ‘A name is a Me’ (1862: X/158). In the original French, this phonetic pun (‘Un nom’/‘Un homme’: a man/a name) suggests the signifier of identity is the owner’s protection from oblivion: to be anonymous is to cease to exist. In Notre-Dame de Paris, the numerous images of crumbling inscriptions point to the ananke of physical decay and the irreparable loss of human identity. Similarly, the narrator of Hugo’s 1829 novel Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné is a nameless victim counting down the days to his execution. He is a symbol of the numberless individuals killed by the state, and this

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incomplete manuscript forms the only surviving evidence of his existence. Similarly, the document room of Napoléon is a site where human life is reduced to lists of names awaiting erasure. This idea of decay was a wider concern of Romantic literature. Carlyle took up the issue of documentary disintegration in the introduction to his edition of Oliver Cromwell’s letters and speeches. Reflecting on the fate of physical evidence, he relates how he was shown a pile of 50,000 pamphlets from the English Civil War that lay rotting in the British Museum: But alas […] what is it, all this […] inarticulate rubbish-continent, in its ghastly dim twilight, with its haggard wrecks and pale shadows; what is it, but the common Kingdom of Death? This is what we call Death, this mouldering dumb wilderness of things once alive. Behold here the final evanescence of Formed human things; they had form, but they are changing into sheer formlessness; – ancient human speech itself has sunk into unintelligible maundering. This is the collapse, – the etiolation of human features into mouldy blank; dissolution; progress towards utter silence and disappearance; disastrous ever-deepening Dusk of Gods and Men! (Carlyle 1845: I/11).

Ironically, the consumption of documents in Napoléon is an act of conservation. Tristan eats the evidence and saves lives by removing names from the nightmarish bureaucracy of the Terror. Gance’s resurrection of La Bussière is also an act of salvation from obscurity. After a benefit performance of Hamlet in his honour in 1803, La Bussière was given a large sum of money by Joséphine as thanks for having ‘eaten’ her condemnation and thus saved her from the guillotine (Masson 1898: 233). However, despite this show of generosity, La Bussière ended his days penniless and partially paralysed, dying in a madhouse in 1808 – ‘entirely forgotten even by those for whom he had most risked his life’ (Michaud 1843-65: XXII/328). Elsewhere in Gance’s f ilms, the secrets, confessions, and identities conveyed and revealed in various pieces of paperwork often serve as key narrative devices. In La Dixième Symphonie, Eve wants to destroy a document that is being used to blackmail her so that she can overcome her past and start a new life. In the 1919 J’accuse, Diaz’s final gesture is to destroy the book of his own poetry once he has lost all connection to his pre-war identity. (Even the opening image of J’accuse spells out the film’s title in blood-dripping letters across a torn piece of paper.) In La Roue, Sisif’s secret adoption of Norma is possible only when he finds and destroys the charred fragment of documentary evidence revealing Norma’s former

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life. This is echoed when his son Elie later uses family documentation to confront Sisif about Norma’s adoption. Finally, a hidden love letter from Elie to Norma triggers his fatal confrontation with his romantic rival de Hersan. Whether through secrecy or revelation, paper evidence often determines the protagonists’ fates. Though such issues are notably demonstrated in the scenes with Tristan and La Bussière, there are other comic variations on the theme of inscription and documentation in Napoléon. At the start of the Cordeliers sequences, for example, we see two guards on duty outside the door to the Three Gods’ room. The standing figure has all the appearance of a brutal sans-culotte militiaman. Yet the first thing the camera makes us observe, with an iris for emphasis, is the spelling mistake of the huge tattoo the guard has on his chest. The slogan reads: ‘Mort au tirans’ (‘Death to tirants’ [sic]). This guard and his companion are also the focus of another visual joke when de Lisle teaches La Marseillaise to the crowd. As the words of the song are handed out on large sheets of paper, the two guards bicker over which way up to hold their sheet – neither knows how to read and so cannot begin to decipher the words on the page. Such moments show the power of Gance’s historical imagination to bring a large crowd scene to life through the use of inventive and delightfully humanizing details. Though neither the guards nor the Fleuris have their names recorded in any factual history of the Revolution, they form part of the single, unitive burst of communal spirit that forms the climax of this sequence. In the most positive example of individual selflessness, their anonymity is transformed through cinema into a shared identity – just as La Bussière forms part of Gance’s collective resurrection.

6.5

Forlorn recognition

Though all the Fleuris survive the political sea change after the Terror, they are still in the lowly positions they have possessed since the start of the film. The focus on their subsequent appearances is the tragic inability to bridge the divide between their lives and that of Bonaparte, for whom they show an enduring love. A particularly noteworthy incident that captures the isolation of Tristan from his hero occurs after Bonaparte has saved Paris from the Royalist ‘Vendémiaire Uprising’ of October 1795. A swelling crowd of well-wishers has trapped Bonaparte in his garret, from where he acknowledges the mass of people below by waving from his window. Tristan is amongst

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the cheering crowd that has gathered outside. However, by the time we see the joyful Tristan looking reverently upwards, the figure accepting thanks is no longer the real Bonaparte. The general has escaped the crowds with the help of a look-alike, who now stands at the window dressed in his uniform. Tristan is unknowingly sidelined by his idol, and remains blissfully unaware that the man he is looking at is a fake. Once safely outside, the disguised Bonaparte asks a member of the throng what’s happening; the man replies: ‘I’ve got two peasants here that don’t know General Bonaparte has saved France!’ Nearby, a street vendor tries to sell Bonaparte his own image in the form of a doll – the same item that Violine buys and will use to ‘marry’ his shadow later in the film (see chapter 7). This sequence playfully comments on the emergence of a popular Napoleonic iconography, just as Tristan’s appearance develops the sense of distance between individual members of the crowd and Bonaparte himself. Tristan remains looking up at the mere image of his idol; Violine will marry herself to Bonaparte’s silhouette, cast by another representation of the real man. Whilst the perspective of the Fleuris is blinded by love, our own viewpoint as spectators possesses more clarity. These characters explore a spectator’s relationship to (and dislocation from) the ‘great man’ at the centre of the historical narrative. In Gance’s screenplay, Tristan is among the defenders of Paris against the Royalist insurrectionists of Vendémiaire; in the realized film, these scenes were cut – but we do later see the character as a volunteer soldier. Both scripted and realized scenes allow Tristan to influence the course of events, though only by accident. As Bonaparte rides along the streets of Paris, being feted by the crowds, Pozzo di Borgo and Salicetti are observing him from an upstairs window. Pozzo tries to take a shot at Bonaparte, but Tristan is stationed at ground level and is so occupied with trying to catch sight of his hero that he accidentally fires his gun straight upwards. His shot breaks the window above him and injures Pozzo. Both Pozzo and Salicetti try to escape but are captured by a mob and then released by Bonaparte. Tristan is never acknowledged by the man he has saved and seems ignorant of what his own action has done. An intertitle then escalates this sense of confusion by denying historical awareness of the whole scene: ‘The large majority of Parisians remained totally ignorant of this event’. Like Violine’s abandoned attempt to assassinate Robespierre, Gance arranges his narrative so that the fictional Fleuris can only influence events that are themselves fictionalized. Tristan’s various acts of support for Bonaparte can never be stamped with the ‘Historical’ credentials that mark the titles of so many contemporary events in the film. His help is thus rendered historically

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Fig. 32: Tristan tentatively comforts the young Bonaparte

impotent but personally charged: the warmth of the coat he brings the child Bonaparte at Brienne is a beautifully transient act of kindness whose meaning is liable to be absent from any historical account (Figure 32). As Hugo observed: ‘many great deeds are done in the small struggles […] Noble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees and no fame rewards, and no fanfare salutes […] Obscure heroes are sometimes greater than illustrious ones’ (1862: VI/266-7). In the film’s last scenes, both Marcellin and Tristan succeed in joining Bonaparte’s Army of Italy. Whilst the general’s officers show insubordination and the morale of the starving, ill-equipped rank-and-file is at rock bottom, Tristan remains entirely optimistic. Just before Bonaparte arrives, Tristan harangues his cynical comrades for doubting the ability of their new commander. As Tristan strides around among the hunched-over soldiers, they slowly rip apart his tatty uniform until he is down to his shirt; gesturing with one hand and desperately clutching his breeches with the other, he finishes his speech by falling over into a tent. He may have donned the uniform denied him in earlier scenes, but it is a fragile façade that quickly unravels to reveal the tatty undergarments of his lowly identity beneath. In the Opéra version of Napoléon, this is our last glimpse of Tristan: neither

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he nor any of the Fleuri family reappears in the film. However, the (longer) Apollo edition contains further scenes with Marcellin and Tristan that offer them one last encounter with Bonaparte. The entire Army is lined up for a general inspection. Tristan excitedly boasts to his comrades: ‘I know the general. I shall go and speak to him.’ As Bonaparte and his staff approach on horseback, Tristan steps out of rank and announces: ‘Tristan Fleuri, General. I was at Brienne’. Bonaparte remains silent for a moment, then responds: ‘One pace forward… March!’ The entire rank steps forward and Tristan is subsumed back into the line; Bonaparte then gallops away. Devastated, Tristan nearly faints with shock and has to be held up by his neighbours. The scene is brutal in its treatment of this loveable character; having been encouraged to identify with the Fleuris throughout the film, the audience is liable to feel almost as shocked as Tristan. Switching to another section of the inspection line, we see a tall grenadier wearing a floor-length greatcoat suddenly shrink to half his height. It is revealed to be Marcellin, who has fallen through the drum on which he was standing to disguise himself as an adult. Bonaparte passes, lifting the bearskin from Marcellin’s head and then tossing it onto the ground before riding off. As with the similar scene at Toulon, the child is left sobbing after being emasculated by Bonaparte. Tristan arrives and picks up Marcellin in his drum with an expression of comic bafflement. Amusing and poignant, this last look of pained confusion on Tristan’s face is a neat summary of his relationship with Bonaparte. Gance’s film ends with Bonaparte having abandoned the entire Fleuri family. Their pursuit of recognition and of love endures throughout Napoléon, yet Bonaparte is destined to sacrifice human intimacy for the sake of national duty. The Fleuris are emblematic of the increasing distance between people and leader: Bonaparte is becoming Napoléon, the figure upon whom Germaine de Staël believed ‘no emotion of the heart could act’ (1818: II/197). The Italian campaign marks a crucial moment at the start of Bonaparte’s rise to power. The love letters seen at the end of Napoléon offer a ‘last glimpse’ of the man behind the icon: Henceforward Napoléon will be, in his every deed and word, supremely conscious of the ages; he will deliberately assume and hold a pose for posterity. He will never again reveal himself, his secret inner self, as he will never again wholly open his heart, never again enter into unreserved, intimate communion with any other living creature (Mossiker 1965: 19-20).

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6.6 Summary The Fleuris are representative of forgotten figures in history’s vast drama: inhabitants (in Carlyle’s terms) of the ‘dark untenanted places of the past’ (1830: 414). These characters provide an alternative perspective on Bonaparte – exemplified by the numerous scenes in which they are framed as witnesses: Tristan looks on from the kitchen window at the snowball fight of Brienne; Tristan and Violine see the Battle of Toulon from the window of their inn; Violine and Marcellin observe the events of Thermidor from the gallery of the Convention; Violine watches Bonaparte depart for the Italian campaign from her bedroom window. Whilst the Fleuris have rightly been seen as ‘points of identification, centres of humorous and sentimental interest’ that ‘bind the action of Napoléon together’ (King 1984a: 154), the complexity of their role has been consistently underestimated. Norman King argues that the Fleuris’ ‘naïve enthusiasm and devotion’ encourages audiences to be less questioning, effectively limiting our interpretive freedom: [They] help to resolve what might be a troublesome contradiction, by providing the foundation of [Bonaparte’s] power […] It is their instinctive recognition that Bonaparte is serving the interests of the people by reconciling freedom and order that legitimates his actions (ibid.: 155).

Yet this interpretation cannot be reconciled with the details of the film itself. Bonaparte’s incorruptibility is not as clear-cut as King suggests, nor do the Fleuris offer simplistic legitimation of his authority. Gance deliberately emphasizes ‘troublesome’ contradictions by interrogating Bonaparte’s messianic status and exploring the deeply ambiguous nature of his relationship to the adoring Fleuris. The great man may fire the enthusiasm of crowds and control huge bodies of men, but he neglects those characters with whom the audience most strongly identifies: it is the Fleuris that suffer most noticeably from Bonaparte’s rise to power. Gance was hardly more kind to these characters in later versions of his Napoleonic narrative. There is no mention of the Fleuris in the 1927-8 screenplay for Sainte-Hélène, suggesting they had been written out of his plans. Koline does appear as Tristan in Gance’s 1935 film Napoléon Bonaparte, set in March 1815, though Violine and Marcellin are entirely absent. Tristan has been blinded at the Battle of Marengo in June 1800 – ironically, the man who always observed events without ever being noticed can no longer see. In his subsequent negligence of Tristan, Violine, and

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Marcellin, Gance followed those editors who were keen to excise these intriguing characters from the original 1927 film. If Napoléon does want audiences ‘to be like [the Fleuris]’ (ibid.: 163), then it demands that we reflect on our spectatorship – and consider the importance of characters so often marginalized in appreciations of the film. Their battle to claim recognition is central to the narrative of Napoléon, just as their presence is crucial to the film’s textual coherence.

7.

Melodrama and the formulations of family

The familial melodramas [in Gance’s films] mirror those of his own life, and [his troubled childhood] explains why he withdrew into himself to build a kinder and more beautiful world with his imagination (Icart 1983: 12).

7.1 Introduction Napoléon not only offers a mythological account of its central hero but also an exploration of his human foibles. I want to demonstrate how the film counterbalances notions of Bonaparte as a ‘great man’ through the lengthy representation of his romance with Joséphine. This relationship, and the parallel story of Violine’s unrequited love for Bonaparte, offer a fascinating and delightful set of scenes: poignant, ambivalent, and often very funny. I also aim to challenge the notion that the ‘political melodrama’ of Napoléon creates a simplistic depiction of ‘the nation as family’ (King 1984a: 162-3). By exploring the structure of dramatic narratives in other Gance films and their connections to the director’s own biography, I will demonstrate a highly ambiguous attitude towards familial and romantic relationships. In Napoléon, these issues are further complicated by the narrative restrictions engendered by the film’s factual content: Gance’s melodrama must obey the impositions of history.

7.2

Incomplete families

Gance was the illegitimate child of Abel Flamant and Françoise Péréthon. Inheriting his father’s first name and his mother’s surname, he was raised by his maternal grandparents in the remote industrial town of Commentry. When Adolphe Gance began a relationship with Françoise, he adopted the three-year-old Abel and gave him his surname. Five years later, Gance’s mother and stepfather finally married and in 1898 this family moved from central France to the capital. Gance later obscured this provincial background and the Jewish ancestry of his biological father, claiming that he had a ‘carefree bourgeois childhood’ in a traditional Catholic household in

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Paris (Icart 1983: 11). He was also highly selective in accounts of his personal relationships: his first biographer was conveniently allowed to exaggerate the age of Gance’s first wife and made no mention of his second or third marriages (Daria 1959). Considered in conjunction with the melodramatic tropes of his films, these issues assume more than just biographical importance. In November 1912, Gance married Mathilde Thizeau, a literary journalist. Husband and wife were both 23 and creatively ambitious. Mathilde had starred in some of Gance’s first efforts as a director for the Film d’Art company and subsequently encouraged him to pursue a number of large-scale theatre projects during 1912-14. By the time Gance resumed filmmaking in 1915, he had fallen for a woman four years his junior – Ida Danis, a secretary at Film d’Art. As his personal life grew more complex, so Gance’s films began to establish a number of narrative features that would recur with intriguing regularity throughout his career: the oedipal collision of familial and romantic love; the division of male rivals along the lines of science and art; the external threat to the family from a capitalist villain. In Le Droit à la Vie (1917), Andrée Maël is in love with Jacques Alberty but is forced to marry the much older Pierre Veryal in order to pay off the debts of her widowed mother. Pierre’s father-like disapproval of Jacques is finally resolved on his deathbed when he blesses the young couple. Familial division is made more explicit in Mater Dolorosa (1917). Though the film underwent subsequent revisions (see Arnoldy 1994), the original story concerns Marthe Berliac having an affair with her brother-in-law, a writer. In an attempted suicide, Marthe accidentally shoots her lover. Though she has promised never to reveal the truth, her husband (a successful doctor) discovers the affair and disowns both Marthe and their son. Marital and paternal crises are eventually resolved when the husband sees the sincerity of his wife’s anguish and admits Marthe and child back into the home. Similarly, in La Dixième Symphonie, Eve Dinant marries the widowed composer Enric Damour and adopts his daughter, Claire. The latter is pursued by the exploitative Fred Ryce, who is also blackmailing Eve over her involvement with the death of his sister. Eve’s attempts to prevent Claire’s marriage are misinterpreted by Enric, who thinks she is having an affair. The drama is resolved when the apparent rivals in love, Eve and Claire, confront Ryce and reveal the truth to Enric. In June 1918, Gance left Mathilde to live with Ida Danis. That summer, he shot J’accuse – another film revolving around various forms of fidelity. The poet Jean Diaz lives with his mother and is in love with the married Edith Laurin. Their attraction angers her widowed father and arouses the jealousy of her husband François. During the war, Edith is raped by a

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German soldier and gives birth to a daughter, Angèle, whom Jean adopts. Just as Jean’s mother and François’ father become a couple as the result of wartime solidarity, so their two sons are reconciled and form a domestic ménage-à-trois with Edith. In the film, François is killed in battle and Jean is driven mad by his efforts to reconcile the living and the dead. This deeply unconventional structure was even stranger in Gance’s original plans, where the narrative would have ended with Jean and Edith living alongside François’ ghost! (Gance 1922: 2). During the production of La Roue, both Ida Danis and Gance’s adoptive father died; by the time of its premiere in December 1922, the director had married Marguerite Danis – the sister of his late fiancée. For this most powerful and disturbing of all Gance’s family dramas, the director foregrounded his own personal connections to the film’s tragic narrative as well as hiding others in the biographical details of adoption and loss (see Cuff 2011). The widowed engineer Sisif adopts an orphaned girl, Norma, who grows up ignorant of her origins. As she reaches adulthood, her fondness for her artistic ‘brother’ Elie enrages the obsessive Sisif. Norma is forced to marry a rich executive, Jacques de Hersan, who is blackmailing her stepfather. Sisif is blinded in an accident and Elie and Jacques are killed as a result of their romantic feud. Norma tries to comfort Sisif, but he blames her for the death of his son. Only after isolated suffering is Norma finally reunited with Sisif, who dies having relinquished his romantic jealousy and paternal anger. In La Fin du Monde, sibling rivalry again dominates the film’s melodramatic core: the fatherless brothers Jean and Martial Novalic both love Geneviève de Murcie. However, her father wants to arrange a marriage with the evil plutocrat Schomburg, who is also the political rival of the Novalics. The narrative becomes one of personal salvation and universal redemption: the filmmaking prophet Jean and the scientist Martial must overcome their differences in order to save the world from disaster and rescue Geneviève from Schomburg. The nobility of Gance’s on-screen character renouncing romantic love for the sake of his brother was not present in his off-screen relations. He began La Roue, the screenplays of Napoléon and La Fin du Monde, and his autobiography Prisme with dedications to Ida Danis. If his wife Marguerite was not already aware of her role as a substitute for this ‘great love’, Gance’s public reminders of his loyalty to her dead sister cannot have helped. During the production of La Fin du Monde, Marguerite began divorce proceedings. Two years after its cinematic release, Gance married Sylvie Grenade – an actress he had cast in the film instead of Marguerite. Though his subsequent sound f ilms utilized less original stylistic techniques, their melodramatic content continued to pursue the motifs

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of Gance’s silent work. He remade Mater Dolosora in 1932, depicted incestuous familial politics in Lucrèce Borgia (1935), and structured Un grand amour de Beethoven (1936) around a love-triangle between the eponymous composer and two women. A more complex set of relationships is apparent in the 1938 version of J’accuse. Jean is in love with Edith, François’ wife. François is killed in the Great War, and Edith is left to bring up their daughter Hélène – maintaining only a platonic friendship with Jean, who wishes to remain loyal to his dead comrade. Gance denies the development of this potential romance, just as Jean expresses no interest in Flo (played by Sylvie Gance) – a woman who remains wedded to the memory of her dead lover. Instead, Jean becomes increasingly close to Hélène – and his ambiguous familial/romantic role is exacerbated by his efforts to prevent her seduction by his political rival, the fascistic industrialist Henri Chimay. Oedipal themes are also visible in Louise (1939), where a father becomes a rival to his daughter’s lover and the threat of familial disintegration. Gance takes up this idea with greater power in Paradis Perdu (1940). Here, the painter Pierre marries Janine before leaving for war in 1914. Janine dies in giving birth to a daughter, Jeannette. After the war, Pierre is struck by the resemblance of the adolescent Jeannette to his late wife (both women are played by Micheline Presle). The father later falls for Laurence, a girl who is as young as his daughter, whilst Jeannette loves Laurence’s brother Gérard. Gérard refuses to marry Jeannette unless Pierre abandons his relationship with Laurence. For the sake of his daughter’s happiness, Pierre does so – dying during her marriage ceremony. More complex still is Vénus Aveugle (1941). Clarisse is a singer who is abandoned by her lover Madère. She gives birth to a daughter, but begins to lose her sight. When Madère returns to town, he has married Giselle, who is pregnant with their child. At the moment Giselle gives birth to a boy, Clarisse’s sickly daughter dies. Eventually, Giselle leaves both Madère and their child; father and son then form a new family with Clarisse, who regains her sight. Gance’s last wartime film contains another oedipal tale: in Le Capitaine Fracasse (1943), the Duc de Vallombreuse crosses swords with the Baron de Sigognac over their mutual love for the actress Isabelle. However, when Vallonbreuse’s widowed father eventually discovers that Isabelle is his long-lost daughter, the two romantic rivals are reconciled and Isabelle marries Sigognac. Both these narratives of adoption and redemption were also accompanied by off-screen rivalries. Sylvie Gance clashed with Viviane Romance (who played her on-screen sister) in Vénus Aveugle and with Josette France during Le Capitaine Fracasse. During the former, a complex arrangement of stand-ins and continuity editing was employed

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in order to overcome the fact that these two women refused to be on set at the same time (Gréville 1995: 274-80); during a studio screening of the latter film, Sylvie struck her opponent in the face and had to spend a fortnight in jail (Le Matin 1944: 2). After a sojourn in Spain during the last years of the Second World War, Gance and his wife resettled in Paris. Gance’s mother died in 1951, the same year that he adopted a girl named Clarisse. These familial relations were complicated when Gance began an intimate relationship with Nelly Kaplan in 1953 – a woman who was more than 40 years younger than him. Their artistic collaboration saw Gance’s career revive, but the ‘amour fou’ of this partnership inspired in the older man ‘an intense jealousy which grew evermore unbearable’; sensing the degree to which he wished to ‘control’ her own nature, Kaplan split from Gance in 1964 in order to achieve both personal and artistic independence (Kaplan 2008: 7-11). The only feature film Gance subsequently completed was Bonaparte et la Révolution, in which the director mediates various layers of his palimpsestic biography. The text itself becomes an eclectic family of mismatched material drawn from celluloid that Gance had orphaned between 1925 and 1970. In newly shot footage, the 81-year-old director appears in silhouette as Saint-Just – his elderly voice reanimating the words of a man who died at the age of 26. Gance thus finishes his career as both a member and a curator of his own cinematic progeny.

7.3

Fate and fortune

Whilst narratives based around lone adults and orphaned children were common in French cinema of the 1920s (Monaco 1976: 84-94), it would be a mistake to regard Gance’s continuing fascination with this subject solely as a reflection of generic trends. The family melodramas within his work need to be qualified by the obvious autobiographical overtones and, in the case of Napoléon, by a more complex characterization and historical narrative. Bonaparte is a fatherless son, his large family of siblings dominated by their mother. He later pursues a widowed mother for his wife, becoming stepfather to her two children. In the unrealized sequels to Napoléon, Gance would have shown the historical path of their future: Joséphine proved unable to provide an heir and Napoléon divorced her in order to marry Princess Marie-Louise, the daughter of the Austrian Emperor Francis II. Still visible in Napoléon is the widowed Tristan’s idolization of Bonaparte – a ‘vain pursuit, like that of Gance, of the bastard child in search

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throughout his life of the recognition of a father’ (Kaplan 1994: 26). Violine’s love for Bonaparte is both that of a child seeking fatherly protection and that of an adolescent seeking a romantic lover. Whilst the audience watches Bonaparte’s relationship with Joséphine in the knowledge that it is doomed to historical failure, Violine’s unrequited relationship with Bonaparte is denied through her fictional status. Gance’s balance between these twin plots has been distorted by a great deal of lost footage. As Bonaparte’s pursuit of Joséphine was deemed more worthy of preservation than Violine’s pursuit of Bonaparte, surviving prints favour scenes involving the former over the latter. In his original screenplay (and in the Apollo version of Napoléon), Gance actually introduces Violine before he does Joséphine. Following the Cordeliers sequence, the film had several scenes (all now lost) illustrating Bonaparte’s state of poverty in Paris. Living in neighbouring apartments are the Fleuris, as well as Pozzo di Borgo and Salicetti. Too timid to speak to Bonaparte, the young girl adores her idol in secret: Violine’s room. She is listening at the wall. Her emotion. Adorable smile. She begins to talk to someone […] Who is it? It is a little pot of flowers. One of the sensitive blossoms opens its petals at the sound of Violine’s voice. Petals opening and closing as if they were speaking. Empathy. Violine continues to chatter, and now Bonaparte’s enormous feverish face is elusively superimposed over this scene; and then another on the right, another on the left – here, there, everywhere. She closes her eyes, overwhelmed by unspoken love (Gance 1927b: 55-6).

This romantic bathos is contrasted with the villainous nature of her other neighbours: Pozzo and Salicetti bet which of them will be the first to seduce the innocent Violine. Their violent advances are interrupted by Bonaparte, who arrives just in time to save Violine from her attackers. Pozzo and Salicetti back off when they recognize their neighbour’s authority – but vow to take revenge (ibid.: 57-8). This incident would economically establish the personal background to Bonaparte’s political rivalries that are developed later in the film. In contrast to the near-clichéd situation of rescuing a damsel in distress, Bonaparte’s ‘neat bow’ and swift exit after meeting Violine denies any expected resolution. Indeed, throughout the whole length of the film, Gance continues to negate the fulfilment of this generic set-up. Immediately after this sequence of events, Gance introduces Violine’s rival for Bonaparte’s affections. Joséphine de Beauharnais was brought up on the Caribbean island of Martinique, the daughter of plantation owners

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on this French colony. She arrived in France in 1779, aged sixteen, to marry the nobleman Alexandre de Beauharnais. By 1792 (the year when we first see her in Napoléon), Joséphine was the mother of two children but was estranged from her husband. Gance’s film introduces her as one of ‘the idle rich’, and these first scenes highlight the social and economic divide between this noblewoman and Bonaparte’s impoverished neighbourhood. Among the lost scenes before his rescue of Violine, we were to see Bonaparte having to make a pair of boots from cardboard to replace his dilapidated leather shoes – another scene (fragments of which are visible in Napoléon Bonaparte) shows him visiting a pawnbroker. Tristan earns a living as a pavement cleaner and (in a surviving sequence) passes Bonaparte in the street; his water-sprinkling cart soaks the officer, whose cardboard boots now disintegrate. At this moment, Joséphine and her friends alight from a large carriage close by. She is wearing a flowing dress of impeccable elegance, a wide-brimmed hat with numerous feathers, and carrying a large garland of flowers. Lifting her skirts to avoid the muck of the street, she looks over at Bonaparte, who is still nursing his ruined footwear. Joséphine’s gaze is one of both superiority and curiosity. Given how little he smiles during the course of the film, the slight grin that crosses Bonaparte’s mouth in response is a clear marker of his interest in this stranger. Joséphine walks away, carelessly throwing her flowers into the street. Just as Violine recognizes Bonaparte’s significance in their first encounter, so Bonaparte senses the importance of Joséphine – but Gance charges this latter moment with a greater sense of historical significance. After her wordless exchange of glances with Bonaparte, Joséphine enters the establishment of Mlle Lenormand (Carrie Carvalho) – a famous clairvoyant. Historically, Joséphine placed great faith in fortunetelling and later recounted a prediction that an ‘old sorceress’ had made during her childhood on Martinique: ‘you will soon be married; this will be an unhappy union for you; you will become a widow and then […] you will be queen of France’ (Ducrest 1828: I/326). Years later, in Paris, Mlle Lenormand claimed to have shown Joséphine a treatise from 1544 by a man named Olivarius, which precisely predicted the rise and fall of Napoléon (Constant 1860: 465). As so often, Gance recontextualizes various pieces of evidence to suit his narrative. In Napoléon, Mlle Lenormand’s parlour is given a comic aura of fakery by the large stuffed bat that sways awkwardly on a string above the séance table; yet the fortuneteller’s words are tellingly prophetic: ‘An amazing fortune – you will be queen, Madame!’ Outside Mlle Lenormand’s, Bonaparte moves to pick up the wreath that Joséphine jettisoned in the street. These flowers are in the form of another

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symbolic wheel – one whose significance is further emphasized in Gance’s screenplay, where the garland is described as a ‘crown of roses’ (one which Joséphine is wearing in her carriage) (1927b: 64-5). As he inherits the royal crown abandoned by King Louis, so here Bonaparte picks up Joséphine’s floral crown – his personal and political destinies linked through parallel imagery. Meanwhile, Pozzo and Salicetti are planning to exact revenge on Violine. In another lost sequence, they send their neighbour an anonymous gift of expensive clothing. She is overwhelmed by the beauty of the clothes and dresses up, powdering her hair with flour. Pozzo informs a mob of vicious tricoteuses that someone of real wealth is living nearby and they burst into Violine’s room, believing her to be an aristocrat. She is dragged off to La Force prison, where Tristan rescues her by crashing his cart through the barricade. He scatters the guards, and his sprinkler dampens the powder of their muskets so they cannot fire. After revealing Violine’s true identity, both are set free. This scene was to be ‘epic and comic at the same time’ (ibid.: 78), mixing its drama and humour in a way typical of the Fleuris’ position. Her donning of aristocratic costume also sets up Violine’s later attempts to mimic Joséphine’s dress: her character is only noticed when pretending to belong to a different class or to be a figure of historical significance. The reaction to her change of attire in the earlier scene also signals the rise of mob justice, which would have dominated the subsequent 10 August sequence. Joséphine and Violine are absent from the scenes set during the fall of the monarchy and from Bonaparte’s subsequent stay on Corsica, but the latter section of the film is not without significance for his personal relationships. That an intertitle tells us that Bonaparte must sacrifice ‘individual happiness’ for his role as a ‘leading actor on the world scene’ must inform our interpretation of later scenes involving Joséphine. After the Double Tempest, Bonaparte is rescued at sea by his brothers, who then collect the rest of the Bonaparte family and sail for France. Their small merchant ship, Le Hasard (‘Chance’), is observed by a British warship. A young officer on board suggests they sink the ‘suspicious’ vessel on the horizon, but his commander dismisses the target as ‘insignificant’. The revelation that the powerless subordinate is in fact the young Horatio Nelson is a wonderfully funny moment of irony, yet it also asks the audience to anticipate this figure’s pivotal role in the defeat of the French navy in 1805. Gance reinforces the fatalism of the moment in the final title of the scene: ‘Caesar and his destiny. A future emperor, three kings, and a queen on a few square metres between sea and sky.’ As I outlined in chapter 5, Napoléon’s nepotism continues to be

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a major source of vilification. Whilst the humour of the Bonapartes’ escape and the joy of their reunification are positive aspects, Gance also reminds us that the most cohesive family unit visible in Napoléon will ultimately prove to be the cause of personal/political corruption. During the Terror, Gance offers more evidence of Joséphine’s complex personality. In a scene that exists only in the 1924 screenplay, she encounters Saint-Just in a café and makes a pass at him. The politician ‘remains impassive’ to Joséphine’s seductive manners, and notes down her name in his pocketbook (Gance 1924c). In the realized film, we see Saint-Just denounce Joséphine for trying to ‘seduce the most virtuous’ – presumably a reference to himself! It is interesting to note that Robespierre’s arrest of Bonaparte is for political reasons (his refusal to obey orders), whilst Saint-Just’s denunciation of Joséphine is personal (sexual promiscuity). These are important markers for their subsequent relationship. Despite their conjoined fate (exemplif ied by the two warrants for their arrest sitting side-by-side in Robespierre’s off ice), Joséphine and Bonaparte are kept in widely separated prisons during the Terror: she at Les Carmes in Paris, he in a fortress at Antibes in southeast France. Though we see Salicetti trying to taunt the incarcerated Bonaparte, Gance devotes more time to Joséphine’s stay at Les Carmes. Here, she is comforted by General Lazare Hoche (Pierre Batcheff), and their subsequent scenes of interaction show the two become lovers during their imprisonment. The pivotal moment of the Terror comes when Tristan is reading out the names of the condemned. Having summoned the famous poet André Chénier (Louis Vonelly) to the guillotine, he announces the name ‘de Beauharnais’. Joséphine screams and swoons in Hoche’s arms. She is helped forward but arrives before the guards at the very same moment as her former husband, the Viscount de Beauharnais (Georges Cahuzac). Tristan is confused: ‘What, two of you?’ he says, ‘Well, work it out yourselves. I only need one head.’ The Viscount bows to his wife and says: ‘For once, Madame, allow me to take precedence.’ He kisses her hand in a highly formal gesture, triggering the derision of the gathered sans-culottes. A particularly roughlooking man mimics the nobleman by kissing an equally rough-looking female next to him; she then strikes him in the face, provoking more laughter from the crowd. Gance draws a contrast between Joséphine’s elegant destitution and the grotesque details around her: she and Hoche form a glamorous couple, and together they are photographed with diffuse lighting and soft-focus lenses (Figure 33). Both characters emerge unharmed from the Terror and re-enter positions of public standing: he as general, she as socialite.

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Fig. 33:  Joséphine and Hoche in prison

7.4

Flirtation and observation

Gance makes it abundantly clear that factors beyond Bonaparte’s control are as much responsible for his rise to power as his innate qualities of leadership. After being released from prison, he turns down a command under Hoche and has his plans rejected by the French high command. During one of his unsuccessful forays into the war ministry, Bonaparte glimpses Hoche and Joséphine, who are walking together arm-in-arm; their intimate body language and impeccable attire reinforce their personal and political superiority to the lowly officer they pass in the corridors of power. Whilst Joséphine’s relationship with Hoche signals her involvement with the upper echelons of the military, her subsequent union with Barras involves her with the new political establishment. The fact that the film gives no clear chronology or reasoning for Joséphine’s move between lovers enhances the discrete sense of her mobility and romantic agency. The simultaneity of her affairs indicates not only a more complex sexuality than her future husband but also her ability to traverse the shifting social hierarchy of post-Thermidor France. It is Joséphine’s multiple connections to high society that enable her to wield a strong degree of power; in turn, her

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skilful ability to bargain and seduce will grant Bonaparte the opportunity to fulfil his potential. Gance’s title explains that France is ‘in agony’ during the last months of 1795. Whilst we see Bonaparte and Violine in exterior scenes of snow-filled streets, Joséphine is glimpsed in plush interiors – safe from hardship and able to exert influence on the rich and powerful. Whilst the poor freeze to death outside, Barras appears in an ornately decorated silk gown and has to fan himself as he paces his warm rooms. He is talking aloud to Joséphine, bemoaning the lack of leadership within France. She asks him: ‘Why don’t you consider that droll young Buona… Buona… Buonaparte?’ When her suggestion is snappily rejected, Joséphine reacts with an expertly honed display of outrage – refusing Barras’s flirtatious attempts to ease her displeasure. After their interplay of body language makes it clear she is finally willing to accept an apology, Barras gives in to her wishes: ‘Very well, I’ll think about it’. This deft sequence provides the immediate motivation for why Barras elects Bonaparte to organize the defence of Paris against the Royalist insurrection of Vendémiaire. After his spectacular success, Bonaparte is feted through the streets of Paris. In another well-appointed interior space, Joséphine asks what the commotion outside signifies. The man who would later become Napoléon’s minister of police, Joseph Fouché (Guy Favière), responds: ‘It is the sound of Bonaparte re-entering history, Madame!’ Joséphine looks down from her window at the street below. A pale iris mask tightens around her face, isolating her from the others around her; both the film’s circular frame and Joséphine’s large earrings reassert the motif of the wheel and its fatalistic significance – this character has already set in motion the events that will align her destiny with Bonaparte. Whilst Joséphine observes the general from above, Violine looks on from the street below – she consoles herself with a doll of her hero that she buys from a vendor. When we see her again, she is an attendant at the ‘Victims’ Ball’ in the former prison of Les Carmes (a sequence discussed further in chapter 8). At this decadent gathering, during which each new female arrival is voyeuristically observed, Violine is once more marginalized from the main attractions on display. When Bonaparte arrives at the hatcheck area to drop off his military apparel, Violine nervously eyes her hero – yet he turns away without ever having thanked her. She stealthily plucks a plume from his hat cockade as a memento – just as, at Toulon, Violine picks up one of his gloves from the floor. By contrast, Joséphine and her glamorous companions are the centre of everyone’s attention. She immediately attracts Bonaparte’s eye; after a close-up of his eager face, there is an explosive

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burst of one 30-frame shot and 21 two-frame shots, each a fragment of the scenes in which the general has crossed paths with Joséphine. The sudden apparition and rapid succession of these images suggest their having been triggered involuntarily by the sight of Joséphine’s face. They form a startling eruption of subjectivity into the scene, a flood of interconnected memories rendered with the flashing speed of the unconscious mind. Violine laboriously collects fragments of (physical) evidence from each encounter with Bonaparte; yet her idol’s capacity to recall and condense the visual signifiers of Joséphine is as instantaneous as the cinematic process of imaging itself. Gance suggests that Violine’s theatrical props must inevitably lag behind Bonaparte’s filmic data. The newly-promoted general walks straight up to Joséphine and engages her in conversation – as does Hoche. Joséphine tells Bonaparte that it was in this very spot in Les Carmes where she was summoned to the guillotine. Hoche interrupts this exchange, reminding Joséphine that her experience was not a solitary one. He provokes another subjective interruption of the scene: Gance dissolves to an image from the much earlier scene (set during the Terror) in which Hoche and Joséphine lovingly comfort one another. This soft-focus tableau only fades away with extreme slowness, and its place within the montage of the scene suggests it is a moment of subjectivity shared between Hoche and Joséphine – as if the general (like Bonaparte) has the ability to cinematically conjure the past. After this memory finally recedes, Joséphine is clearly embarrassed by Hoche’s interjection and walks away without responding – trailed by Bonaparte. Soon after, in a marvellously self-conscious scene, the two generals play each other at chess. This is a perfect example of how Gance condenses several historical events into a single fictional one. Napoléon and Hoche knew their interest in Joséphine overlapped, and their rivalry was often visible on social occasions. At an evening hosted by the Talliens, Joséphine encouraged Napoléon to read the palms of each guest. Saving Hoche’s fortune for last, he said: ‘You will die in your bed.’ Hoche’s anger was tempered by Joséphine’s quick display of tact: ‘Nothing bad about that’, she remarked, ‘Alexander the Great died in his bed’ (Cronin 1994: 103). In Napoléon, Joséphine must negotiate a similar game of suggestion and manoeuvre played by her suitors. During the chess match at the Ball, Joséphine makes lengthy eye contact with both protagonists – directly with Bonaparte and via a mirror with Hoche. The scene is reminiscent of another in La Roue, where Hersan spies on Norma using a small round mirror; Norma herself is doubled in another reflection as she pauses between Elie and Hersan (the two rivals for her love) in the doorway. In the chess scene in Napoléon, Bonaparte

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warns Hoche: ‘Look out, I’m about to steal your queen’ – a sly comment that refers to both the acknowledged game of strategy on the table and the unacknowledged rivalry around it. When Hoche retires, he responds: ‘You are clearly the better general’ – a compliment of military skill that subtly avoids praising Bonaparte’s emotive charm. The set of shot-reverse-shots between Joséphine and Bonaparte that follow is dominated by the flirtatious fanning movements of Joséphine’s black lace fan (beautifully matched by the lilting ‘fan’ waltz theme in Carl Davis’ score). As this object rhythmically sways across the alternating close-ups, successively concealing and revealing its owner’s face and wafting in front of Bonaparte, Joséphine asks: ‘What weapons do you fear most, General?’ ‘Fans, Madame’, he replies. This beautifully concise exchange acknowledges the social importance of fans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where certain hand movements and fan positions became ‘a kind of sign language’ among women and their suitors (Steele 2002: 12). One eighteenth-century journalist commented on their role in feminine power: ‘Women are armed with Fans as Men with Swords, and sometimes do more Execution with them’ (The Spectator 1711: 1). This accessory features in several significant scenes in Napoléon, beginning with the assassination of Marat. Before we see the face of Charlotte Corday, we are given a close-up of her fan. She withdraws this to reveal her knife, which she then conceals in her bosom. She then covers both with her fan once more. Only now does the camera tilt upwards, allowing us to see her anxious face. Significantly, this appearance of a fan links it with concealment and (deadly) deception. When we first see Joséphine, in a carriage with Barras and other friends, she too is holding an unfurled fan. After the Ball, Bonaparte’s own romantic armoury is revealed to be distinctly lacking – as Hoche’s comment suggested. After allowing Eugène de Beaharnais (Georges Hénin) to keep his father’s sword during a ban on personal arms, Bonaparte is thanked in person by Joséphine. Here, Gance’s lightness of touch and Dieudonné’s masterful performance create one of the most successful sequences of the film. Joséphine arrives, with Eugène and her dog in tow, and Bonaparte is a bundle of nervous energy. His gestures are dramatically abrupt – he is desperate to show kindness, but his enthusiasm produces nothing but clumsy awkwardness. He violently kisses her hand, and she withdraws in surprise at this excessive gesture. He gets her a seat, which he almost breaks as he slams it firmly next to his desk. He then places a huge cushion on the chair, which is so big that Joséphine that cannot actually sit down – so he swiftly throws it on the floor for her feet. But what to do with Eugène, who is still hovering nearby?

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Bonaparte pinches him on the cheek – but, as with his kiss, this gesture is far too enthusiastic and Eugène winces with pain. Gance’s scene is informed by historical evidence: Marie Avrillion, Joséphine’s maid after her marriage, testified that the Empress would have to endure the ‘playful taps’ of Napoléon whilst dressing, pinches so severe that they would induce ‘tears in her eyes’ (1833: I/193). In Napoléon, Bonaparte gets Eugène to sit down at another table and thumps a pile of hefty volumes down onto the desk; he whips open the topmost book and breezily smacks the page to encourage the child to start reading. Subsequently, Eugène is in tears of laughter as he observes the scene between Bonaparte and his mother unfold. After having tried too hard to pet Joséphine’s growling dog and nearly been caught up in her skirts trying to make her comfortable, Bonaparte sits on the corner of his desk. We now realize that the chair is too near the table, placing him awkwardly close to Joséphine. He opens his arms and is about to speak – but he cannot think of anything to say! Joséphine sits in a state of pristine elegance, waiting for her suitor to open the conversation. The texture of her dress possesses a sheen that seems to deny the possibility of physical contact from Bonaparte, just as her elaborate veils stand in the way of receiving a kiss. Faced with this coolly aloof ensemble, Bonaparte sinks into a comic expression of resignation. He looks towards the camera, as if to implore us for guidance. We cut from this extended moment of uncertainty to a title: ‘Two hours later’. Dieudonné’s slow change from boyish excitement to wilting failure and Gance’s sudden cut to an elliptical title display a deliciously assured sense of comic timing. We then cut to the waiting room, where members of Bonaparte’s staff are wandering around impatiently. Returning to Bonaparte’s room, the couple now seem slightly less frozen in uncertainty. The general’s clumsy seduction is beautifully summarized by Joséphine’s next remark: ‘When you are silent, you are irresistible.’ The line is a lovely icebreaker, for us and for Bonaparte, who at last smiles easily. Though the above sequence is played for comedy, Bonaparte’s inability to perform social and romantic roles highlights an uneasy divide between the lovers. The next scene is introduced with a title: ‘Romeo’. We see Bonaparte on one knee, his arms raised, and a halo around his head. Gance conceals the surrounding mise-en-scène with an iris. When this mask is gradually removed, we see that Bonaparte is not with Joséphine but with a man – and that his halo is merely a lamp in the background of the room. Gance comically undercuts the luminous imagery associated with this hero elsewhere in the film, and underlines his failure in lovemaking. The general is now an enthusiastic pupil of the actor Talma (Roger Blum) – so keen, that he grows impatient with his lack of progress and shouts at his instructor. He

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Fig. 34: Bonaparte gazes longingly at the image of Joséphine superimposed inside the globe

walks over to a table on which stands a large model globe. Gance slowly dissolves a superimposed close-up of Joséphine’s face over the map, which Bonaparte kisses passionately. Looking on in bafflement, Talma asks: ‘Are you kissing Paris?’ ‘Paris?’ Bonaparte replies, ‘This is Joséphine’s mouth!’ The image of Joséphine’s head contained within the circular form of the globe (Figure 34) echoes the numerous occasions in La Roue when characters’ faces are framed within circular forms – train wheels, circular mirrors, circular masking, and circular iris fades. Such is the all-consuming nature of the geometric symbolism that dominates La Roue that it is impossible to discount the significance of similar devices in Napoléon. In this instance, Joséphine and the world are united (or confused) as objects of desire – she is fatalistically trapped within his designs. As with the prominent guncarriage wheel in the final scene at Brienne, the model sphere is militarized in its association with Bonaparte and his destiny. Joséphine is now tied up with Bonaparte’s ambition, her image subsumed within the globe that he turns towards him to capture with his embrace. Violine can exercise no control over her own fortune or that of Bonaparte. An intertitle describes how she is the ‘little white shadow’ that trails behind the general’s eager pursuit of Joséphine. Whilst Bonaparte embraces

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Joséphine on the steps of her home on the Rue Chantereine, Violine leans limply against a wall. In the mellow light of the evening sun, Gance’s softfocus lens imbues both halves of the scene with the same shimmering beauty – yet the waifish form of the younger girl melts away unnoticed by the lovers.

7.5

Negotiating the future

Having married a noble before the Revolution, Joséphine was an established member of France’s social elite. Indeed, it was precisely because she was ‘a woman of the ancien régime’ that she flourished in post-Terror Paris, where society ‘asked nothing better than to return to the customs and pleasures of the past’ (Saint-Amand 1885-94: VII/62). In an intertitle, Gance describes Joséphine as ‘beautiful’ and cultured (having an interest in music and the arts), but also ‘amoral’. This remark needs to be contextualized. According to Count Lavalette, one of Napoléon’s adjutants, Joséphine’s mind ‘was neither extensive nor cultivated’, but her social skills, ‘ingenuity’, and ‘inimitable grace’ made her a formidable presence in political life (1831: II/124). She possessed an uncanny ability to manipulate men through her use of fashion and décor: Joséphine ‘incessantly’ changed her appearance in order to ‘[give] her lovers the illusion of infinite variety’ and decorated her bedrooms with mirrors to ‘[multiply] the images of their love [and create] the illusion of an orgy’ (Stuart 2004: 206-7). The array of outfits in which Joséphine appears in Napoléon is a marker of her interest in haute couture, but the ‘outrageous wastefulness’ of her wardrobe and household expenses became ‘a continual source of grievance’ during the latter days of her marriage with the Emperor (Wairy 1830: IV/229). Her profligacy was made worse by her ‘natural’ facility (and ‘preference’) for lying (Tour du Pin 1913: II/220). According to Barras’ scandalous memoirs (not published until 70 years after his death), Joséphine’s motivations for her ‘libertinism’ were entirely financial. He claims that ‘her heart played no part in the pleasures of her body’ and ‘the lubricious Creole never lost sight of business, even when one believed that she had freely given herself to be conquered’ – she was a woman who ‘would have drunk gold from her lover’s skull’ (Barras 1895-6: II/56). Though this description may be exaggerated, it was certainly true that Joséphine became ‘accustomed to solving her incessant financial problems by forming liaisons, sometimes sexual, sometime merely social, with wealthy men’ (Erickson 2000: 119). By the time that this ‘compromised woman’ began

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her relationship with Napoléon in 1796, Joséphine may well have ‘lost the capacity to love disinterestedly’ (ibid.: 125). Indeed, such was her standing that many in her social circle were shocked that ‘the widow of [the Viscount] de Beauharnais was about to marry a man so little known as Bonaparte’ rather than the more glamorous General Hoche (Remusat 1880: I/141-2). In Gance’s film, Joséphine only marries Bonaparte after having elevated his status. An intertitle explains: ‘Joséphine, realizing that Barras wants her off his hands, agrees to marry Bonaparte – on condition that he appoints him Commander of the Army of Italy.’ If Gance’s words about Joséphine’s amoral outlook did not already serve as such, these words bluntly summarize her practical, unsentimental motivations. Joséphine’s shrewd experience and Bonaparte’s romantic innocence are cannily demonstrated in the scene following her deal with Barras. The general arrives before the latter has time to escape but, luckily for Barras, Bonaparte is made to play blind man’s bluff by Eugène and Hortense (Janine Pen) whilst waiting for Joséphine to appear. He fumbles around in pursuit of the children and, in so doing, knocks over the box containing a wreath of white roses that he has bought for Joséphine. This is the same style of garland that she threw into the street on their first encounter; just as the roses were discarded in that earlier scene, here they are accidentally crushed by the blindfolded Bonaparte and the scampering children. That this moment is a marker of ill omen is confirmed when Joséphine enters the scene a moment later, accompanied by Barras. As the blinded Bonaparte crawls around on the floor, his rival tiptoes from the room – charmingly smiling at the children as he does so. Once her lover has left the room, Joséphine joins the children’s game and allows Bonaparte to capture her. She tries to remove his blindfold, but he replies: ‘In love, my dear Joséphine, one should not see more clearly than this!’ The uneasy look that spreads over her face, coupled with a sidelong glance almost into the camera, indicates Joséphine’s concern (or guilt) over her secret collusion with Barras. After she regains her composure, she leads Bonaparte into a private room and we are given a high-angle close-up of her feet treading on his flowers. As they leave, the significance of this moment is reaffirmed with a second close-up of the garland being trampled. If Gance is not as harsh as Elie Faure in condemning Joséphine as ‘financially, morally, and politically’ corrupt, he certainly literalizes the idea that Napoléon ‘fell blindly into the trap’ of a marriage arranged by his rival Barras (1921: 121-2). From the complexities of this negotiated relationship, Gance returns to the simpler melodramatic narrative of Violine’s unrequited love. She has ingested a bottle of narcotics and collapses at the bottom of the steps

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outside Joséphine’s rooms on the Rue Chantereine. Inside, Joséphine is busy trying on a series of dresses and hats whilst Barras looks on from a chaise longue – his comments provoke her playful displeasure, and she throws one of her garments over him. When Violine is found by a servant, she is brought inside and slowly regains consciousness. As she slowly opens her eyes, Gance inserts a startling upside-down close-up of the faces of Barras and Joséphine staring back – the blurred image sharpens into focus, then fades away. Having seen that it is not her hero, but her rival who has saved her, Violine faints once more. As evident in her attempted suicide, Violine’s love for Bonaparte is more intense than that of Joséphine. Whilst the latter’s desire for Bonaparte is the result of rational consideration, Violine’s far stronger desire is rooted in fantasy. Her dreamy abstractions have more in common with Bonaparte’s personality than with the worldly experience of Joséphine. Violine’s social inferiority to her beloved matches Bonaparte’s initial separation from the object of his affections. Similarly, the tokens of love Violine takes from him echo the discarded flowers Bonaparte takes from Joséphine. The earlier (lost) scene in which she has visions of Bonaparte directly foreshadows Bonaparte’s own daydream of Joséphine after the ‘blind man’s bluff’ sequence. Here, the general is in his room and multiple superimpositions of Joséphine surround him in a poetic evocation of romantic obsession. As so often, Gance interrupts the reverent tone of idealism with comic drama. After knocking a jar onto the head of the sleeping concierge and bursting into Bonaparte’s room, Junot (Jean Henry) tells the general that he has been appointed to command the Army of Italy. Meanwhile, at the Rue Chantereine, Tristan has joined the recovering Violine and agrees that his daughter can enter Joséphine’s service as a maid – leaving him free to join the army. The innocent Tristan is about to go to war but is so amazed (or frightened) by the sight of Joséphine’s bare shoulders that Violine has to cover them up before he can stop staring. At this moment, Bonaparte storms into the building – knocking aside Tristan, ignoring Violine, and startling Joséphine at her dressing table. Rather than a romantic proposal, he issues his request for marriage as he would a battlefield order: ‘We must get married, Madame. Quick – a notary, the banns, the certificates!’ He barks instructions to his fiancée and her servants, who rush around in a chaotic frenzy of activity; in the background, Violine looks on tearfully. Having been encouraged to question the motivations of Barras and Joséphine, Gance’s audience must now interrogate the behaviour of Bonaparte towards the woman he loves. From this moment on, the Italian Campaign and Joséphine vie with each other for importance in Bonaparte’s life: he says he has given himself three months to conquer Italy, providing

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a timeframe into which his personal life must fit. Military preoccupations and romantic passions begin to collide and become confused in Bonaparte’s words and actions, as epitomized by the image of Joséphine superimposed in the globe.

7.6

Love and war

On the night of their marriage, Bonaparte is absent from the registry office. The scrawny registrar, Barras, and the military entourage shrug in unison when Joséphine asks when her fiancé will arrive. Hour after hour passes on the imposing timepiece on one side of the room, while we see the candles dwindle and the roomful of uniformed officials fall awkwardly asleep in their chairs. Joséphine suddenly jolts everyone awake by shouting and throwing her arms aloft in frustration. Someone is sent to fetch Bonaparte. We see him on the floor of his rooms, utterly absorbed in maps and overlooked by a large globe on the right of the frame. When the servant reminds him he is late for his own marriage, Bonaparte hurls on his uniform and marches outside. Finally arriving at the ceremony, he urges the registrar to hurry: ‘Faster’, ‘Skip all that!’ His single word ‘Yes!’ then bars the need for any affirmation of ‘I do’ from Joséphine. The bride wears an expression of surprise and hurt during the ceremony and when she signs the certificate, she whispers to Barras: ‘He frightens me, your Buonaparte’. Her reference to the general as ‘your Buonaparte’ (rather than hers) is striking, just as her use of the Italian form of his name denotes a certain sense of distance (if not disdain) that recalls the mocking schoolchildren of Brienne. Treated as a political alliance by the bride and as a legal formality by the groom, Gance’s superb depiction of this romantic union is both warmly humorous and coldly unsettling. Gance follows Bonaparte’s wedding with a parallel sequence. A title announces: ‘And Violine was also married that evening.’ The girl is alone in her room, looking into a mirror. She has made herself up to resemble Joséphine and wears a long white veil in imitation of a wedding dress. As Violine gazes at herself in the mirror, we are given a shot looking over her shoulder into the glass. Moving to one side of the frame, she unknowingly reveals the reflection of a large circular window with radiating mullion like the spokes of a wheel (Figure 35). Taking up half the frame, the wheel’s dark shape forms an unsettling contrast to her white veils – a contrast only visible to the audience. As Bonaparte was playfully blindfolded to enable the escape of Joséphine’s lover, Violine here is blinded by her love and does

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not see the huge emblem of fate that looms menacingly behind her in the mise-en-scène. As with the prominent window in the final shot of Brienne, this wheel’s spokes and central hub are reminiscent of a cobweb – a crucial image in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris: The ray of daylight which penetrated through this aperture f iltered through a circular spider’s web, which carefully inscribed its delicate rosette in the ogival window arch, and at its centre the insect architect remained motionless like the hub in this wheel of lace (1831: II/61).

Here, Frollo observes a trapped fly being slowly dismembered by the spider, seeing a parallel to the inevitability of his own fate. Violine is as stricken as the fly in Hugo’s scene, her fate also caught up in a wheel-like web ‘spun by destiny’ (ibid.: II/88). The next scene shows Joséphine and Bonaparte retreat to their wedding bed, which is surrounded by semi-transparent curtains and chains of flowers. It is capped by a close-up of bride and groom locked in a kiss; this shot is gradually obscured by a series of gauze veils that are slowly drawn across the screen, transforming the moment of physical union into an immaterial emotive state. Despite its aesthetic splendour, this scene is far less moving than the one that follows it: Violine’s mystical wedding. Here, she conjures Bonaparte through the familiar leitmotif of his shadow. Earlier in the film, we see her buying a puppet of Bonaparte; now, she places this foot-high model in front of a candle so as to cast a life-size silhouette onto her white wall (Figure 36). As Tristan’s involvement with events is reduced to the marionette coronation in the 1923 outline, so Violine is here a ‘white shadow’ (Gance 1924c) that can only interact with the image of Bonaparte. This exquisite scene succeeds not merely through visual enchantment but because of the complex way in which Gance draws attention to the apparatus of the illusion. Much like the guillotine Robespierre inadvertently creates on his desk, Violine’s projected husband is merely the result of light and shade – its power derives from the belief this viewer places in her illusion. Gance’s parallel wedding ceremonies undermine the emotional aspirations of the obsessive fan and the oblivious star. Whilst Violine worships impersonal iconography, Bonaparte marries a bride he hardly knows. Gance suggests that love is as real and as illusory as cinema, and its effects are sustained by the faith of the participants. The duration of this spellbound state was also to be raised in a subsequent scene (later cut before filming), in which Bonaparte’s mother says: ‘Married… Let us hope it lasts!’ (Gance 1927b: 382).

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Fig. 35: Violine arranges her bridal veil on the night of her ‘wedding’

It is historically inevitable that her son’s illusions will end, just as a film audience must leave when the lights go up. The morning after the wedding, Bonaparte departs for Italy. Standing with Joséphine on the terrace outside Chantereine, he grabs his bride and gives her a remarkably passionate kiss – one so sudden and physical that it still makes audiences gasp (and occasionally applaud!). Unlike the etherealized embrace of their wedding night, this kiss emphasizes the realities of passion – just as Bonaparte’s strategic genius is now to be realized on the battlefields of Italy. Gazing down at Bonaparte’s departure from her circular window, Violine is here denied the agency to change the events she witnesses. When she returns to serve her rival in love, Joséphine admits: ‘I am jealous, Violine’. Asked ‘of whom’, she replies: ‘Of France.’ As Violine is associated with the wheel of her window, so Joséphine’s large gleaming earrings in this scene form another wheel-like form within the frame. Gance further aligns these two women in a later sequence, when Joséphine discovers Violine praying before an altar in her bedroom. At its centre is the effigy of Bonaparte, surrounded by the various objects she has taken from him over the course of the film. As Joséphine enters the room, a remarkable subjective handheld shot lets us share her tentative

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Fig. 36: Violine marries herself to the shadow of Bonaparte

approach and confrontation; when Violine realizes she has been found out, she turns directly to the camera and begs for forgiveness. Instead of chastising the girl, Joséphine calms and reassures her. The surprisingly undramatic conclusion to this scene directly echoes the situation of Jean and François in the 1919 J’accuse. In the trenches, Jean finds that François maintains an altar devoted to Edith. (As does Violine, François decorates his altar with a comb, a glove, and other fragments of clothing salvaged from the object of his adoration.) Instead of fighting, the two rivals accept the equality of the love they share for the same woman. Similarly, in Napoléon, Joséphine and Violine pray before the altar to Bonaparte – the man destined to abandon both on his path toward military destiny. The dichotomy between love and war in Bonaparte’s life after he is appointed commander of the Army of Italy is symptomatic of the ambiguity in his actions and emotions. Though the breathless tracking shots of his journey to the front indicate the urgency of his mission, inside the carriage Bonaparte is calmly writing both love letters and military orders. His simultaneous composition of different documents may be mentally impressive, but it also raises questions about the despair he expresses in his letters. He writes: ‘Each moment draws me away from you, beloved, and

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with each moment I find less strength to endure this separation’, before giving out more instructions to his messengers. Bonaparte’s words express profound insecurity, but his actions show him to be in complete control: he is able to master several mental tasks at once, all whilst riding at ferocious speed towards his most important and challenging command. Once at Albenga, he quickly wins the respect of his initially hostile generals with little more than the force of his gaze and bearing. Yet, soon after, he writes despairingly to Joséphine: ‘My life is a nightmare without you. A hideous presentiment stops me breathing. I am no longer living. I have lost more than life, more than happiness, more than repose. I am almost without hope. I beg you to answer me.’

Even if his actions do not cast into doubt the genuine nature of his expressed feelings, his ability to combine war and romance is unsettling. Faure’s comment that ‘[Napoléon] was quick to put [love] into place and into his plan’ (1921: 118) presages Gance’s depiction of the general from the wedding onwards – violently in love but controlling his feelings so that they don’t disrupt him from his goal. Yet instead of Joséphine being entirely displaced by the onset of the Italian campaign, she haunts Bonaparte’s mind at the very climax of his invasion – dominating large portions of the finale and disrupting any monocular focus on war that the film or its lead character may have had. In the final moments of Napoléon, Joséphine’s face is superimposed over the spinning globe and juxtaposed with images of maps and future victories. Wife and world are ‘seductive rivals within Bonaparte’s soul’ (Gance 1927?), the general’s dissonant desires locked within the symbolic wheel of the globe.

7.7 Summary A central concern of the film is to show the tensions between Bonaparte as a leader and a lover, as a source of comedy and of tragedy, as a figure of humanity and of inhumanity. Through Bonaparte’s relationship with Joséphine, Gance creates a dichotomy between the increasingly authoritative, emotionally distant general and the stumbling, laughable, and recognizably human lover. He also reminds his audience that these characters are determined by historical narratives that stretch beyond the timeframe of Napoléon. Joséphine’s exercise of social mobility and

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personal independence suggest her actions will transgress the legal confines of marriage, just as the tensions between career and domesticity, romantic and political ambition, are evidence of the future strain in Bonaparte’s fealty to his wife. By contrast, Violine represents a form of pure love that remains uncorrupted by the realities of historical fact or physical consummation in Napoléon. Whilst many have reacted negatively to her presence in the narrative, at least one critic defended Gance’s ‘substantial and sustained’ character as a ‘leitmotif’ of emotional contrast (D’Herbeumont 1926). D’Herbeumont compares Violine to Graziella – the eponymous heroine of Alphonse de Lamartine’s novel of 1852 (which had been adapted for the screen in France in 1926). Graziella is an Italian peasant girl who falls deeply in love with the aristocratic narrator; he, however, fails to recognize the nature of her love: ‘I didn’t know if she was a companion, a friend, a sister, or something else to me’ (Lamartine 1852: 122). His Italian tour ends and he leaves Graziella heartbroken; she dies alone, whilst in old age he feels profound remorse for his behaviour. Lamartine’s semi-autobiographical novel explores the dissimilar levels of affection between Graziella and author, but Gance’s contrast is even more extreme: Violine crosses paths with Bonaparte without even making her presence known to him. Lamartine’s oedipal confusion between familial and romantic love is repeated in Napoléon: the fatherly Tristan possesses a childlike adoration of Bonaparte, whilst the young Violine seeks an adult relationship with him. The destiny of another one of Gance’s incomplete families ends with the disappointment of Tristan’s search for a father and the displacement of Violine’s yearning for a lover. It is an archetypal melodramatic structure typical of the director’s films, but one that is fascinatingly enriched by the conditions of a historical narrative.

8. Worlds in transition: Class, consumption, corruption [For Gance, the French] Revolution, like [the Great War], is the signal of a new era. Its sacrifices must have been useful […] Bonaparte has observed the progress of the Revolution, its achievements and its errors and is determined to put it back on the right path. Without him, it would be overthrown by reactionary forces or its achievements frittered away by a decadent bourgeoisie. [This is] a Napoléon for the 1920s, addressed to the post-war generation, a stand against the new jeunesse dorée, an appeal to popular imagination. Although Napoléon will later be entrapped by his family, his ministers and his enemies into a defence of bourgeois order, […] the young Bonaparte is a man for the people, for the future (King 1984a: 158-9).

8.1 Introduction This chapter explores the historical contexts that inform Gance’s portrayal of French high society in the Victims’ Ball sequence of Napoléon. Set in late 1795 during the ‘Thermidorian Reaction’ that succeeded the Terror, the sequence is also a response to the conditions of post-war France in the 1920s. After providing an overview of the circumstances of each period, I will analyse the key socialites and politicians portrayed in relevant sequences of Napoléon. In doing so, I want to demonstrate the links between the eighteenth-century events depicted in the film and Gance’s concerns for the world of the twentieth century. The social issues at stake in the aftermath of the Great War inform the director’s promotion of Bonaparte and the image of a ‘Universal Republic’ in Napoléon.

8.2

Corrupting powers

Reacting to the worldwide catastrophe of 1914, many European intellectuals and pacifists began to place ‘the struggle against war and the fight for social justice within the paradigm of the class struggle, seeing them as being part of the national and international struggle against capitalism and imperialism’ (Drake 2005: 75). When the Russian Revolution erupted

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in 1917, commentators made comparisons to the French Revolution of 1789: both upheavals were seen as the result of not merely political division and foreign invasion but of entrenched social inequalities (Mathiez 1920: 3-4). Gance’s J’accuse was one of many angry expressions by former soldiers that attributed wartime ‘price rises and shortages [to] the work of speculators and other economic evildoers’ (Stovall 2012: 29). Artists felt that they ‘should not defend any sectional interest’ and fall prey to nationalism or political factionalism; instead, they were to ‘guide humanity, to rally their fellow human beings across the planet in a spirit of fraternity that would triumph over blind, senseless conflicts’ (Drake 2005: 73). In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, Romain Rolland wrote: We do not recognize the peoples. We recognize the People: indivisible and universal, the People that suffers, that struggles, that falls and rises again, forever advancing over the broken path which is soaked with its blood and sweat – the People of all human beings, all equally our brothers (1919: 1).

The anticipated ‘reconstruction’ of France led to a mixture of ‘hope and fear’ in the post-war years that produced a continual ‘struggle between workers and employers’ (Sowerwine 2009: 117). This class tension was evident in the 4,000 strikes that took place during 1919-20, events that involved a total of 2,400,000 workers (ibid.: 125). Political turmoil followed the financial crises of 1920, 1924, and 1925-6; between April 1925 and the end of 1926, no less than six French governments came and went. Though the subsequent re-election of the conservative Raymond Poincaré as prime minister may have given the appearance of stability, ‘numerous scandals and cases of corruption’ continued to sully French political life in the late 1920s and early 1930s (Fortescue 2000: 191). Rather than the building of a new society, France seemed to be returning to the pre-war world – one where workers ‘accepted without a murmur the domination and values of the reigning bourgeoisie’ (Bernard 1975: 207). Radical and socialist candidates attracted increasing popular support, but the ‘bankers and the businessmen had learned the technique in a democratic society of how to thwart the majority’ (Shirer 1970: 139). Despite increasing efforts to redress inequality, the ‘power of a small elite which possessed most of the wealth was greater than the power of the Republican government elected by the people’. By the mid-1920s, ‘the possessing class in France [was] alienating itself from the rest of the nation’ (ibid.: 139-40). The right-wing forces in the country were led by financiers and industrialists such as François Coty, the man who had chastised Gance’s Napoleonic

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project in 1924. In the post-war decade, France ‘lived in an illusion of social consensus which gave free rein to sectarian rancour’ (Bernard 1975: 207-8). The conservatism represented by men like Coty aimed to curb the socialist elements in much the same way that ‘the European autocracies [grew emboldened] to stand against the dangerous threats of democracy and other tides of history’ after the downfall of Napoléon in 1815 (Shirer 1970: 141). This context is crucial to understanding Napoléon, especially its depiction of social change in the aftermath of the Terror. Gance saw the nation’s apparently uncaring reaction to the wartime slaughter as deeply immoral. Developing the righteous anger expressed in J’accuse, he stated that there would be ‘a hallucinatory and profound connection’ between Napoléon and the work of the Marquis de Sade (Gance 1926). This infamous writer had spent the duration of the Terror under arrest, avoiding execution by the narrowest of margins. Witnessing the ghastly prison system and the crude processes of state-endorsed murder, he wrote: ‘My national detention, the guillotine under my eyes, has done me a hundred times more harm than all the Bastilles imaginable’ (De Sade 1795 cited in Sollers 1992: 11). Henceforth, de Sade’s writing would explore ideas that ‘in his relationship with his victim, the libertine is like an executioner or a murderer’ (Hayman 2003: 195). Working in the wake of another traumatic holocaust in the twentieth century, Gance wanted to recreate the mood of the Marquis’ violent and disturbing literature. In a note attached to the screenplay of Napoléon, he wrote: ‘Don’t forget an astonishing text from de Sade’ – ‘emphasize the sadism’ (Gance 1924c). As well as summoning the spirit of de Sade, Gance wrote scenes in which this figure appears in person. He considered the German actors Max Schreck and Conrad Veidt for this role, which he wanted ‘[to stand] in vivid relief against the oceanic depths of the Revolution’ (Gance 1926). Though it remains unclear if any tests or finished footage were achieved with either man, Gance did meet with Veidt in September 1924 to discuss his participation and later contacted him to confirm the shooting schedule of scenes at the end of June 1926. The desire to use actors famed for their work in Expressionist cinema is intriguing – as is the macabre nature of their most famous characters. In Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), Veidt plays Cesare, a somnambulist coerced into murder by a hypnotist. His hauntingly agonized performance style seems to embody ‘the memory of a traumatic experience’, and Anton Kaes has convincingly argued that his introduction, standing ‘in an upright coffin, suspended in a state between life and death’, echoes the ‘near-death experiences’ of shell-shocked soldiers (2009: 54-7). Similarly, Schreck’s role as the vampire in Nosferatu (1922)

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‘connotes the nature of war’; by portraying the mass death resulting from plague, the film ‘allegorizes’ the ‘encounter with death’ suffered by the generation of 1914 (ibid.: 88). In his published screenplay, Gance kept an unfilmed scene involving de Sade as part of the 10 August sequence. As originally conceived, de Sade would appear in the chapel of the Tuileries Palace after the great slaughter of the King’s Swiss Guards. He is playing the Dies Irae on the organ – with his ‘terrifying face drained of blood’, he looks as though he has emerged ‘from a tale by Edgar Allan Poe’. De Sade’s hands leave ‘red imprints’ as they turn the pages of the score, and the ivory keyboard is stained by his bloody fingers, whilst ‘a dead man’s arm hangs over the keys’. This ‘spine-chilling’ atmosphere would be furthered by ‘the bellowing roar of [the organ’s] heavy and lugubrious voice’ and the sight of the ‘corpses draped over the balusters’ and ‘piled on the wooden pews’. Approached by a mob of sans-culottes, the organist ‘raises his strange and dreadful eyes’ – the petrified onlookers react ‘as if the exterminating angel of the Last Judgement were looking at them’ (Gance 1927b: 82-5). This ‘aura of terror’ around the ‘infamous marquis’ (ibid.) suggests a character deformed by his environment – exemplary of some terrible force that the Revolution had unleashed but also evidence of the trauma of the Great War. The endless lists of casualties printed in the press during 1914-18 are echoed in the lists of the condemned drawn up in Napoléon – another historical situation in which a national effort resulted in immense human sacrifice. In scenes written in 1924 but never filmed, Gance further emphasizes the sadism of these pursuits. Robespierre, Saint-Just and others are seen guillotining toy figures during their dinner – later, de Sade appears in the company of Charles-Henri Sanson, the man who executed Louis XVI. They look over at Saint-Just, ‘our exterminating angel’, and the ‘libertines’ at nearby tables. De Sade comments: ‘He follows the same routine as me. He comes here to drink a glass of blood every day’ (Gance 1924c). The fall of Robespierre and Saint-Just in 1794 did little to cure the state’s sadistic attitudes. This Directory period, which lasted until Napoléon’s seizure of power in 1799, saw a reaction against the old gods of the Revolution: The bodies of the Robespierrists were buried in quicklime in the cemetery of Errancis, and the unmarked grave of these men of incorruptible virtue became later, by Fate’s ironic commentary, the site of a public dance-hall (Bruun 1966: 154).

Marat’s body was disinterred from its honorary place in the Panthéon, and numerous dedicatory statues were dumped into a cesspool at Montmartre

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by gangs of jeunesse dorée – the ‘gilded youth’ of the post-Terror society that sought to erase the past. In The French Revolution, Carlyle depicts this social change through classical Furies being ‘transmuted’ into modern Dandies: an ‘apotheosis-in-reverse’ that ‘nicely illustrates, in advance, Marx’s aphorism on history repeating itself – first as tragedy, then as farce’ (Rosenberg 2002: xxii). Carlyle satirizes how the resurgent social elite willingly sought a state of ‘amnesia regarding the immediate past’ (Kale 2004: 70). As a result, instead of creating a liberated society, the post-Terror world saw the gap between rich and poor radically widen: ‘there are no longer any public interests; every interest is private, personal’ (Taine 1901-4: VIII/323). During the winter of 1795, food prices soared and people froze to death in bread queues that started in the earliest hours of the morning. Suicide became rife, and destitute mothers in Paris were seen throwing themselves and their children into the river Seine. As Carlyle wrote: ‘chimerical Obtain-who-need has become practical Hold-who-have. To anarchic Republic of the Poverties there has succeeded orderly Republic of the Luxuries, which will continue as long as it can’ (1837: III/435). Though dozens of theatres were open every night in the capital, the lust for life was in stark contrast to the bad harvests and the effects of war that were bringing starvation to the working class. Outside the Tuileries, a fat, defrocked Benedictine monk kept the queues of women who had come to beg for bread at bay with his ‘untiring lungs’ and interminable tirades; inside the palace, government officials enjoyed the contents of their well-stocked cellars and pantries: They become merry once more: jaws begin masticating, champagne is drunk, witty banter starts up. About eleven o’clock or midnight, various other members come from their committees; they trustingly sign their decrees without reading them; they, in turn, sit down at the table, and the conclave of sovereign bellies digests, without troubling itself further over the millions of empty stomachs (Taine 1901-4: VIII/325).

Gance highlights this contrast in the wintry scenes preceding Vendémiaire. A title summarizes the situation: ‘France, in agony, was facing starvation. Distress beyond all imagination was making the people drift away from the Revolution.’ This short sequence shows a snow-coated Violine queuing in the icy streets as Bona passes by with Junot. In a nearby house, we glimpse a warmly lit interior and the ‘gluttonous’ upper classes: ‘Unimaginable, fairy-tale splendour... Swirling golds, lights, voluptuousness... Gaunt, snowcovered faces [gaze though the window] with eyes filled with envy, hatred,

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or despair’ (Gance 1927b: 300). Hugo warned against those who ‘yield up principle to appetite’ (1864: 516-7), and Gance’s scenes of the freezing bread queues outside the over-stocked house of the rich illustrate the social consequences of greed – the rich behave as if this were ‘the end of Byzantium’ (Gance 1924c). One of the chief ‘gluttons’ that Bonaparte sees from the street is Paul Barras, a man related to de Sade by blood as well as by personality: for despite being a vocal critic of the Marquis’ libertinism, ‘[he led] the life described by his cousin’ (Cronin 1994: 166). Contemporaries were ‘unanimous in finding the goings-on at Barras’ several mansions repellent’: All the vices converged there: the greed and dishonesty of corrupt business dealings, lust and sexual profligacy […] Barras himself, who was fortyish, set the tone for this continual orgy of self-indulgence, entertaining lavishly night after night, filling his crowded salons with debauchees and financial intriguers, scantily clad, voluptuous women and attractive young boys. He was a dark Pied Piper, vulgar and coarse, presiding with enthusiasm over scenes of uncouth revelry and unrestrained pleasure (Erickson 2000: 119).

Barras was ‘an old terrorist, cynical and corrupt, surrounded by a Byzantine court’ as well as being ‘a shrewd observer of gains to be made’ (Furet 1988: 326). Politically astute, he survived the Terror and became a leading member of the five ‘directors’ of France during 1795-9. In his novels of this period, de Sade armed his heroes with the only qualities that the Directory and Barras’ high society required: ‘sexual prowess and cynicism’ (Fleischmann 1908: 285). As with the various capitalist villains in Gance’s earlier melodramas (examined in chapter 7), Barras is an immoral influence on the hero’s love interest. However, unlike the women in these other films, in Napoléon Joséphine is allied to those who would corrupt her – moral contamination is (historically) inevitable.

8.3

New femininities

Joséphine became involved with Barras thanks to her friend Thérésa Tallien – ‘the quintessential representative of Thermidorian high society’ (Kale 2004: 70). Born into a prosperous family, Thérésa Cabarrús had married the Marquis de Fontenay at the age of fifteen and spent time at the court of Louis XVI. However, Fontenay left both his wife and his country the next year

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when the Revolution began. Despite her divorce, Thérésa was imprisoned for her aristocratic connections during the Terror. She was saved from the guillotine thanks to her new lover, a member of the Convention called Jean Tallien, but was arrested again under orders from Robespierre and spent time in the prisons of La Force and Les Carmes. Tallien helped instigate Robespierre’s fall in 1794, after which he married Thérésa. When Tallien’s own power faded during the Directory period, his wife became the mistress of Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard (an influential banker) and also the increasingly powerful Barras. Divorcing Tallien in 1802, Thérésa soon consolidated her name and social rank by marrying the Prince de Chimay. Thérésa’s reputation for social mobility, political shrewdness, and glamorous notoriety is an important background to her scenes in Napoléon. Though she met Joséphine for the first time at Les Carmes in 1794, Gance shows them as friends in scenes set in 1792. Both are in Barras’ coach when Bonaparte first catches sight of Joséphine after the Cordeliers sequence. In a (cut) scene at Mlle Lenormant’s salon, Joséphine and Thérésa were to have flirtatiously kissed: ‘On the mouth? A deft fan screens possible licentiousness’ (Gance 1927b: 66). Their unconventional friendship mirrors those of other socialite women, such as Juliette Récamier (who appears in Napoléon) and Germaine de Staël (present in Austerlitz). This latter pair wrote that they loved one another with ‘a love surpassing friendship’ (Stuart 2004: 154). Juliette herself enjoyed a marriage of convenience with a man that many now believe was her father. (Jacques Récamier had been the longstanding lover of her mother, so arranged this secret union with Juliette to make her his heir without damaging her honour.) Though she never formed sexual relationships with any of her subsequent admirers (among them Lucien Bonaparte, Napoléon’s brother), Juliette famously ‘[enjoyed] all the notice she attracted’ (Trouncer 1949: 23). Chateaubriand, her longstanding platonic lover, wrote that she was: ‘Ignorant of all and knowing all; at once virgin and lover; innocent Eve and fallen Eve’ (1849-50: I/248). Both Thérésa and Joséphine were friends with the cross-dressing actress Mlle Racourt, who was openly lesbian. Thanks to ‘executions, emigrations and the new divorce laws’, many women ‘came to rely on each other for the intimacy, stability and sometimes also sex that they had previously obtained from men’ (Stuart 2004: 154). Joséphine’s association with Juliette and Thérésa in Napoléon affirms her role as a socially/sexually adroit figure – antithetical to the soldier’s romantic naivety. These women popularized new modes of fashion, especially the neoclassical variety of the Thermidorian period. Carlyle writes how Joséphine and Thérésa ‘[were intent] to blandish down the grimness of Republican

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austerity, and recivilize mankind […] by witchery of the Orphic fiddle-bow, and Euterpean rhythm; by the Graces, by the Smiles!’ (1837: III/406-7). He mocks this effort at ‘recivilization’ by juxtaposing a description of the jeunesse dorée demolishing former symbols of Jacobinism with Thérésa and ‘the Army of Greek sandals [smiling in] approval’ (ibid.: III/410). Whilst ostensibly invigorating France with the trappings of a glorious past, this new fashion also enabled the upper classes to dress in an increasingly sexualized way. Napoléon ‘spoke openly of his distaste for the new modes grecques’ (Kale 2004: 81), and something of this same suspicion informs Gance’s depiction of socialites in Napoléon. In the early twentieth century, Paris was the centre of Europe’s ‘new temples of consumption’ (Haupt 2004: 175). Just as had been the case with the jeunesse dorée in the 1790s, in the 1920s the clothing of classical antiquity became a major influence on Parisian couturiers like Jeanne Lanvin and Madeleine Vionnet. Vionnet’s famous ‘bias cut’ design allowed dresses to follow the body’s contours, allowing women’s clothing to have ‘the freedom of movement of Greek and Roman times’ (Kirke 1998: 42). Lanvin designed contemporized versions of Directory dresses for Gina Manès in Napoléon, but the wider influence of her style is very visible in the costumes displayed throughout the Victims’ Ball sequence. Though the commercialization of fashion in the 1920s ‘became political in a more subtle and less conscious way than in the revolutionary period’, it nevertheless provoked debate as to its role and purpose within modern society (Roberts 2003: 70). Just as the post-war period saw increasing class tension, so the French press drew attention to a series of gender crises that centred on the issues of abortion, the falling national birthrate, and the desire for political suffrage. The ‘new woman’ of the 1920s was ‘free, assertive, and independent’ – and there was a rise in masculinized female fashion as well as in gay subculture (Sowerwine 2009: 121-4). These issues form an undercurrent to the scenes around the Victims’ Ball in Napoléon, where the decadence of a new generation of consumers is contrasted with the tragedy of the recent past. Gance took inspiration from Thérésa Tallien’s ‘Tombstone Ball’, which set the trend for a series of ghoulish festivities after the Terror: ‘People danced on the tombstones at the cemetery of Saint-Suplice, and at the Prostitutes’ Ball at the Hotel de la Chine, at the dance hall set up amid the ruins of the Bastille’ (Erickson 2000: 136). As Gance mentions in an intertitle before his Ball, there were perverse rules for attendees: ‘it was necessary to have been imprisoned, or to prove the death of a father, a brother or a husband’. This left many with a bizarre regret for not having been outrageously mistreated:

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It was the height of good manners to be ruined, to have been suspected, persecuted, and above all, imprisoned; without this last qualification, there was neither salvation nor consideration for you in society; people deeply regretted they hadn’t been guillotined, but said they were to have been a day or two after 9 Thermidor. There were disputes over who had been more unfortunate that were enough to make one die with laughter, and I remember the shame I felt at a victims’ luncheon given by Mme Le Sénéchal at her Montrouge house: I bore the affront of being the only guest who had not been incarcerated! (Frénilly 1908: 197-8).

Despite the image of respectability seen in the contemporary portraits of Mmes Récamier and Tallien by François Gérard and Jacques-Louis David, many such women flaunted social convention. In the 1790s, Thérésa attended balls in scandalously revealing clothing and no underwear, bedecking herself with gaudy jewellery. Even the usually unflappable politician Talleyrand felt he had to intervene when she turned up to an opera dressed in nothing but a tiger skin (Lacombe 1910: 138). She and her circle became the focus of enraged polemics against the godless Republic: See Mme Tallien come into the public theatre, accompanied by other beautiful women (I was about to have misnamed them Ladies) laying aside all modesty, and presenting themselves to the public view, with bared limbs, à la Sauvage, as the alluring objects of desire (Robison 1798: 250).

Another satirical British portrait can be found in James Gillray’s caricature from 1805: ‘Ci-devant Occupations; or Mme Tallien and the Empress Joséphine dancing Naked before Barras in the Winter of 1797 – A Fact!’ (Figure 37). In more exploitative terms, an anonymous roman à clef was published in Paris that bore all the trademarks of de Sade. It contained a vitriolic satire of Napoléon (Orsec, an anagram of ‘corse’ – Corsican), Joséphine (Zoloé), the Talliens (Fessinot and Laureda), and Barras (Sabar): Pushing 40, Zoloé nevertheless maintains the pretence of being 25. Thanks to her prestige, courtiers flock to her and this (to some extent) compensates for her passing youth. She has a fine mind, a character both supple and proud (depending on circumstances), an insinuating tone, a consummately hypocritical dissimulation; along with everything seductive and captivating, she possesses an ardour for pleasure a hundred times keener than Laureda, the avidity of a usurer for money (which she

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Fig. 37: In this caricature from 1805, James Gillray satirizes Barras’s sexual escapades with the wives of Tallien and Bonaparte

squanders with the speed of a gambler), and an unbridled love for money that would eat up the revenue of ten provinces (Anon. 1800: 1).

Whilst Napoléon displays a far subtler treatment of Joséphine than the caricatures of de Sade or Gillray, Gance nevertheless draws on such sources to inform the relationships established after the Terror. As suggested by the presence of Barras in so many scenes in Gance’s film, Napoléon was cuckolded whilst away on campaign – and publically mocked as a consequence. He later had to ‘curb his disgust’ to do business with Barras (Faure 1921: 46) and was sure to gradually starve his romantic rival of political power – as well as controlling Joséphine’s own activities: [Napoléon] was ‘horrified by courtesans’ and insisted on the need to ‘purify’ the company Joséphine kept at the Tuileries, going so far as to post spies at the entries to her salon in order to make sure that certain individuals, like Mme Tallien, were not admitted (Kale 2004: 81).

The desire to control such women arose not merely from personal jealousy but out of political expediency. Along with Germaine de Staël, Juliette and Thérésa gained notoriety through the burgeoning salon culture of

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Directory France. Through the political nature of such meeting places, these women would become a thorn in Napoléon’s side. Along with Joséphine, they represented not just a social world to which he was a stranger but also a rival source of power that he would never be able to harness. De Staël believed women should seek greater involvement in political life and published numerous literary works that displeased Napoléon. She once asked him: ‘Who would you consider the greatest woman to be?’ Napoléon tersely replied: ‘She who bears the most children, Madame’ (Arnault 1833: IV/27). Though successive regimes in France sought ‘to capture the newly awakened literary talents of women and deploy them toward their own ends’ (Hesse 2001: 52), Napoléon tried to quash those he felt fermented unrest and exiled various courtiers for defying his political power. As Emperor, he ostracized Thérésa and disbanded many salons he considered to be a bad influence on France or on Joséphine. Though Juliette met with Napoléon only twice and spoke with him only once (Lenormant 1859: I/19, I/34-8), she was viewed with suspicion thanks to her refusal to act as lady-in-waiting to Empress Joséphine. Both Juliette and Germaine de Staël appear at another ball in Gance’s Austerlitz, set in 1801. Bonaparte crosses contemptuous glances with de Staël, who swiftly exits as he approaches Juliette. Frosty words are exchanged about General Moreau, soon to be disgraced as the figurehead of a conspiracy to overthrow Napoléon. Moreau had been the ‘darling of the discontented drawing-rooms’ (Cronin 1994: 241), and his connections with Juliette and Germaine de Staël saw both women banished from Paris. As Gance amply demonstrates, Bonaparte is an outsider to Joséphine’s lifestyle and society – as Germaine de Staël wrote: ‘His bearing, his mind, his language, were stamped with an alien nature’ (1818: II/197). By the time of the Directory, he may no longer wear boots made of cardboard and have to patch up his broken windows with paper, but he is still ‘a stranger to the world of the bourgeoisie’: The Corsican general cut a singular figure: bony, emaciated, taciturn. An islander recently returned from his native scrubland with his yellowish face and huge eyes, framed by long hair falling to his shoulders in ‘dog ears’. The salons of the parvenu revolutionaries where the dazzling Mme Tallien reigned smiled a little over this soldier who had inherited nothing of the ways of the world and who never seemed to want to imitate them (Furet 1988: 326-7).

Being entirely ignorant of Parisian high society, Napoléon had to be taught about ‘la bonne compagnie’ by experienced veterans (D’Abrantès 1837-8:

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V/5-6). In Napoléon, his comic inability to woo Joséphine with the suave ease of her other suitors is emblematic of his social awkwardness. Gance’s scenes demonstrate how ‘the story of his marriage […] says everything about what tied him to that society which was so foreign to him’ (Furet 1988: 327). Like Thérésa, Joséphine negotiates a series of political and sexual alliances among the high society whose power will rival Bonaparte’s. His inability to control this group will become clear by the time of the narrative of Austerlitz, but its origins are already visible in Napoléon.

8.4

The Victims’ Ball

In Napoléon, the Victims’ Ball is set in Les Carmes prison – the site of Joséphine’s incarceration. Gance juxtaposes the Terror’s violence with the Reaction’s decadence, depicting the new society dancing over the ruins of the old in a marvellous blend of the suave and the sadistic. The scene is preceded by a title announcing ‘The Reaction’. Gance’s opening shot shows a gruff guard pulling open the heavy barred doors of a prison gate. One by one, members of the waiting throng are roughly ushered down the stone steps that descend into a space somewhere behind the camera’s view. We see Tristan move forward and read out from a long list. Thanks to the opening title and imagery of imprisonment, the audience is led to believe that this situation continues from the earlier scene in which Tristan announced the names of those about to be executed. As Gance writes in the script: ‘One might almost think there has been a mistake and that this is a repeat of a previous scene’ (1927b: 337-8). There follow two successive shots: a close-up and an extreme-close-up of a bloody handprint on the wall – a rhythmic jolt that repeats imagery from the Terror sequences. Convinced of the gravitas of the scene, the audience is absolutely unprepared for what happens next: we return to the establishing shot of Tristan, but the framing changes. The camera slowly tracks backwards, revealing that the ‘victims’ in the foreground are in fact dancing. After this delightful shock, Gance finally reveals the contents of Tristan’s list: it is a banquet menu! The next title announces: ‘In this feverish reaction of life against death, a thirst for joy seized the whole of France. 644 balls took place in the space of a few days over the tombs of the victims of the Terror.’ The factual precision of this number indicates the level of historical detail visible in the sequence. Historically, dancers wore ‘their hair tied up or cut short and a small red ribbon around their necks’ to signify the guillotined victims; guests even ‘greeted one another by imitating the motion of the head dropping into the

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scaffold’s basket’ (Kale 2004: 70). Men also ‘buttoned the collars of their coats above their heads and stuffed their shoulders so that they appeared to be walking torsos’ (Bruce 1995: 83) – a disturbing fashion sense illustrated in Gance’s sequence by the figure dressed as an aristocrat with a balloon head that he bursts with a pin. Soon, another title signals the arrival of ‘the three most celebrated beauties of the day’. Mmes Tallien, Récamier, and de Beauharnais are given lavish attention by the camera and the crowd on screen. Gance’s Thérésa Tallien (Andrée Standart) is given a resplendent entrance: beneath the roses interwoven in her locks, her haughty and empowered expression is a base of austerity in the glowing image. After this introductory close-up, Gance cuts to a wider shot of the gathered crowd, their lustful stares comically enhanced with an array of ornate eyeglasses brought to bear on Thérésa’s impeccable form. The camera appropriates their amorous gaze in a close-up that starts down at her feet and then tilts slowly up her body. As so often in Napoléon, this unashamedly voyeuristic shot invites the audience to share the perspective of characters on screen. Thérésa’s knowingly aloof expression and controlled pose, elegant staff in hand, show that she is in full control – inviting and dominant. Her sleeveless dress, with its high split up the skirt, is made of a provocatively semi-transparent material. The arched lipstick captures her slightly pouting lips in a manner that expresses the knowledge of her power, a self-conscious air of authority that dominates the room as she enters. Gance’s screenplay introduces her as ‘scantily clad, almost licentious’ and ‘queen of the easy life’ – ‘Venus of the Capitol’ (1927b: 342). Her hairstyle, specified as a ‘Titus’ coiffure, originates with the Greek and Roman styles flourishing in the 1790s. Gance captures elements of her 1804 portrait by Gérard, in which she is dressed in neo-classical finery and gazes distantly away from the viewer. Her facial expression and the guarded, assured position of her right arm give her the same air of confident power seen in Gance’s Ball. Next to arrive is Juliette Récamier (Suzy Vernon). Unlike Thérésa’s diaphanously transparent costume, Juliette’s dress at the Ball is silkily opaque. Her short sleeves avoid entirely bare limbs and her expression mixes modesty with girlish excitement – far more guarded than Thérésa’s impeccably honed coquetry. Her shy and delighted smile as rose petals flutter around her is perfectly in keeping with the youthful radiance displayed in another portrait by Gérard from 1802. Gance’s script declares: ‘The more one looks at her, the more beautiful she seems’ (1927b: 343) – reiterating the description by Auguste de Staël that ‘one finds no other pleasure than just looking at her’ when in her company (1805: 221).

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Fig. 38:  Joséphine seductively conceals her face with the fan

Joséphine’s entrance is saved for last, and, as discussed in chapter 7, her appearance draws the attention of Hoche and Bonaparte. The beauty of these moments is enhanced by the Wollensak soft-focus lens that Gance uses throughout the Victims’ Ball. The warm haze this produces is heightened by pink tinting, and their combination gives the sequence a remarkably luxuriant pictorial quality: every frame is filled with radiant highlights and rich depths of shadow. This exceptional photography makes Joséphine all the more seductive to both audience and Bonaparte. In the close-ups of her intimate conversation with the general, Joséphine’s face occupies almost the entire frame – she gazes directly into the camera, and her eyes never move or let go of her captive audience. The sensuousness of this sequence is palpable: we experience the luminosity of her eyes, the gentle rhythm of her fan (one can almost sense her perfume drifting across the table), the steady concentration of her gaze, the movement of her dark lips and the glow of her cheeks, the alternate concealment and revelation of her face behind the embroidered black fan (Figure 38). This exchange is intercut with the revelries elsewhere at the Ball: we see the prison yard swarming with smiling faces and groups of dancers, the whole room packed with flowers, the air filled with confetti. Whilst a man

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Fig. 39: The riotous dungeon of the ‘Victims’ Ball’

seems to conduct the crowd from a balcony, pairs of young women glide back and forth through the air on flowery swings that are suspended from the ceiling (Figure 39). As Joséphine asks Bonaparte what weapon he most fears, Gance’s editing rhymes the sway of her fan with the women on swings: it is as if, with this measured gesture, Joséphine controls the seductive form of movement that grows steadily more wild elsewhere in the Ball. Gance’s glamorous aesthetic titillates the audience with the luxury it presents, yet simultaneously questions its morality. He places Jospehine in the context of sexualized imagery as well as licentious company: just as Barras hovers in the background of the chess game, so Thérésa is visible behind Bonaparte as Joséphine flirtatiously uses her fan. This sequence in Napoléon contains an inversion of the scene in La Roue where Norma sits on a swing in her stepfather’s garden. Whilst Sisif watches the object of his desire in guilty secrecy, our own gaze during the Victims’ Ball is openly celebratory. Gance recruited his female dancers for Napoléon from the Folies Bergère, a Parisian music hall renowned for its erotic display. The swings at the Ball are just as florally decorative as that of Norma, but her childish embellishment in La Roue is replaced by a sense of sexual play and decadent ornament. The women at the Ball wear next to

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nothing and rhythmically swing into the camera with their raised skirts and bare legs. Norma’s unknowing sexuality, innocently flowering, is here knowingly flaunted by young women with carefree abandon. The camera hardly dares look at Norma, sharing Sisif’s discrete glance only in an isolated close-up of her bare legs; the camera at the Ball is free to play and flirt with the flesh on display. The handheld camerawork pushes the audience against bare breasts and bouncing bottoms, ignoring faces whilst ogling long white legs or scantily clad midriffs, constantly verging on the brink of indecency through imprudent angles, ever ready for a garment to reveal the young flesh beneath; it is camerawork enough to make one blush – the audience is made to lurch and leer like an effervescent dancer, stumbling around the petal-strewn floor with unashamed voyeurism. The Ball also acts as an ironic visual counterpoint to the Double Tempest. As in this earlier sequence, the camera jostles among the crowd, capturing the spontaneity and drama of dancers in an appropriately boisterous fashion. The pendulum camera of Hugo’s mighty wave is now transformed into swinging maidens embowered with flowers and bedecked with jewellery. Instead of flashes of tumbling sea spray, there are flutters of falling rose petals. Before, there had been the Three Gods; now, there are the three ‘bewitching’ women: in place of three godheads battered by crowds like rocks in a fremescent ocean, the female trio stand laughing like the Three Graces – tied to pillars by chains of flowers. From the impassioned violence of the crowded Convention, we now see the swarm of socialites in a state of giggling unconcern. Images of profound, elemental power (the wind, the waves) are replaced by shallow motives and surface decoration. Equally, the riotous Ball in Napoléon is strikingly similar to the climactic orgy sequence in La Fin du Monde, a film at whose moral centre is the battle between spiritual idealism and materialist corruption. Whilst Martial Novalic uses the last hours of life on earth to inspire humanitarian reform, the moneyed classes meet oblivion in an orgy of culinary and sexual excess. Echoing the Biblical language used to describe the revellers in Napoléon, Gance’s screenplay for La Fin du Monde describes the excessive halls of the rich as: ‘Babylon. Sodom. Gomorrah. Byzantium’ (1929a). The orgy is filmed in strikingly similar fashion to the Ball in Napoléon: handheld camerawork explores a decadent space filled with overladen tables and falling confetti, whilst the drunken crowd gorges on food and wine – their expensive costumes covered in detritus or torn away in a sexual free-for-all. In Napoléon, the corruption of the over-sated elite forestalls the spiritual and moral evolution that the messianic Bonaparte offers.

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As in so many scenes, Gance peppers the Ball with moments of comedy. When we see Tristan late in the sequence, he is clearly the worse for wine. He slumps down on a step with an empty glass and notices that the woman sitting beside him has a bottle of champagne under her arm. She is unknowingly tipping the contents all over the floor, so Tristan reaches over and helps himself to the flowing liquid. He drains his drink at the same time as he picks out bits of confetti from the glass, then looks up with a lip-smacking air of satisfaction at his alluring neighbour. Tristan smiles giddily and catches the person’s bemused gaze. As he clumsily moves in for the kiss, he knocks off her wig – revealing that the person is actually a man in drag! The man bursts out laughing and Tristan hits him with his hat before sliding onto the floor. This drunken flirtation is a comic reflection of the playful ambiguity and sexualization visible throughout the sequence. In a room filled with sadistic abandonment, Tristan’s innocent encounter is a lighthearted contrast to the complex power play of Barras, Bonaparte, Hoche, and Joséphine. The general is certainly not amused by the Ball. He grabs a nearby guest and shouts: ‘With imbeciles and layabouts like you, France is heading for the abyss.’ The dancers are stunned and stop their revelry; however, his mesmeric power lasts only for a moment – as soon as he turns away, they resume. After Bonaparte’s outburst, we see that one of his officers, Murat (Genica Missirio), is already barechested, having ripped off his hussar’s dolman in the mayhem. He sheepishly puts it back on under Bonaparte’s gaze. We have already seen Murat surrounded by young women as the Ball gets under way, and his reputation is clearly being established for the sake of future events in Gance’s Napoleonic series. He was a man whose immense bravery was excelled by personal vanity: having been rewarded with the kingdom of Naples, he became increasingly concerned with the accumulation of private wealth. After falling from power, Murat attempted to regain his throne but was executed by his own men in 1815. His last words to the firing squad were: ‘Spare the face, straight to the heart!’ (Colletta 1836: II/289) Like so many characters with a brief appearance in Napoléon, Gance provides a memorable set of details to suggest Murat’s ultimate fate. Throughout Gance’s sequence, Bonaparte remains aloof. The camerawork remains calm and static at the centre of visual and moral excess. In the original draft of the 10 August sequence, Gance notes that Bonaparte must be the only figure to remain ‘entirely stationary’, being filmed ‘with a fixed camera to cathedralize his psychology amid this upheaval’ (1924i). The final shot of the Ball underlines this sense of his focused, steady presence. Bonaparte is standing in the centre of an empty area of seating, when a

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line of dancers suddenly enter the shot and skip around him in a gleeful, dancing chain. He remains motionless as the revellers leap around him and out of the statically held frame. The contrast Gance draws between the young general and the social world he encounters directly echoes passages in Carlyle’s The French Revolution that depict Napoléon’s ‘lean, almost cruel aspect’ and isolated anger at the dancing fops: Somewhat forlorn of fortune, at present, stands that Artillery-Officer; looks, with those deep earnest eyes of his, into a future as waste as the most. Taciturn; yet with the strangest utterances in him, if you awaken him, which smite home, like light or lightning; – on the whole, rather dangerous? A ‘dissociable’ man? Dissociable enough; a natural terror and horror to all Phantasms, being himself of the genus Reality! He stands here, without work or outlook, in this forsaken manner; – glances nevertheless, it would seem, at the kind glance of Joséphine […] and, for the rest, with severe countenance, with open eyes, and closed lips, waits what will betide (1837: III/407-8).

In Napoléon, Bonaparte’s dismissive attitude to the dancers at the Ball is a further reflection of his nature as the secluded visionary. Despite his elemental magnetism, Bonaparte’s glamour is of a different order to his peers: he is absolutely unable to be charming. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche discusses the difficulty ‘overmen’ must face in engaging with society: the pervasive influence of the social order sickens the ‘strong human’, and their moral/instinctual limitations ‘fatalistically’ undermine his own unique qualities (1889: 549). In society, ‘a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or the adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal’ – only a man like Napoléon can prove himself ‘stronger than society’ and resist its corruption (ibid.). In Napoléon, an intertitle during Brienne tells us that the heroic child lives ‘in a kind of savage isolation’ – only later, amid the wild beauty of Corsica, does he seem truly united with his environment, exemplified by the lyrical series of superimpositions that unite him with his native landscape. There, Bonaparte’s extended family and the band of shepherds that aid their escape are the only social groups in which he is truly comfortable. His sympathies were to be made overt in a scene cut from the Ball sequence, wherein Bonaparte notices a group of poor people standing outside the festivities. Throwing his purse to the maître d’hôtel, he orders him to set up a buffet outside. Thérésa and others react with shock, but Bonaparte motions to the banner over the entrance: ‘the word “Equality” is spelt out in huge letters, whilst those of “Liberty” and

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“Fraternity” are buried under swathes of flowers’. ‘He has a point!’ admits Thérésa, as some of her friends begin to dance with the poor (Gance 1927b: 351-2). This moment neatly suggests the transcendence of social division that Bonaparte represents – underlining the moral message visible throughout the sequence.

8.5 Summary By highlighting his status as an outsider to the social leadership of Directoryera France, Gance foreshadows the class and gender tensions that informed Napoléon’s rise to power. The danger of moral corruption signified by men like Barras relates to Bonaparte’s political life but also to his personal future with Joséphine. Whilst the delightful and disturbing scenes of the Victims’ Ball use a great amount of historical research, they also offer a critical commentary on the society of post-war France. Bonaparte’s anger at the wastrels of the Ball echoes Jean Diaz’s denunciations of a complacent society at the climax of the 1919 J’accuse. The poet accuses the civilian population of exploiting the soldiers’ immense sacrifices for personal gain: ‘you all greedily profited from the carnage, shamelessly lining your pockets from the war!’ In Napoléon, the Ball illustrates the excesses of a decadent and politically corrupt class – it not only refers to a specific period of history but also serves as a warning to post-war Europe.

9. Death and transfiguration In classical Greek theatre a hero can only exist in the genre of tragedy, which makes people appear more than they are and lends their stature to figures who are not necessarily virtuous or attractive. The more tragic the action, the more terrible the trials to which he is subjected, the greater the hero appears. The same was true for the Romantics, who were fascinated by the concept of man living out a tragic destiny. To be interesting, a man had to be both colossus and victim (Zamoyski 2005: 556).

9.1 Introduction During his last years of exile on the island of St Helena, Napoléon reflected on the historical benefits of defeat: ‘If I had died on the throne, swathed in my military power, I would remain problematic for many people; today, thanks to misfortune, they will be able to judge me stripped bare’ (Las Cases [1822-3] 1842: I/212). Lacking its last episodes, Gance’s incomplete Napoleonic saga cannot offer the same kind of perspective on its subject matter. Its narrative having ended with a glorious triumph in 1796, Napoléon has fooled many critics into thinking its author naïvely endorses the whole of Bonaparte’s future career. To provide a more complete interpretation of Gance’s historiography, I will turn to the evidence of the two last cinematic projects he pursued during the silent era: the sixth episode of his series, Sainte-Hélène (1927-8), and the biopic Victor Hugo (1928-9). The former screenplay was completed and ready for publication, but the latter never advanced beyond an extensive folder of notes. Though both films remain unrealized, the surviving material illustrates Gance’s efforts to develop the creative imagination seen in Napoléon. Each transforms historical and literary material into an account of ‘great men’ through whom we are shown the spirit of the French Revolution and its legacy for future centuries.

9.2

From history to legend

Aided by his assistant writer Georges Buraud, Gance began drafting Sainte-Hélène in late 1927 and finished the screenplay in September 1928. Originally called ‘The Fallen Eagle’, this ‘Cinematic Tragedy in Three

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Parts’ follows the Emperor’s career from the aftermath of his defeat at Waterloo in June 1815 to his death on St Helena in May 1821. This final film was to contrast the huge scale of Bonaparte’s life and ambition against the realities of confinement. In Napoléon, we witness the child gaze fixedly at his destiny; in Sainte-Hélène, we were to see the adult perish on this ‘little island, lost in the ocean’. In a telling indicator of this contrast, Gance’s screenplay no longer refers to his character as ‘Bonaparte’ but as ‘Napoléon’. Gance was keen to emphasize the historical accuracy of the scenario: ‘All titles, without exception, are authentic and cover various aspects of life on St Helena. The author insists on the importance of this authenticity, which confers a profound truth to the simplest details.’ (1928e) In his ‘directive’ for the film, Gance explains that ‘Sainte-Hélène is conceived like a familiar, realist poem in a colossal style. It’s a kind of titanic bourgeois drama’: The whole tragedy of St Helena resides not in dramatic entanglements, but within the quotidian details and their expression through the figure of Napoléon – a man who is suddenly obliged to come to terms with a base, petty reality which persistently frustrates his genius. He is the open-winged Albatross in a tiny cage. We wanted to follow the exact events; the rigorous documentation which was used to construct these pages of history will ensure that the spectators will see nothing which did not genuinely happen. Let us repeat: this requirement of respecting the absolute truth removes us from the dramatic intrigues of an ordinary film; through our approach, along the lines of Russian cinema, we have achieved an immense day-by-day reportage of this greatest of historical tragedies. Our more sober and direct formula must yield much more powerful results than the artificial baggage of typical dramas. Here, the accumulation of real-life details gradually constructs a gigantic drama without the writer having to intervene to arrange them (ibid.).

However, as with Napoléon, the screenplay of Sainte-Hélène frequently transcends the austerity of any historical remit. Having envisioned the film with a synchronized musical score and sound effects, Gance’s directions for audio-visual rhythm demonstrate the screenplay’s competing tendencies between realist detail and symbolic rhetoric: The whole film will have to be orchestrated by the Ocean. I think that for the musical orchestration […] it will be necessary to use the noise of

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the sea as an essential, dynamic, and frightening component – with its lulls, its rages, and its sobs (ibid.).

This oceanic ‘orchestration’ of the film is immediately apparent in Gance’s description of the opening sequence: Open on the swelling high sea. The camera itself is being tossed by the waves. Dissolve, holding the fluid waves over a map which seems to emerge from their centre: the map of Corsica, then the map of the Isle of Elba, then the map of St Helena. Very slow dissolve on the head of Napoléon, filling the whole screen with fluids: the ocean and the three maps dissolve into one another. The legendary outline of the small hat; his impassive figure, like marble; a God staring into the beyond. All around, enormous waves seem to roll onto the spectators; the camera itself is always subject to the waves. Dissolve onto the gigantic stern of the Northumberland, which splits the deep. One can read the name [of the ship]: ‘Northumberland’. Michaelangelo-esque movement of the waves. Across the black stern now appears Napoléon’s writing, which another dissolve makes readable: ‘I hereby solemnly protest, in the face of heaven and man, against the violation of my most sacred rights, in forcibly disposing my person and my liberty.’ Dissolve to the stern, and panorama of the top of the stern. There, one sees only Napoléon – tiny, motionless, silhouetted in black against a stormy sky. Slow fade (ibid.).

Sainte-Hélène thus begins by setting the dark silhouette of Napoléon against the spectacle of nature: this vision of the defeated adult fulfils the premonition of the child’s shadow seen at Brienne. Gance contrasts Napoléon’s fall with the rise of the restored monarchy: whilst King Louis XVIII is mocked by his subjects, the former Emperor is surrounded by the ocean’s ‘titanic waves’. The fluid and uncertain temporal setting of the film’s opening is heightened by a series of flashbacks: the audience was to see visions of Waterloo; of Napoléon’s final abdication; of reprimands against those who had betrayed the royalist cause; of Napoléon’s absent mother, wife, and son. On board the Northumberland, Napoléon wakes up: just as the audience might doubt the reality of the preceding footage, so the character is momentarily unaware of his surroundings. He thinks he is at home in the

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Tuileries palace, but a series of ‘aural hallucinations’ from beyond Napoléon’s cabin disrupts his illusion: the ship has docked at St Helena. When Napoléon arrives in October 1815, he is forced to stay on the estate of the Balcombe family whilst his permanent residence, Longwood House, is being prepared. The surroundings were to be profoundly mournful, the Emperor’s solemn face superimposed over a sequence of desolate views. This was to recall the lyrical images of the young Bonaparte arriving home in Napoléon – a point Gance himself notes: ‘Make a parallel to what I did for Corsica in my first film’ (1928-9). A vital aspect of SainteHélène was to be the use of landscape and location photography: the eerie setting of Napoléon’s last years transforms a naturalist mise-en-scène into a symbolic drama of emptiness and isolation. As with the final half of La Roue, where lyrical location photography makes the clouds and mountain scapes the site of spiritual transcendence, Gance wanted to use the geography of St Helena to create a similarly elevated atmosphere for Napoléon’s Golgotha. As with Napoléon, comedic episodes provide ironic counterpoint to the tragic course of Sainte-Hélène. Napoléon’s relationship with the Balcombes’ young daughter, Betsy, provides a touching mix of humour and pathos. In one scene, Napoléon plays the monster: Betsy is in a tree, making fun of the monstrous ‘Boney’. Suddenly, she hears a branch break and a fearful voice issue from the unknown: ‘What is the capital of France?’ ‘Paris.’ ‘What is the capital of Russia?’ ‘St Petersburg now; it used to be Moscow.’ ‘What happened to Moscow?’ ‘It burned down.’ ‘Who burned Moscow?’ ‘Bo – …uh, maybe the Russians… I don’t know…’ ‘I burned Moscow!’ bellows Napoléon, in a terrible voice (Gance 1928e).

Napoléon then leaps out and grabs Betsy by the hair, laughing as he chases her around. Gance notes to emphasize the ‘enormous buffoonery, the fundamental ingenuity’ of Napoléon and the ‘sad irony of the scene’: Here must appear one of the film’s essential themes: the imprisoned force within Napoléon which wants to break out, the playful demon, the diabolic mischievousness – the rustic Italian who conquered the world,

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who carries in his blood the ‘commedia del’arte’ and a love for marionette theatre. This will soon develop into the tragic (ibid.).

Napoléon and his remaining supporters – Generals Montholon and Bertrand, and their families – move into the damp, mouldy accommodation at Longwood. Upon his arrival, the Emperor is greeted by a large rat, with which he exchanges a lengthy stare. The next arrival is Hudson Lowe, the man in charge of the Emperor’s confinement. ‘General Buonaparte?’ the Englishman asks, echoing the numerous references to Napoléon’s Italian name and accent in Gance’s first film. The small-minded Lowe was a famously poor choice for governor of Longwood, and much of Sainte-Hélène develops out of the friction between the two men – minor incidents take on huge significance in the petty struggles of everyday activity. Gance’s screenplay outlines the ensuing drama: All the great evils, the vultures of exile, will swoop down on this rock and gnaw at the flank of Prometheus: poverty, dissension, loneliness, boredom, paternal suffering. Time after time, Napoléon’s soul will be visited by these tragic spectres; one day […] they will form a circle around it, like lemurs around Faust’s corpse, gathering together during the five years of terrible agony. However, the hero’s soul will surmount them; it will transcend suffering, transcend men; after fighting against them, it will cross Fire, Water, Air, and arrive at the supreme conquests of the spirit purified by death (ibid.).

Sainte-Hélène was not only a drama about the isolated fate of its central protagonist but a reflection on wider historiographic narratives. Gance’s screenplay for this final episode consciously revisits and reworks ideas from his 1927 film – completing the cyclical structure of his biography. In Napoléon, the child must listen to the geography teacher insult his native Corsica; in Sainte-Hélène, the exiled adult is forced to take English lessons. Whilst conjugating simple phrases, the name of Napoléon’s jailer unconsciously enters his prose: ‘I lowe my country, you lowe your country, we lowe our country’ (ibid.). Just as at school, his writing is controlled by the cultural guardians of the old order: Longwood is another Brienne College. The fallen emperor decides to stage a marionette show for the local children, which gives him a chance to narrate his own life. Gance’s intriguing sequence was to be accompanied by the music of Charles Gounod’s comically macabre Marche funèbre d’une marionnette and would feature elaborate stencil tinting to evoke early nineteenth-century chromolithograph prints

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of Napoleonic battles. The show consists of Napoléon recreating his historical career in miniature but ends with an account of his own death – a disturbing self-acknowledgement of his fate. In later scenes of Sainte-Hélène, Napoléon and his Polish aide, Pionkowski, plot their escape from the island to forge a new empire in Mexico or South America – fantasizing about the kind of future Louis Geoffroy’s apocryphal history would elaborate in the 1830s. Gance’s screenplay proceeds to emphasize the void between these dreams and Napoléon’s real position: bouts of illness make the exile increasingly immobile, whilst the physical environment of Longwood itself begins to disintegrate. Napoléon can only recall a lost past or envision impossible future realities – he is unaware that his real legacy is being shaped beyond St Helena. Gance lists a series of scenes in which we see statues of Napoléon selling in England, European authors taking inspiration in their work from the exile, and children tracing his name in the stars. The final scenes of Sainte-Hélène are amongst the most extraordinary in Gance’s vast collection of unrealized projects, and offer the best evidence of his interpretation of the Napoleonic inheritance. Hudson Lowe systematically expels those closest to the exile – each departing friend ‘comes to hammer his nail into Napoléon’s crucified soul’ (ibid.). An English doctor arrives at Longwood and his prescription of purges and inactivity sees the health of Napoléon rapidly decline. Finally confined to his bed, Napoléon has a series of feverish visions that Gance planned to intercut with details of his surroundings: Napoléon speaks to the shades of the Revolution around his bed. Cromwell, Washington, Danton, and Robespierre are present. Their unfathomable gaze reveals the heavens above him, filled with heroes and ideas. Cromwell leans over and wipes the sweat from his brow […] The rats now control Longwood. Fear reigns. No one tries to drive them out. They pullulate. They take joyous delight in gnawing away amid their filth. Save for the kitchens and the Emperor’s apartment, where the inhabitants now shelter, they have invaded everywhere. We can see them swarming even in the Emperor’s boots, where they have made a fortress. In contrast: a view of the island of St Helena, like the altar of a dying God. Marvellous vision, as in [the paintings of Arnold] Böcklin. A basalt island of blackest marble like an Acropolis or a Calvary in the middle of a silvered, nocturnal sea […] ‘The waves illuminate the night by the so-called light-of-the-sea, a light produced by the myriads of mating insects, electrified by storms, lighting on the surface of the abyss the

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Fig. 40:  An inspiration for Gance’s unrealized depiction of St Helena: Arnold Böcklin’s Die Toteninsel (1883)

illuminations of a universal wedding. The shadow of the island, obscure and fixed, rests in the midst of a seething expanse of diamonds’ [Chateaubriand (1849-50: VII/133)] (Gance 1928e).

As well as absorbing Chateaubriand’s lengthy description of St Helena into his text, Gance also alludes to Böcklin’s famous series of paintings Die Toteninsel (‘The Isle of the Dead’) (Figure 40). The f ilmmaker thus establishes his ‘historical’ scene by quoting two highly f ictionalized accounts: Chateaubriand had never visited St Helena, whilst Böcklin described the island in his paintings as a ‘dream image’ and refused to identify its source or meaning (Bürger/Christ 1977: 201). In the finale of the silent J’accuse, Gance uses a combination of matte-painted sky and location photography when depicting the rise of the dead; in SainteHélène, he sought a similar unification of artifice and reality to depict the last hours of a life. Napoléon cries out to his dead generals, deliriously dictating orders to phantom armies. As the storm wind blows open the window, we were to see a surreal ‘Tableau of Rats’ – a ‘ferocious’ rodent legion that ‘dances during [Napoléon’s] agony’. Amongst these groups, ‘a solitary rat performs a comic, macabre step’; in a series of close-ups, we see innumerable ‘gleaming little eyes and large whiskers’. Gance’s final direction for the scene is to show the ‘general Sabbath of the Rats’ (1928e) – an astonishing image that seems to defy cinematic realization. Equally ambitious is his description of the Emperor’s delirium: ‘The clock beats. Time dances over Napoléon’s

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deathbed’; the dying man vomits and ‘an acrid, black fluid floods over his sheets’; in superimposition, ‘a Hindu god – Shiva the destroyer – in a hideous laughing mask, with multiple arms, dances’ (ibid.). As these nightmarish interior scenes become increasingly fervid, the exteriors around St Helena grow more violent: The sea mounts an assault on the isle; terrible waves seem to want to climb the granite cliffs; the whole ocean rises to see Prometheus die. Strange shadows brood over the plateau and on the mountainsides. Inland, the wind blows in scalding flurries. (Create the perfect synchronism of the wind and the sea in the orchestra with the crescendo of images.) Title: ‘The End’ Sky. Sea. Napoléon immobile. The grasping form of a black tree. Napoléon is on his back, as if looking at the horizon of the ocean. Absolute immobility: a tableau synthesizing the futility of all effort and human desolation (ibid.).

The Emperor has visions of his son, of Joséphine, and of his mother. Finally, he says his last words: ‘Tête… d’armée…’ The vision materializes – seeming to leave his lips, the head of a giant column carrying tricolours and singing: the eternal Republic is leaving this soul to go and conquer the world until the end of time; and this sigh of divine breath brings forth the impression of a radiant fresco, of a free and colossal force singing a Beethovian march. We see the vaporous column of thousands of soldiers and their heroic laughter, erasing behind it the dying man’s fading lips. And now a kind of apotheosis, evoking the triumph of liberated humanity, a heroic march: that of Beethoven, Schiller, Schubert – and Napoléon. Over an immense frontage this radiant crowd spreads out and advances: men, youths, women, children – their eyes filled with light and courage, a march of power and joy, which sings. (Both images and orchestra must possess the rhythm and theme of Beethoven’s heroic march from the finale of the Ninth Symphony.) Suddenly an absolute silence fills our ears and eyes – everything dies away. And slowly the image of the mask of Napoléon’s motionless profile is formed, the corner of his lips drawn tight. He is no more. (At the moment this image appears, a terrifying bolt of lightning shatters the silence.) (ibid.)

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Gance’s next sequence was inspired by ‘The Night Review’, a ballad by Austrian poet Joseph Christian von Zedlitz in which the ghosts of France’s legions gather round their ‘dead Caesar’ in the moonlit Champs Elysées (1829: 16-18). In Sainte-Hélène, the spirits of soldiers from the Empire march alongside Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. Amid ‘a symphony of flames’, this huge procession advances across the horizon towards Europe ‘to take possession of human imagination for all eternity’. There follows a ‘Vision of the Apocalypse’ on the horizon of the ocean: the ghosts of kings rise up to bar Bonaparte’s army of the Revolution but are defeated and evaporate in the clouds. The sun rises over a calm ocean: ‘Smiling, Napoléon and the Revolution pass’. The Napoleonic legend is spread in France and ‘across the most remote regions of the world’. This ‘gracious and heroic flight of ideas’ inspires ‘the opening of souls’ around the earth: The children of the Revolution, the sons of the Emperor, spread themselves throughout the universe and take root wherever they land. Entering each house and each heart, they overturn human consciences. Each home is inundated with light and happiness; each inhabitant becomes more courageous and prouder of being alive […] Thanks to this miraculous elixir, selfhood is supplanted by a united humanity. Each heart is made braver and more luminous; each conscience more liberal, more just, more fraternal. Across the farthest reaches of the globe, they live and inspire Love; they have won over the Earth forever. From the oldest to the youngest, men, women, and children: the whole world sings. The legend of Napoléon has begun in the imagination of mankind (ibid.).

In Napoléon, Bonaparte promises that the ‘Universal Republic’ will eventually be created ‘without cannon and without bayonet’; the final vision of Sainte-Hélène suggests that the spiritual revolution will realize what the material upheavals of the Napoleonic era failed to achieve. Those who cite Napoléon as ‘the Prometheus of democracy’ (Guérard 1924: 230) forcefully argue that his social legacy has proved to be as permanent as his military achievements were ephemeral. The legislative code formed during his reign was a model of tolerance and is still the basis of much European and international civil law; it remains ‘one of the few documents which have influenced the whole world’ (Holtman 1967: 88). Napoléon himself observed: ‘My glory isn’t to have won 40 battles […] Waterloo will erase the memory of as many victories […] It is my civil code that will never be erased and which will live forever’ (Montholon 1847: I/401). Gance’s Sainte-Hélène

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emphasizes the fact that Napoléon possessed an international appeal in his fight against the oppressive hierarchy of monarchies and absolutism. As I highlighted in chapter 1, he appeared as ‘catalyst, deliverer, and saviour’ to generations of aspiring reformists – Napoléon’s reign ‘let in a blast of fresh air and modernity’ and he became a ‘kind of avatar’ for innumerable liberal causes in the decades after his fall (Zamoyski 2005: 157-60). The ending of Sainte-Hélène allows Napoleonic enthusiasm to escape the confines of a historically determined narrative: the vision Gance offers is of a future whose outcome has yet to be decided. After his death, Napoléon is no longer a source of conflict and contradiction within the world – his achievements can now provide inspiration for a new century. These issues are foregrounded in the epilogue to Sainte-Hélène, which Gance sets at Les Invalides in the 1920s. In an eerily lit close-up, we see Napoléon’s final resting place. His spirit ‘leaves his tomb’ and passes unnoticed through groups of tourists who are talking about him. Napoléon’s shade goes to the Arc de Triomphe and visits the tomb of the ‘Unknown Soldier’, where the remains of an unidentified Frenchman killed during the Great War were interred on Armistice Day, 1920. Afterwards, the Emperor’s spirit returns along the Champs Elysées and re-enters his sepulchre; the films ends as ‘the great Shadow fades away’ (Gance 1928e). Whether in the form of personal loyalty to lost lovers or national fealty to fallen comrades, the afterlife of the dead is a recurring feature in Gance’s films. Cinema becomes the ultimate site of reconciliation between the past and the present; in Sainte-Hélène, the ghost of Napoléon acknowledges the sacrifices of the twentieth century – just as, in life, he had promised the ghosts of the Convention that he would fulfil their mission. By resurrecting Napoléon after the Great War, Gance calls for a renewed spirit of internationalism through the legacy of the French Revolution.

9.3

From individualism to universalism

As Sainte-Hélène contains the last testimony of the Napoleonic era, so Gance’s subsequent project explores an artist who inherited its spirit of creative ambition. Victor Hugo was conceived in 1926, but the screenplay was only begun in earnest once Gance had read Raymond Escholier’s literary biography La Vie glorieuse de Victor Hugo, published in 1928. Just as the curator Georges d’Esparbès had encouraged the writing of Napoléon at Fontainebleau, so Escholier ran the ‘Maison Victor Hugo’ museum in Paris and was keen to give Gance his support. The filmmaker and the historian

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met in December 1928 and corresponded during the following year as the project developed. Gance envisioned Hugo as ‘the Prometheus of language’; this ‘true element of nature’ is a ‘demonic and prophetic force who transcends the arrogance of individual will’ (1926-8). His social importance is as an artist who comes to understand, and to proclaim, the universal significance of Revolutionary values. Over the course of his long career, Hugo occupied the antithetical positions that defined the nineteenth century: his father supported Napoléon, but his mother was a royalist; he began life as a devout monarchist but became the mouthpiece of republicanism; he maintained a faith in God but attacked religious orthodoxies. Gance wanted to avoid the ‘feeling of disorientation and inconsistency’ apparent in so many accounts of this contradictory figure (ibid.). His biopic would reconfigure Hugo’s inner life into cinematic forms, making tangible a complex set of abstract historical forces: Beneath the sentimental and political levels of biography, another narrative must develop: a Vision of Universal Images, dissembled and reconstructed through Hugo’s imagination ([and achieved cinematically] through special effects); this will be a veritable ocean, the flux and reflux of a giant soul moving in tandem with the evolution of events, of men, and of the universe itself; – a tumult of love visualized on the screen, in whose midst will swim, disappearing and reappearing, the scattered elements of biography (ibid.).

The film was to start in a ‘mysterious forest’ high in the Vosges Mountains. Léopold Hugo claimed his son had been conceived here, close to a Celtic temple near the summit of Mont Donon. Victor would amend this story by replacing the Donon with Mont Blanc, a far higher mountain which lies ‘at the intersection of France, Switzerland, and Italy’ – this meant that ‘the embryo of Victor Hugo came into a major crossroads of world history: even before he had legs to walk on, he was following in the footsteps of Hannibal and Napoléon’ (Robb 1997: 3-4). Gance may have preferred to keep Léopold’s original location because of its significance later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mont Donon marks the border of Alsace, a territory that had been annexed by Germany in 1871 and was only reclaimed in 1918 after years of vicious fighting throughout the Vosges during the Great War. Gance’s film would thus begin on the fault line between two centuries and at the centre of Europe’s traumatic past. Léopold Hugo was a general in Napoléon’s army, and his son Victor accompanied him to Spain during the Peninsular War. In 1855, Adèle Hugo

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recorded her father’s memory that his very first lines of poetry were devoted to the Emperor: ‘The great Napoléon / Fights like a lion’ (1968-2002: IV/327). In following Hugo’s wartime childhood and youthful literary successes, Gance links artistic endeavour with the conquests of Napoléon. One early episode of Victor Hugo is called ‘The Two Islands’ and contains a vision of Corsica and Elba and a ‘superimposition of the silhouette and face of Bonaparte’ (Gance 1926-8). Slowly abandoning his youthful royalism, Hugo eventually voices an internationalist belief in the ‘Universal Republic’. His art becomes a conduit for the world’s political evolution: He forged a heroic symphony from the cauldron of elements that the great liberating revolution set ablaze; but this work burned out, victim to his monstrously egotistic will. [Now his challenge is] to forge ahead with the poem of political freedom, the apostolic mission [to transform] Napoleonic individualism into democratic universalism; this will be the summative internal history of nineteenth-century France, a history whose various phases Hugo will incarnate with the irrepressible certainty of a force of nature. Here is the ideal rhythm of this biography, which must be the f ilm’s fundamental tempo (ibid.).

Like Napoléon, Hugo must endure exile in order to construct his legacy. After supporting the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, he opposes Louis-Napoléon’s coup in 1851 and is forced to flee France and take refuge in Brussels. At the heart of Victor Hugo is the artist’s subsequent period of isolation in the Channel Islands: first on Jersey (1852-5), then on Guernsey (1855-70). This section of Gance’s film opens with ‘a grandiose Ocean Prelude’ in which personal and political events are synthesized into a ‘symphonic seascape’ (ibid.). The incomplete notes for this sequence offer a fascinating insight into Gance’s working process as he slowly dissolves the literary texts of Escholier’s biography and Hugo’s work into his screenplay: In the middle of this world of tempests, eternal dreams, and ferocious melancholy, every modulation of Hugo’s face from youth to adulthood emerges and overlaps the last. This enormous, mutating head remains as impermeable as an element as it furls [across the screen], appearing and disappearing amid a series of extraordinarily beautiful waves. One has the impression that nothing can erase it – it is like a block of granite. Soon, other visions arise: all the dramatic heroes, the novels, and the poems born from this genius. They are the diverse incarnations of a new Proteus, the precipitate of a primordial Element.

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With these strange beings mingle [images of] Napoléon; ‘my father with so gentle a smile’; then Léopoldine, Adèle, Juliette; indistinct, fleeting women like sirens – it is as if we can see into Hugo’s very soul. Then dissolve to page 317 of Escholier: ‘the odour of the wild tide’, which we stay with and from whence emerge the next great visions […] Tolling bells that sound amid the waves; soon the sea falls away […] [We fly up] into the sky, over the towers of Paris […] [We see] flashes from the terrible repressions of the swelling revolution; glimpses of the departing exiles, of proscriptions, of martyrs. Realize the minor details up to the end of page 319 (like a screenplay): all the Shakespearean visions, the memories and sudden bursts of revolt – then bathe in the visual vibration of bells and sublime dissolves of the sea, which rises and falls in endless succession […] Title: ‘Since Paider’s law chased him from Brussels, Victor Hugo lives as one of the men of the sea’ (1926-8).

Gance’s restless visual imagination was the perfect vehicle to explore Hugo’s creative mindset. In exile, surrounded by the ocean, he wrote: I live in a splendid isolation, as if perched on the tip of a rock, having all the vast foaming waves and all the great clouds of the sky under my window; I inhabit this immense dream of the ocean and slowly I become a sleepwalker of the sea. It is from this eternal contemplation that I wake up from time to time to write. In each stanza or page that I write, there is always something of the shadow of the cloud and the saliva of the sea; my thoughts float to and fro, as unravelled by all this gigantic oscillation of the infinite (Hugo 1856: 238).

Gance perfectly captures this idea that ‘The English Channel should be counted as one of the main influences on Hugo’s style’ (Robb 1997: 331). Whilst the dying Bonaparte is haunted by his past in Sainte-Hélène, the exiled artist finds inspiration for the future in Victor Hugo: Guernsey may be a ‘new St Helena’, but Hugo’s exile was one ‘without remorse’ (Pelleport 1860: 11-12). As he had done on Corsica for Napoléon, Gance planned to shoot much of Victor Hugo in the locations where historical events had taken place. He was particularly keen to use Hauteville House, Hugo’s home on Guernsey, the ownership of which had been granted to the municipal authority of Paris in 1927. This site is characterized by an extraordinary set of interior spaces which the exile personally designed and decorated: this surreal homemade

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décor still possesses ‘a mysterious life’, and visitors often have ‘the uncanny sensation of being followed by a familiar shadow’ as they explore its unusual layout (Delalande 1947: 12-13). Hugo’s pyramidal conception of the house leads from the dimly lit public rooms on the ground floor up to the glass ‘lookout’ on the roof; here, he stood to write at his desk that overlooked the sea and the distant sight of France on the horizon. Throughout the house, there are innumerable riddles, macabre jokes, and sinister Latin puns written into the fabric of the rooms. Hauteville would act as a perfect pre-built set for Gance to illustrate the exile’s expressive creativity. By re-enacting the past on location in Guernsey, Gance was also engaging with a site that Hugo believed was shared by the living and the dead. In the dining room, a chair was set aside for departed ‘ancestors’; in the ‘oak gallery’, a bed faced a panel of three empty chairs labelled ‘Pater’, ‘Mater’, and ‘Filius’ – this uninhabited room had no purpose other than its peculiar symbolism of death and judgement. As I mentioned in chapter 1, Hugo became involved with spiritualism and undertook numerous ‘tabletapping’ séances whilst in exile. He became convinced of the veracity of this recent craze when the spirit of his late daughter announced her presence in September 1853, almost exactly ten years since Hugo was told of her death. Léopoldine had drowned at sea alongside her husband, an event that exacerbated Hugo’s lifetime obsession with his daughter beyond the tomb. As well as exemplifying personal loyalty to the departed, the Hugos are yet another oedipal family in Gance’s work: the director lists Léopoldine alongside Adèle (Hugo’s wife) and Juliette Drouet (Hugo’s mistress) as the three central women of the film. Grief-inspired séances were to be an essential aspect of Victor Hugo: we were to see the author ‘interrogating the tomb [and] questioning Death’ (Gance 1926-8). The large number of séance texts to have survived reveal that Hugo was ‘visited’ by historical and Biblical figures (Aristotle, Moses, Hannibal); great writers (Byron, Molière, Shakespeare); angels, aliens, or genii loci (Amelia, Tyatafia, ‘the Ocean’); and by abstract ideas (‘Drama’, ‘Inspiration’, ‘the Shadow of the Sepulchre’). Gance’s ambition to realize this delightfully odd set of ‘characters’ was extraordinarily ambitious; in mobilizing twentieth-century film technology, he wanted to draw upon the legacy of drawing and photography produced by Hugo in the nineteenth century. These inky visions of nocturnal ruins, abstract seascapes, distant planets, and surreal dreamscapes offer intriguing evidence for the aesthetic design of Gance’s unmade film. The cinematic arts of matte-painting, colour tinting and toning, and superimposition were to mark the conciliation of graphic manipulation with the immaterial substances of light and shadow. The

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evocation of spirits and visions through special effects was to offer Gance’s technical experimentation ‘an almost boundless opportunity for invention and renewal’, transforming the cinematic screen into ‘an organ with the hundred keyboards of Hugo’s soul’ (ibid.). Though Hugo’s séance sessions took place solely on Jersey and ceased in late 1855, Gance’s film emphasizes their continuing importance to his later activity on Guernsey. This was part of a wider concern with depicting the author’s transition from political egotism to spiritual universalism. The visions related in Victor Hugo are most often concerned with a pantheist conception of the universe, creating common ground between the philosophies of Hugo and Gance. As I discussed in chapter 2, Gance believed cinema was uniquely capable of expressing the ‘hidden’ truths that exist beyond phenomenological reality. He wrote that it is thanks to his engagement with spiritualism that Hugo’s work allows ‘objects and even concepts [to] become sentient creatures’ (ibid.). Presaging Gance’s own faith in the power of film, Hugo’s literature was absolutely concerned with the revelation of animist life within the material world and the existence of spiritual consciousness in abstract immateriality. By dealing with these issues in Victor Hugo, Gance hoped to ‘render the inner reality of space’; audiences could experience how ‘the sentient tree pronounces oracles’ and understand the animist unity of creation evidenced by the natural world (ibid.). Crucially, the expansion of this personal philosophy was to have wider implications. The exteriorization of Hugo’s ‘internal drama’ serves to vivify ‘the great dramatic protagonists of the divine revolution’ (ibid.). His art begins to formulate a new, universal religion: the legion of alien spirits and literary characters that surround him evidence ‘the creation of the supreme myth’ that will overthrow the ‘ancient myths’ of the past (ibid.). Gance’s desire to visualize the intellectual/verbal content of poetry also indicates the expressive direction of this ‘divine revolution’: Hugo’s art becomes a harbinger of cinematic communication. Through the artist, ‘we follow the Revolution transposing itself into [a] universal interpretation’, a ‘sublime metamorphosis’ that ‘destroys’ or ‘breathes new life’ into ‘ancient and traditional ideologies’. This ‘germination of new virtues’ was to be the ‘formidable and irresistible cadence’ that transforms the ‘grandiose biography’ of Victor Hugo into ‘a poem and a revelation’ (ibid.). The notes for Gance’s screenplay become increasingly religiose, elaborating on Hugo’s role as a modern ‘mystic’. The author comes to discover that ‘the idea of Revolution adheres to the idea of miracles’:

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The Revolution is nothing other than the very rhythm of peoples and the universe, and each diverse revolution is part of the procession of miracles by which they maintain their divine existence […] In the depths of his genius, [Hugo] transposes the miracle in Revolution, and within his soul he churns and condenses these storm-clouds which will later burst in avenging lightnings and torrents of light in his poetical Apocalypse (ibid.).

Thus, the artist is no longer considered as an individual but as ‘a collective character’ who embodies the concerted enthusiasm of the French Revolution. This ‘humanity-Hugo’ is the ‘first initiator’ of ‘a new poetical education of the human race’ (ibid.). He inspires the expression of the Revolutionary spirit in the work of artists and thus the distribution of ideas to the wider population. Hugo is therefore the inheritor of the Napoleonic legacy, as spelled out in Sainte-Hélène. From being a ‘fragment of humanity’, one bound by the constraints of individual and national identity, he becomes a citizen ‘of all humanity’; his soul ‘struggles through lightning to dilate and expand into the conscience of the Universe’, and his art ‘merges with the revolutionary instinct of our planet’ (ibid.). The utopian future Gance desires is one in which the abstract barriers that disrupt communication between human beings are abolished: Victor Hugo prophesizes a world in which ‘imagination is no longer simply personal’ and where ‘faith becomes a collective imagination’ (ibid.). Returning to France after the fall of Napoléon III in 1870, Hugo is present during the siege of Paris and the establishment of the Third Republic. By the time of his death in May 1885, he has become a legendary figure across the world. Over 2,000,000 mourners attended his funeral (more than the entire population of Paris), and Gance planned to use this event to portray the diverse social community the artist inspired. Hugo’s death was seen as the ‘unofficial end of the nineteenth century’, and every conceivable group or organization sent a delegation: ‘war veterans, civil servants, artists and writers, animal-lovers and schoolchildren’ marched alongside gymnasts, prostitutes, representatives of department stores, and feminist suffragettes (Robb 1997: 524-32). Thanks to the fairground atmosphere of seething crowds, commercial stalls, and lack of policing, the funeral turned into ‘something between a mythical regeneration and a moral disgrace’ (ibid.: 528). The Catholic press was outraged by ‘the absence of any religious thought’ in Hugo’s final testimony – they deemed that he had ‘outraged God’ and would ‘suffer for all eternity’ (L’Univers 1885: 2). The author continued to insult tradition after his death. For his benefit, the Church of St Geneviève

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in Paris once more became the national mausoleum of the Panthéon – the fourth deconsecration of this site in its history. During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, various ‘great men’ had been interred there by the state; yet even during this period, reactionary interruptions resulted in the disinterment of some inhabitants. (Marat had suffered this fate in 1794, and it was rumoured that Voltaire’s remains had been expelled in 1814.) In 1885, the state permanently annexed this church, leading to many more artists and social thinkers being honoured with burial (or reburial) in the Panthéon. Men whose political positions were anathema to the Catholic, monarchical past (such as Emile Zola, the liberal politician Léon Gambetta, and the assassinated Socialist leader Jean Jaurès) were enshrined by the state. By highlighting the inauguration of this secular pantheon, Gance’s film celebrates the potential for art to supersede religious power. As Napoléon’s death engenders future eras in Sainte-Hélène, so the artist’s funeral in Victor Hugo becomes an apotheosis that unites history and modernity. As Hugo was born on the borderland between pre- and postGreat War France, so his funeral culminates with the symbolic fusion of the Napoleonic era with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: In the midst of a phantasmagoria of wind-whipped flames, in extraordinary low-key lighting, the pale Arc de Triomphe rises in the night, shrouded in colossal veils. [The sculpture of] La Marseillaise appears over the shroud. People in delirium, overexcited by glory and death, kneel beneath the chestnut trees in the balmy surroundings of the Champs-Elysées, to pray and to show their love […] The Arc itself must seem the true tomb. Hold for a long time, like a funeral dirge, this fateful and imposing vision. It fades slowly in the morning light. Close on the Emperor’s tomb in Les Invalides – and the tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Gance 1926-8).

The visual similarity of this scene to the finale of Sainte-Hélène is also echoed musically. Gance states that both sequences were to use Berlioz’s Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, a work written to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the July Revolution of 1830. This event marked the erection of the ‘Colonne de Juillet’, a monument in the centre of the Place de la Bastille (site of the former prison) that honoured those who fell during the uprising in Paris. The column was itself built upon the remains of two previous monuments: a founding stone placed in 1792 for a proposed site dedicated to the fall of the Bastille, and the base of the incomplete Napoleonic statue

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‘L’éléphant de la Bastille’. The foundations of the ‘Colonne de Juillet’ were later used to store the remains of victims of the 1848 Revolution, and the Place de la Bastille saw the symbolic burning of King Louis-Philippe’s throne. By his choice of setting and music, Gance therefore places the apotheosis of Victor Hugo at the heart of political change in French history: the fallen artist was equal to the fallen soldier, and his legacy was all the more revolutionary.

9.4 Summary In exile, Napoléon described himself as a ‘new Prometheus’ who ‘stole fire from heaven and gave it to France’ (1821-5: IV/414). That the world had rejected this great gift of enlightenment was proof, for Gance, that men ‘always crucify their gods’ (1930: 36). His thoughts echo Nietzsche’s statement that humanity always ‘misunderstands its benefactors’ (1889: 548) – the ‘great men’ of history were perennially destroyed by the moral limitations of their age. Arguing that his ‘Shakespearean’ tragedy of Sainte-Hélène demonstrated ‘the Passion of Man’ (1927-8), Gance’s biographical project offers a fatalistic account of death and transfiguration. In Victor Hugo, the writer transposes the spiritual legacy of Napoléon into communicative art – the very goal Gance pursued through cinema. Gance’s fixation with exiles began to match his own isolation from filmmaking control in the years after Napoléon. When it became apparent that no funding could be raised to produce Sainte-Hélène in France, he sold this screenplay to Lupu Pick – a Romanian-born director who worked in Germany. Though he had actually auditioned for the role of Bonaparte in Gance’s film in 1924, Pick was not interested in mimicking the grandiose plans of his friend. He and his co-author Willy Haas set about severely reducing the original screenplay and ignored the additional material Gance enthusiastically supplied for their consideration. Pick’s film starred Werner Krauss as the exiled Emperor and was released as Napoleon auf St Helena in November 1929. Clearly disappointed by the film’s tame ambition and tangential resemblance to his conception, Gance tried (unsuccessfully) to publish his screenplay in France. By this time, he was already at work on Victor Hugo and on his first sound film, La Fin du Monde. Even during the difficult production of the latter, Gance continued to press the French government to fund Victor Hugo. He reminded officials that ‘cinema is a prodigious instrument of moral education and of international civilization’ and that collaborations between film and state ‘must be vigorously pursued’

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(Gance 1929b). However, not even assurances that Victor Hugo would ‘consecrate all my art and my love for Paris’ (Gance 1929c) could persuade the authorities to finance his project. La Fin du Monde was a catastrophe so great that it nearly ended Gance’s career, and he would never be able to realize his grandiose projects of the 1920s. Historians may be thankful that so much evidence has survived its creator – an idea that comforted those isolated artists of previous centuries. The ‘oak gallery’ of Hauteville House had been offered as accommodation by Hugo to Giuseppe Garibaldi, a fellow exile who fought for Italian liberty. However, the famous rebel never visited Guernsey and the room was left uninhabited, its empty bed facing three empty chairs – as if the spirit of reform were awaiting its final judgement. On the headboard of the bed is a macabre sculpture depicting a skull, half-covered with flesh, and the motto ‘Nox – Mors – Lux’ (night, death, light). In an adjacent corner of the room, hidden behind a curtain, is a small staircase leading up to the writing-den of the ‘look-out’: this marvellous architectural joke signifies that the artist’s work offers an escape from extinction. Gance’s last projects of the silent era, Sainte-Hélène and Victor Hugo, are similarly concerned with the journey from the nox of life to the lux of a transformative afterlife. Chateaubriand wrote: ‘Alive, Napoléon lost the world; dead, he regained it’ (1849-50: VII/126) – a similar motto might be said of Hugo’s journey from exiled egoist to citizen of ‘all humanity’. For Gance, the great legacy of the nineteenth century was its transformation of the Revolution into a collective, populist source of imagination. His films were to be part of this reconquest of the moral world, placing art at the centre of social reform. Even though his Napoleonic and Hugolian projects remain incomplete, the fragments that survive are more than enough to provoke an inspiring sense of wonder.



Conclusion: The case for enthusiasm I wish tomorrow’s cinema to be the true image for which it was invented: a school of exuberance, energy, grandeur, power, of the metamorphosis of man beyond himself […] We must live out delirious fantasies, live perpetually in that intellectual exaltation which alone can jolt us out of that slow, so slow, biological rut of miserable evolution. We have to jump ever forward through hoops aflame with our own possibilities, never stopping at the dumbfounded sneering of bystanders. No matter how sublime the theatre or cinema we achieve, there will always be somebody to listen, to watch, even if they are only that part of ourselves which we have left behind on the way (Gance 1956-7 cited in Kaplan 1994: 44).

*** In the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo’s conversion from monarchism to republicanism was aesthetic as well as political. He argued that ‘Language was the State’ until 1789, whereupon the French Revolution unleashed the expressive potential of art (Hugo 1834: 31). La Marseillaise was not just a national hymn but an artistic call to arms: ‘Aux armes, prose and verse! Formez vos bataillons!’ Acting as the Danton and Robespierre of language, Hugo claimed to have ‘stormed and demolished the Bastille of rhymes’; traditional expressive formulae were the kings and titled aristocrats of language, making the Revolutionary poet ‘the devastator of the old abcd’ who ‘declares all words equal, free, adult’. Thus, it is through popular art that the Revolution remains ‘vibrant in the air, in voices, in books. / In living words, the reader feels her life. / She shouts, she sings, she instructs, she laughs’ (ibid.: 30-7). This project of liberation was continued by the Modernists of the twentieth century. Blaise Cendrars’s essay ‘L’a bc du cinéma’ draws a breathless route from ancient civilizations to the birth of photography and the ‘Eternal Revolution’ of cinema. Thanks to filmmaking, the ‘floodgates of the new language are open’ and ‘everything becomes possible’ – modern art could construct ‘The Gospel of Tomorrow’ (1919-21: 165). Through this utopian ideology, Abel Gance traced a direct path from the French Revolution to his own work as a filmmaking artist. In the 1920s, Gance’s reanimation of the Napoleonic myth was a reaction to the realities of a divided modern Europe; his film sought to inject post-war society with an impetus for change. The same year that Gance began his project, the Austrian author Robert Musil reflected on the need

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for a renewed sense of fraternal enterprise in a European culture that had entered ‘a period of discouragement’ (1923: 151). From the perspective of ‘an age that has given up on itself’, he looked back at previous eras of optimism that were defined by the ‘desire, will, [and] hope’ to ‘cast aside’ nation-states and religious institutions for the sake of social evolution. Conservatism and nationalism were symptoms of moral timidity: ‘Progress is international […] Intellectual life is international […] A person who has progress in his heart is international’ (ibid.: 150-1). As Musil suggests, the artistic revolution sought by Gance was to look beyond the existing borders of (political) state and (artistic) expression. It is a wonderful anomaly that the most powerful articulation of Napoleonic energy and Romantic grandeur should occur as a spiritual rallying cry for the twentieth century. Ninety years after its creation, much of the pleasure of watching Napoléon lies in the vividness of its historical testimony: the expressive dynamism of the 1920s is nowhere more evident, nor has the spirit of the Revolutionary era been brought to life with greater force. Gance’s film points to the heterogeneous ancestry of Modernism and the perseverance of Romanticism – it is further evidence for the claim that the latter is ‘simply an extension’ of the former (Alvarez 1967: 12). In its isolated position on the frontier of two epochs, Napoléon is surely ‘the epitome of what the cinema might have become but never did’ (Kramer/ Welsh 1978: 13). Gance’s eclectic philosophy has been a common source of scholastic discontent since the 1910s, yet it is the primary source for the experimentation praised by the same critics as quintessentially ‘Modern’. One of the central efforts of Romanticism was to formulate art that ‘reconciles opposites’ (Kermode 1957: 48), and Napoléon is certainly a work of multifaceted conciliation: it is a stylistic, thematic, and historical hybrid of startling imagination. The urge to classify rather than to evaluate art is a persistent trend in academia, but ultimately, as Vladimir Nabokov argued, ‘only one school’ should matter: ‘that of talent’ (1973: 97). Napoléon has fallen victim to producers and critics judging the film within preconceived parameters of genre, style, and ideology; both groups have castigated its unconventional nature and tried to reshape it into more conventional forms. The result has been the physical mutilation of Gance’s art and the omission of his work from multiple generations of scholarship. Napoléon deserves to be championed for its originality rather than condemned as an unclassifiable oddity. Accordingly, this study has aimed to reveal the depth and complexity of Gance’s artistic ideology and its visible evidence in Napoléon. Just as Hugo was able ‘to remember everything except the context, to pluck a

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variety of fruits and arrange them on a tree of his own making’ (Robb 1997: 340), so the filmmaker synthesized an amazingly diverse range of ideas in his work. The full title of Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance proclaims its author’s right to select and transform evidence, refusing ‘adventitious facts’ to ‘obscure the real meaning of history’ (Kramer/Welsh 1978: 150-1). Gance’s historical imagination requires a sympathetic approach, one not inclined to polarize issues without regard for context. The combination of documentation and fantasy, literary text and visual transformation, fatalism and optimism cannot be understood without considering the Romantic historiography Gance builds upon or the post-war environment in which he worked. Far from voicing a simplistic brand of chauvinism or displaying stylistic incoherence, the textual riches of Napoléon embody a bold, cogent, and progressive vision of history. The true value of this film is to be found in knowing it as a living work of art, exhibited for a community of viewers. The philosopher Stanley Cavell has observed that some of the most effective criticism is the result of a ‘compulsion to share’ aesthetic experiences (2005: 9). This urge most certainly lies behind my book, for Napoléon is a work of art that I ‘cannot bear not to share’ (ibid.) – and I urge all readers to seek out this superlative film in the context of a live performance. As I argued in my preface, a critic cannot claim to have evaluated Napoléon unless they do justice to their experience in the theatre. This primal engagement with art must involve emotional honesty and a willingness to let subjective intelligence inform objective analysis: Whatever the final truth may be about the relationship between feeling and the ‘synthesizing intellect’, there must first be feeling. Everyone who has had powerful artistic experiences knows how difficult it is to remain true to them when trying to give an account of what they really came to – it is the first and last test of the true critic (Tanner 1996: 59).

By resisting its emotional power or denying its intellectual substance, critical accounts have continually failed to grasp the real nature and importance of Napoléon. In the wake of each performance, countless spectators are adamant that Gance’s creation is the most rewarding cinematic experience of their lives. The immensely positive reaction of those who attended screenings of Brownlow’s restoration in San Francisco (2012), London (2013), and Amsterdam (2014) is the latest evidence of the film’s magnetic appeal. To censure this emotive impact is to miss the ultimate point of Napoléon as a work of art. An enthusiastic defence of the film does not simply ratify

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Gance’s own interpretation but validates the aesthetic experiences of audiences – past, present, and future. Jean Arroy’s mournful transition from the world of mythical resurrection during the production of Napoléon to the bland reality beyond it (1927a: 133) is echoed by spectators when they emerge from the exhibited film. Situated in the historical present, audiences are fully conscious of Bonaparte’s failure in the distant past; yet, within the theatre, we are allowed to live again this lost reality. The power of Napoléon is also the essential power of cinema: it casts a spell whose magic is defined by temporality. Beyond the predestined termination of the Napoleonic dream and of the cinematic illusion, it is up to the collective audience to complete the utopian project outside the theatre. By suspending their disbelief, spectators take part in what amounts to a religious experience for the duration of the film. For Gance, cinema made possible the ‘transmutation of universal pessimism’ – its immersive power could override the ‘negativist intuition of worn-out instincts’ (1930: 81, 87). His ambition was ‘to floor the accelerator of creative imagination, to create new intellectual ambiences favourable to the blossoming of new senses, to create a reality the cube of that which we now live’ (ibid.: 61). When exiting the theatre, his audience was to feel as though it was ‘emerging from paradise to find, alas, the hell of the street’ – leaving the viewer joyously bewildered, their faith reaffirmed in the filmic experience: ‘That is the cinema!’ (Gance 1974: 21). Napoléon is the greatest advocate for Gance’s cinema of enthusiasm, that quality which he believed was humanity’s greatest asset for personal and universal change. His work contains a set of values that are intercultural, mystical, optimistic, and conciliatory: facets that would be devalued or destroyed in the decades after the completion of Napoléon. Contrary to numerous anachronistic claims, this film is not a precursor to twentiethcentury extremism; rather, it is a postscript to nineteenth-century idealism. Nietzsche wrote: ‘I consider every word behind which there does not stand […] a challenge to action to have been written in vain’ ([1876] 1999: 184). For Gance, cinema was a means of motivating people to change the world for the better. The very open-endedness of Napoléon – the general on the brink of his glorious career – gives audiences the perfect lift, a sense of possibility and potential. The film opens up an imaginative space that gives spectators the desire to create, to change, to complete – a supremely inspirational effect. The fact that so much of Gance’s work arrives pre-censored by human alteration or the effacements of time requires the active engagement of critics and historians. Problems of access and availability should encourage

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rather than discourage enthusiastic exploration of unchartered territory. Gance’s masterpiece remains protean, voltaic, unfinished, imperfect – it brims with transformative energy. Napoléon is far more than the sum of its parts – it is no mere collection of assembled influences or isolated technical tricks: it has its own life, its own unique beauties, its own extraordinary impact. Critics must explore not only its intellectual complexity but also the emotive grandeur of its life on the screen. As an embodiment of what film art could achieve, Napoléon stands like a benevolent guide lighting the way forward – a weird beacon, blazing eternally on cinema’s horizon.



Filmography and bibliography

The following lists represent only those works directly cited within this study. The most complete filmographies of Gance’s work can be found in King (1984a: 233-48) and in Véray (2000: 323-50). The most complete bibliography of work by and on Gance can be found in Véray (ibid.: 299-322). Archival material included in this study comes from two major collections, both located in Paris. The first is the ‘Fonds Abel Gance’ of the Département des Arts du spectacle in the Bibliothèque Nationale (designated in this bibliography by the abbreviation ‘BnF’). This is the chief collection of archival material on Gance in France and consists of over 850 folders in approximately 240 boxes. This has recently been expanded with additional material donated by Nelly Kaplan. Whilst individual boxes are dedicated to specific films, there are many other relevant documents located in various correspondence and financial files, along with a huge collection of press reviews and exhibition material. The second collection is the ‘Fonds Abel Gance’ held in the Bibliothèque du Film at the Cinémathèque Française (designated ‘BiFi’). This consists of over 600 folders in 124 boxes. Whilst there is some repeated material from the Bibliothèque Nationale (mainly correspondence and press cuttings), the Cinémathèque’s holdings contain a great amount of unique material, including complete manuscript screenplays for J’accuse, La Roue, Sainte-Hélène, and La Fin du Monde. The Bibliothèque du Film also contains a comprehensive collection of contemporary trade press publications, film novelizations, and other related cinema journals.

Films directed by Gance Le Droit à la Vie, 1917. France: Le Film d’Art. Mater Dolorosa, 1917. France: Le Film d’Art. La Dixième Symphonie, 1918. France: Le Film d’Art. Ecce Homo, 1918 (unfinished). France: Le Film d’Art. J’accuse!, 1919. France: Pathé/Films Abel Gance. La Roue, 1922. France: Pathé/Films Abel Gance. Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance, 1927. France: Société générale des films. Autour de Napoléon, 1928. France: Société générale des films. Danses, 1928. France: Société générale des films. Galops, 1928. France: Société générale des films.

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Marine, 1928. France: Société générale des films. La Fin du Monde, 1930. France: L’Ecran d’Art. Napoléon Bonaparte, 1935. France: Majestic Films. Lucrèce Borgia, 1935. France: La Compagnie du Cinéma. Un grand amour de Beethoven, 1936. France: Général Productions. J’accuse!, 1938. France: Société du film ‘J’accuse’. Louise, 1939. France: Société parisienne de production de films. Paradis Perdu, 1940. France: Tarice. Vénus Aveugle, 1941. France: France Nouvelle. Le Capitaine Fracasse, 1943. France: Lux/Zénith. Austerlitz, 1960. France/Italy/Yugoslavia/Liechtenstein: CFPI/Dubrava Film/Galatea Film. Bonaparte et la Révolution, 1971. France: Les Films 13.

Written material and interviews by Gance Gance, Abel (1912), ‘Qu’est-ce que le cinématographe? Un sixième art!’, Ciné-journal, 9 March, p. 10. — (1915), Letter to Albert t’Serstevens, 30 June [manuscript], BnF, 4-COL-36/497. — (1922), ‘Pourquoi j’ai fait J’accuse’, Hebdo-Film, 13 April, pp. 1-2. — (1923a), Proposal and resume for six-film Napoleonic cycle, 15 September [typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1923b), ‘La Cinématographie c’est la musique de la lumière’, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, 15 December, p. 11. — (1924a), Notes concerning Napoléon [manuscript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1924b), Letter to François Coty, 3 February [typescript], BiFi, GANCE171-B56. — (1924c), Draft screenplay for Napoléon, March-July [manuscript], BiFi, GANCE165-B59. — (1924d), Letter to H.P. Roché, 12 March [typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1924e), ‘Proclamation’ (address to the cast/crew of Napoléon), 4 June [manuscript/typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1924f), Production note to Edouard de Bersaucourt and Noë Bloch, 18 August [typescript], BiFi, GANCE181-B61. — (1924g), Letter to Edouard de Bersaucourt, 22 August [typescript], BiFi, GANCE171-B56. — (1924h), Notes for future production plans, 24 August [typescript], BiFi, GANCE181-B61. — (1924i), Draft screenplay for Napoléon, October-November [manuscript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1924j), Draft screenplay for Napoléon, October-November [typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1924?), Notes concerning the Brienne sequence of Napoléon, n.d. [manuscript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1924-7), Production diary for Napoléon [manuscript], BnF, 4-COL-36/926. — (1925a), ‘La Porte entr’ouverte’, Paris-Soir, 17 March, p. 1. — (1925b), Telegram to Albert Banzhaf, 9 June, BiFi, GANCE171-B56. — (1925c), Letter to Gaston Thierry, 6 July [typescript], BiFi, GANCE171-B56. — (1925d), Letter to François Coty, 30 September [typescript], BiFi, GANCE171-B56. — (1925e), Letter to Stephanopoli, 16 November [typescript], BiFi, GANCE171-B56.

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— (1925?), Notes concerning the 10 August sequence of Napoléon, n.d. [manuscript], BiFi, GANCE166-B60. — (1926), Letter to Conrad Veidt, 6 April [typescript], BiFi, GANCE179-B61. — (1926-8), Notes and screenplay material for Victor Hugo [manuscript/typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/757. — (1927a), Draft material for ‘Aux spectateurs de Napoléon’ and ‘Pourquoi j’ai fait Napoléon?’, n.d. [manuscript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1927b), Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance. Epopée cinégraphique en cinq époques – Première époque: Bonaparte, Paris: Plon. — (1927c), ‘Le temps de l’image est venu!’ In L’Art cinématographique II (1927), Paris: Félix Alcan, pp. 83-104. — (1927d), ‘Comme j’ai vu Napoléon’, programme for the Théâtre de l’Opéra presentation of Napoléon, 7 April. — (1927e), Letter to Wilhelm Meydam and David Melamerson, 6 October [typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1927f), ‘Aux Spectateurs de Napoléon’, programme for the Marivaux Theatre presentation of Napoléon, November. — (1927g), ‘Note pour la version anglaise de Napoléon’, 29  November [typescript], BiFi, GANCE181-B61. — (1927h), Letter to M. Costil, 15 December [typescript], BiFi, GANCE181-B61. — (1927i), ‘Projet de constitution de l’Occident’ [typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/662. — (1927?), ‘Découpage des triptyques de la Campagne d’Italie’, [typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1927-8), Draft screenplay and notes for Sainte-Hélène [manuscript/typescript], BiFi, GANCE500-B102. — (1928a), ‘La Section Cinématographique de la Société des Nations. Rapport sur l’utilité d’organiser et d’élargir l’influence de la Société des Nations à l’aide du cinéma et de la radiophonie’, May [typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/810. — (1928b), Letter to Albert Thomas, 3 May [typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/810. — (1928c), Letter to R. Rubin, 29 August [typescript], BiFi, GANCE179-B61. — (1928d), Personal note, September [manuscript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. — (1928e), Screenplay for Sainte-Hélène, 3 September [typescript], BiFi, GANCE499-B103. — (1928f), ‘Projet d’Organisation d’une Société Musulmane de f ilms’ [typescript], BiFi, GANCE491-B101. — (1928-9), Notes and draft screenplay material for Sainte-Hélène [manuscript/typescript], BiFi, GANCE164-B57. — (1929a), Screenplay for La Fin du Monde, April-June [manuscript], BiFi, GANCE101-B44. — (1929b), Letter to the Secretary of State for Fine Art, 17 July [typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/757. — (1929c) Letter, Gance to M. Deville, 3 August [typescript], BnF, 4-COL-36/757. — (1929d), ‘Autour du moi et du monde: le cinéma de demain’, Conférencia, 23:18, pp. 277-91. — (1930), Prisme, Paris: Gallimard. — (1949), ‘Un grand projet: La Divine Tragédie’, Revue internationale du cinéma, 1:2, pp. 33-4. — (1954), ‘Départ vers la Polyvision’, Cahiers du cinéma, 41, pp. 4-9. — (1968), Interview with Kevin Brownlow, The Charm of Dynamite [documentary film]. — (1973), Interview with Armand Panigel, 25 October, Hommage à Abel Gance: un soleil dans chaque image [television], Chaîne 1. — (1974), Interview with Seven Philip Kramer and James Michael Welsh, ‘Film as Incantation: An Interview with Abel Gance’, Film Comment, 10:2, pp. 19-22.

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— (1976), Interview with Jean-Pierre Chartier and Maurice Bessy, 22 February, ‘Autour de la Roue’, episode two of Les Grandes Heures d’Abel Gance [television], FR 3. — (1980), Interview with Laurent Drancourt and Thierry Filliard, Abel Gance, une mémoire de l’avenir [documentary film].

Written material concerning Gance and/or cinema Abel, Richard (1984), French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Andrew, Geoff (1999), The Director’s Vision: A Concise Guide to the Art of 250 Great Filmmakers, Chicago: A Cappella Books. Arnoldy, Edouard (1994), ‘Mater dolorosa di Abel Gance’, Cinegrafie, 4:7, pp. 72-5. Arroy, Jean (1926), ‘Une vraie tempête en mer… dans un studio’, Cinémagazine, 21 May, p. 399. — (1927a), En tournant ‘Napoléon’ avec Abel Gance. Souvenirs et impressions d’un sans-culotte, Paris: Plon/La Renaissance du Livre. — (1927b), ‘La Technique de Napoléon’, Cinéa-ciné pour tous, 1 June, pp. 9-12. — (1927c), ‘Les Fusillades de Toulon’. In L’Ecran (1958), 3, p. 49. — and Jean-Charles Raynaud (1929), Attention! On Tourne!, Paris: Tallandier. Artaud, Antonin (1929), Interview with Georges Fronval, Cinémonde, 1 August, p. 733. Bardèche, Maurice and Robert Brasillach (1935), Histoire du cinéma, Paris: Denoël/Steele. Bazin, André (1952), ‘Montage’. In Twenty Years of Cinema in Venice (1952), Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, pp. 359-77. Bersaucourt, Edouard de (1924), ‘Le Napoléon d’Abel Gance’, L’Eclair, 30 May, p. 1. Brownlow, Kevin (1968), The Parade’s Gone By, New York: Knopf. — [1983] (2004), ‘Napoleon’, Abel Gance’s classic film, London: Photoplay. — (1994), ‘Obituaries: Mabel Poulton’, The Independent, 30 December, p. 28. — (2005), Interview to author, London, 28 October. Canudo, Ricciotto (1911), ‘La Naissance d’un Sixième Art’, Les Entretiens Idéalistes, 25 October, pp. 169-79. Cendrars, Blaise (1919-21), ‘L’abc du cinéma’. In Blaise Cendrars (1960-4), Œuvres complètes (eds. Raymond Dumay and Nino Frank), 8 vols., Paris: Denoël, IV, pp. 161-6. Clayton, Alex and Andrew Klevan (2011), ‘Introduction: The language and style of film criticism’. In Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (eds.), The language and style of film criticism, Abingdon/ New York: Routledge, pp. 1-26. Coty, François (1925), ‘Pouquoi je ne donne pas mon concours au film dont Napoléon sera l’étoile’, Le Figaro, 28 September, p. 1. Cuff, Paul (2011), ‘Interpretation and restoration: Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922)’, Film History, 23:2, pp. 223-41. — (2013), ‘Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance (1927): The case for enthusiasm’, Studies in French Cinema, 13:2, pp. 95-109. D’Herbeumont, Louis (1926), ‘Autour du film Napoléon d’Abel Gance’, Cinéopse, 1 August, n.p. [press cutting], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. Daria, Sophie, Abel Gance, hier et demain, Paris: La Palatine.

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Faure, Elie (1927), ‘Napoléon ou l’imposteur’, Comœdia, 9 May, p. 192. — (1934), ‘Introduction à la mystique du cinéma’. In Elie Faure (1934), Ombres solides (Essais d’esthétique concrète), Paris: Malfère, pp. 168-89. — (1937), ‘Vocation du cinéma’. In Elie Faure (1953), Fonction du cinéma. De la cinéplastique à son destin social (1921-1937), Paris: Plon, pp. 87-115. Ferro, Marc (1977), Cinéma et Histoire, Paris: Denoël/Gonthier. Gordeaux, Paul (1927), ‘Les films de la semaine: Napoléon’, L’Echo de Paris, 13 May, p. 4. Gréville, Edmond T. (1995), Trente-cinq ans dans la jungle du cinéma, Lyon: Institut Lumière. Greydanus, Steven D. (2004), ‘Napoléon (1927)’ [online]. Available at: . Gros, Léon-Gabriel (1926), ‘Gance tourne au soleil’, Le Feu, 1 August, n.p. [press cutting], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. Holmstrom, John (1996), The Moving Picture Boy: An International Encyclopaedia, 1895-1995, London: Russell. Icart, Roger (1983), Abel Gance, ou Le Prométhée foudroyé, Lausanne: l’Age d’homme. Jeanne, René (1926), ‘Nous assistons à la Révolution Française’, Lectures pour tous, November, pp. 47-54. Kael, Pauline (1984), Taking It All In, New York: Holt. Kaes, Anton (2009), Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kaplan, Nelly (1994), ‘Napoléon’ (ed./trans. Bernard McGuirk), London: bfi. — (2008), Mon Cygne, mon Signe… (Correspondances Abel Gance/Nelly Kaplan), Paris: Rocher. King, Norman (1984a), Abel Gance: A politics of spectacle, London: bfi. — (1984b), ‘The Sound of Silents’, Screen, 25:3, pp. 2-15. Kramer, Steven Philip and James Michael Welsh (1978), Abel Gance, Boston: Twayne. L’Eclair (1924), ‘M. Abel Gance a vendu Napoléon à l’Allemagne’, 15 August, p. 1. Le Gallo, Emile (1929), ‘Bonaparte au cinéma, vu par Abel Gance’, Revue des Etudes Napoléoniennes, 18:28, pp. 53-6. Le Matin (1944), ‘Au palais’, 28 April, p. 2. Levin, Bernard (1984), ‘Tonight, Josephine, even if it costs you £15’, The Times, 7 January, p. 8. Lévy, Arthur (1928), Letter to Abel Gance, 4 March [typescript], BiFi, GANCE179-B61. Miomandre, Francis de (1927), ‘Le Napoléon d’Abel Gance’, L’Europe Nouvelle, 28 May, p. 707. Monaco, Paul (1976), Cinema and Society: France and Germany during the Twenties, New York/ Oxford: Elsevier. Mourier, Georges (2012), ‘La Comète Napoléon’, Journal of Film Preservation, 86, pp. 35-52. Moussinac, Léon (1927a), ‘Un film français: Napoléon’, L’Humanité, 23 April, p. 4. — (1927b), ‘Un film français: Napoléon’, L’Humanité, 30 April, p. 4. Pappas, Peter (1981), ‘The superimposition of vision: Napoleon and the meaning of fascist art’, Cinéaste, 11:2, pp. 4-13.

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Parker, Noel (1998), ‘The French Revolution on Film: Oppositions and Continuities’. In Ian Germani and Robin Swales (eds.) (1998), Symbols, Myths and Images of the French Revolution, Regina: University of Regina, pp. 265-82. Philpott, Richard (1983), ‘Whose Napoleon?’, Framework, 20, pp. 8-14. Rivolet, André (1925), ‘Napoléon à Billancourt’, L’Intransigeant, 8 August, p. 4. Saint-Cyr, Charles (1927), ‘Napoléon à Marivaux’, La Semaine à Paris, 16-23 December, p. 81. Scize, Pierre (1925), ‘“On tourne” au pays de Napoléon’, Lectures pour tous, August, pp. 1459-68. T’Serstevens, Albert (1925), Letter to Abel Gance, n.d. [manuscript], BnF, 4-COL-36/554. Thomson, David (1994), A Biographical Dictionary of Film, New York: Knopf. Truffaut, François (1975), Les films de ma vie, Paris: Flammarion. V.R. (1923), ‘Les Vedettes Russes à Paris: N. Koline’, Mon Ciné, 11 January, pp. 9-11. Véray, Laurent (ed.) (2000), 1895, 31 (special issue: ‘Abel Gance: Nouveaux regards’). Vuillermoz, Emile (1926), ‘La Machine à explorer le temps’, L’Impartial Français, 19 March, p. 2. — (1927a), ‘Napoléon’, Le Temps, 9 April, p. 4. — (1927b), ‘Abel Gance et Napoléon vu par Emile Vuillermoz’, Cinémagazine, 25 November, pp. 335-40.

Written material concerning art, history, and/or philosophy Alvarez, Alfred (1967), ‘Beyond All This Fiddle’. In Alfred Alvarez (1968), Beyond All This Fiddle: Essays, 1955-1967, London: Penguin, pp. 3-21. Anon. (1800), Zoloé et ses deux Acolytes, ou quelques décades de la vie de trois jolies femmes, Turin [Paris], s.n. Arnault, Antoine Vincent (1833), Souvenirs d’un sexagénaire, 4 vols., Paris: Duféy. Avrillion, Marie Jeanne Pierrette (1833), Mémoires de Mademoiselle Avrillion: Première femme de chambre de l’impératrice, sur la vie privée de Joséphine, sa famille et sa cour, 2 vols., Paris: Ladvocat. Bainbridge, Simon (2005), ‘Napoleon and European Romanticism’. In Michael Ferber (ed.), A Companion to European Romanticism, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 450-66. Barras, Paul (1895-6), Memoires de Barras, membre du Directoire, 4 vols., Paris: Hachette. Beauterne, Robert Antoine de (1840), Conversations religieuses de Napoléon, Paris: Chez l’Auteur. Bell, David A. (2007), The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the birth of warfare as we know it, New York: Houghton/Mifflin. Bernard, Philippe (1975), La fin d’un monde, 1914-1929, Paris: Seuil. Blackmore, E.H. and A.M. Blackmore (eds.) (2000), Six Poets of the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloy, Léon (1874), ‘L’Histoire de la Révolution française de Carlyle’. In Léon Bloy (1925), Le Pal: Suivi des nouveaux propos d’un entrepreneur de démolitions, Paris: Stock, pp. 124-6. — (1912), L’Âme de Napoléon, Paris: Mercure de France. Böhme, Jacob [1612] (1914), The Aurora (trans. John Sparrow), London: Watkins.

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Index Abel, Richard 63, 129, 156 Annabella (Suzanne Charpentier) 67, 163 Artaud, Antonin 84, 102-03 Austerlitz (1960) 26, 109, 213-14 Austerlitz, Battle of 140, 161 Autour de Napoléon (1928) 63, 76,

Ecce Homo (1918) 19, 45-46, 47, 49, 133 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 38-39

Balzac, Honoré de 40 Barras, Paul (historical figure) 194, 195, 208, 209, 211-12 Bazin, André 26 Beauharnais, Joséphine de (historical figure) 172, 183-85, 192, 194-95, 208-09, 211-13, 220 Beauterne, Robert Antoine de 35, 41 Beethoven, Ludwig van 32, 39, 44, 156-58, 230 Bersaucourt, Edouard de 47 Bloy, Léon 41-42, 101 Böhme, Jacob 58, 99 Bonaparte, Napoléon (historical figure) cultural impact 31-36, 38-40, 41-44, 46-48, 50-51, 52-54, 90, 130-33, 156-58, 231-32, 233-34, 240-41 early life 60-61, 64-65, 70-71, 91, 93, 115 final years 33, 223, 226 military/political career 23, 31-33, 65, 98, 129-33, 137-38, 149, 186-87, 213-14 personal life 176, 183, 185, 190, 192, 195, 201, 210, 211-13, 220 Bonaparte et la Révolution (1971) 26, 183 Bourrienne, Louis de 60-61 Brownlow, Kevin 26, 27, 28, 29, 62, 155, 245 Burke, Edmund 58 La Bussière (historical figure) 171-72

Gance, Abel early career 19, 23, 45-47, 179-81 ideology 31, 45-49, 53-54, 145, 204-05, 243-46 mysticism 49-51, 58-59, 72, 77, 82-83, 87, 119-20, 146, 237-38 personal life 179-84 views on cinema 45, 54, 57-60, 62, 64, 90-91, 98-99, 109, 150-51, 153, 243-44, 246 views on French Revolution 83-84, 90-91, 95, 102, 238, 239-40, 243 views on Napoléon 47-48, 54, 131-34, 140, 177, 224 views on war 19, 45-46, 47-48, 53, 54, 80, 83, 132, 139, 145, 201, 203-04, 206, 221, 232, 243 see also films by title Ganneau, Simon 35, 37, 38, 45, 46, 120 Geoffroy, Louis 34, 228 Un grand amour de Beethoven (1936) 182 Griffith, D.W. 45, 56, 163

Canudo, Ricciotto 57, 58 Le Capitaine Fracasse (1943) 182-83 Carlyle, Thomas 34, 49-50, 80, 83, 95-96, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 145, 160, 172, 177, 207, 209, 220 Charpentier, Suzanne see Annabella Chateaubriand, François-René de 209, 229, 241 Close, Ivy 163 Constant, Alphonse-Louis 37, 38, 39, 46, 80 Coty, François 47-48, 204-05 Danis, Ida 180-81 Danton, Georges (historical figure) 84, 95, 102, 126, 243 David, Jacques-Louis 88, 119, 211 Davis, Carl 20, 27, 29, 62, 70, 76, 153, 155, 156, 191 Dieudonné, Albert 51-53, 72, 86, 163, 191, 192 La Divine Tragédie (1947-51) 49 La Dixième Symphonie (1918) 60, 123, 172, 180 Le Droit à la Vie (1917) 180

Faure, Elie 43-44, 47, 52, 57, 59, 91, 130, 145, 195, 201 La Fin du Monde (1930) 49, 99, 120, 181, 218, 240-41

Hegel, G.W.F. 33, 80 Hoëné-Wronski, Józef 34, 36-37, 38, 48 Hugo, Victor influence on Gance 20, 46, 77, 79, 102, 104, 109, 112-14, 116, 123-25, 146, 149, 198 literary work 28, 39-40, 71, 89, 98, 119, 126-27, 133, 157, 160, 171, 175, 208, 243, 244 personal life and political career 39, 232-41 spirituality 45, 50, 236-37 views on French Revolution 38, 81-83, 99, 101, 145 views on Napoléon 35, 39, 65, 71, 130 J’accuse! (1919) 19, 23, 24, 45-46, 47, 48, 53, 60, 95, 96, 97, 145-46, 159, 172, 180, 200, 204, 205, 221, 229 J’accuse! (1938) 182 Kaplan, Nelly 183 King, Norman 27, 31, 129, 177, 179 Koline, Nicolas 67, 162, 167, 177 The League of Nations 43, 48, 90 Louise (1939) 182 Louis-Napoléon see Napoléon III

264  Marat, Jean-Paul 50, 102, 103, 206, 239 Marx, Karl 40, 207 Masson, Frédéric 41 Mater Dolorosa (1917) 180 Mayer, Lewis 33 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 25 Michelet, Jules 50 Mickiewicz, Adam 36 Mosjoukine, Ivan 48, 162 Moussinac, Léon 24, 79 Napoleon auf St Helena (Pick, 1929) 240 Napoléon Bonaparte (1935) 26, 177, 185 Napoléon III, emperor of France 38, 39, 40, 234, 238 Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance (1927) 10 August scenes 91-98, 117, 125, 126, 141, 186, 206, 219 Apollo version 24, 25, 26, 149, 155, 159, 176, 184 Army of Italy scenes 23-24, 147-57, 175-76 Barras (character) 117, 139, 188, 189, 191, 195, 196, 197, 208, 209, 212, 217, 219, 221 Battle of Toulon scenes 65, 68, 116-18, 129, 138-41, 164-69, 176, 177, 189 Bonaparte as adult (character) see scenes by title; see also Abel Gance, views on Napoléon Bonaparte as child (character) see Brienne scenes Bonaparte family (characters) see Corsica scenes Brienne scenes 20, 55, 60-78, 83, 109, 129, 133, 139, 141, 153, 161, 164, 167, 169, 175, 176, 177, 193, 197, 198, 220, 225, 227 La Bussière (character) 169-71, 173 Les Carmes scenes 169, 187, 189, 190, 209, 214 Carteaux (character) 116, 165-67 Charlotte Corday (character) 118-19, 191 Cordeliers scenes 83-91, 93, 95, 99, 103, 106, 112, 141, 149, 164, 173, 184, 209 Corsica scenes 51, 52, 70, 106-16, 134-37, 163, 165, 186, 220, 226, 227, 235 Couthon (character) 93, 119, 121, 143 critical reception 19, 21, 23, 24-30, 31, 63, 78, 79, 131, 150, 156, 159, 202, 223, 244-46, 247 Danton (character) 84-85, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96-97, 103-04, 115, 121, 143, 146 distribution and exhibition 19-20, 24-25, 27, 29, 150-56, 245-46 Double Tempest scenes 24, 112-16, 123, 137, 141, 142, 145, 155, 186, 218 Dugommier (character) 117, 141, 169 editing 19, 24, 61-64, 73-75, 85, 87-88, 145, 147, 149, 155, 217 Ghosts of the Convention scenes 143-46, 148, 149, 232 Green-Eye (character) 122, 126, 170 Hoche (character) 187-88, 190-91, 216, 219

A Revolution for the Screen

Joséphine (character) 72, 121, 142, 149, 157, 161, 170, 179, 184-201, 208-09, 211, 214, 216-17, 221 Juliette Récamier (character) 215 Louis XVI, king of France (character) 91-92, 93-94, 96, 98, 106, 186 Marat (character) 84, 93, 102-03, 104, 105, 115, 118-19, 144, 146, 191 Marcellin (character) 67, 125-26, 159, 162, 164, 167, 168, 169, 175-76, 177-78 La Marseillaise scene see Cordeliers scenes Opéra version 24, 25, 26, 155, 159, 175 Paoli (character) 107, 112, 120, 137 Pozzo di Borgo (character) 107-08, 109, 111, 119, 120, 121, 174, 184, 186 restorations 26-28, 29, 155-56, 159, 245 Robespierre (character) 84, 93, 97, 103-05, 112, 115, 119-21, 122, 125, 126, 138, 143, 146, 171, 174, 187, 198, 206 Rouget de Lisle (character) 84-86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 173 Saint-Just (character) 52, 93, 119, 120-27, 143-44, 146, 149, 150, 171, 187, 206 Salicetti (character) 117, 119, 121, 139, 174, 184, 186, 187 split-screen 24, 59, 74-75 symbolic motifs 66-67, 69-71, 72, 76-77, 83, 85, 90, 95, 96, 106, 108, 109, 112, 114, 116, 122, 124, 141-42, 149, 153-55, 157, 165, 185-86, 193, 201 technical innovation 23-24, 62-63, 113-14, 143; see also editing; triptych scenes the Terror scenes 102, 114, 116-27, 141, 169-73, 187, 190, 214 Thérésa Tallien (character) 209-10, 215, 217, 220-21 triptych scenes 19-20, 24, 25, 26, 75, 114, 129, 149-56 Tristan (character) 67-68, 69, 72, 76, 122, 139, 159, 161-63, 164-78, 183, 184, 185, 186-87, 196, 198, 202, 214, 219 Victims’ Ball scenes 189-91, 203, 210, 214-21 Violine (character) 67, 125-26, 139, 159, 161-69, 171, 174, 177, 179, 184-86, 189-90, 193-94, 195-96, 197-200, 202, 207 Nerval, Gérard de 36, 82 Nietzsche, Friedrich 41, 42, 43, 44, 59, 60, 62, 77, 119, 132, 133, 141, 220, 240, 246 Pappas, Peter 28, 79, 155-56 Paradis Perdu (1940) 182 Pick, Lupu 240 Poe, Edgar Allan 163, 206 Poulton, Mabel 163 Récamier, Juliette 209, 211, 212-13 Robespierre, Maximilien (historical figure) 50, 84, 102-03, 105, 112, 115, 122, 126, 129, 146, 206, 209, 243 Roudenko, Nicolas 48, 55, 65, 72, 76, 78

265

Index

La Roue (1922) 19, 23, 24, 46, 47, 60, 77, 83, 95, 123, 132, 133, 159, 163, 172, 181, 190, 193, 217, 226 Sade, Marquis de 205-06, 208, 211, 212 Sainte-Hélène (1927-8) 25, 30, 177, 223-32, 235, 238, 239, 240-41 Saint-Just, Louis-Léon de (historical figure) 98, 119, 122, 123, 126, 183, 206 Schopenhauer, Arthur 58 Schuré, Edouard 45, 48, 109 Société générale des films 48 Spiritualism 37, 50, 236-37 Stinnes, Hugo 47 Studio 28, Paris 25 Suarès, André 42

Tallien, Jean (historical figure) 190, 209, 211 Tallien, Thérésa (historical figure) 190, 208-09, 210, 211, 212, 213 Towiański, Andrzej 36 Truffaut, François 26 T’Serstevens 45, 79 Veidt, Conrad 205 Vénus Aveugle (1941) 182 Victor Hugo (1926-8) 30, 223, 232-41 Vuillermoz, Emile 24-25, 52, 89 Wagner, Richard 28, 39, 52, 57-58, 59 Waterloo, Battle of 33, 35, 36, 65, 131, 162, 224, 225, 231 Wengeroff, Vladamir 47



Film Culture in Transition

General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser, Robert Kievit and Jan Simons (eds.) Double Trouble: Chiem van Houweninge on Writing and Filming, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 025 9 Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons and Lucette Bronk (eds.) Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 054 9 Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds.) Film and the First World War, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 064 8 Warren Buckland (ed.) The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, 1995 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 131 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 170 6 Egil Törnqvist Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 137 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 171 3 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 172 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 183 6 Thomas Elsaesser Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 059 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 184 3 Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.) Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, 1998 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 282 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 312 0 Siegfried Zielinski Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’Actes in History, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 313 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 303 8

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A Revolution for the Screen

Kees Bakker (ed.) Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 389 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 425 7 Egil Törnqvist Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 350 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 371 7 Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds.) The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000, 2000 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 455 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 456 1 Patricia Pisters and Catherine M. Lord (eds.) Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, 2001 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 472 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 473 8 William van der Heide Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures, 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 519 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 580 3 Bernadette Kester Film Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in German Films of the Weimar Period (1919-1933), 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 597 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 598 8 Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.) Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 494 3 Ivo Blom Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 463 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 570 4 Alastair Phillips City of Darkness, City of Light: Émigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 634 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 633 6

Film Culture in Transition

269

Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds.) The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, 2004 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 631 2; isbn hardcover 978 905356 493 6 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, 2004 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 635 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 636 7 Kristin Thompson Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 708 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 709 8 Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds.) Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 768 5; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 769 2 Thomas Elsaesser European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 594 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 602 2 Michael Walker Hitchcock’s Motifs, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 772 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 773 9 Nanna Verhoeff The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 831 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 832 3 Anat Zanger Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Carmen to Ripley, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 784 5; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 785 2 Wanda Strauven The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 944 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 945 0

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A Revolution for the Screen

Malte Hagener Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 960 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 961 0 Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 984 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 980 1 Jan Simons Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 991 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 979 5 Marijke de Valck Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 192 8; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 216 1 Asbjørn Grønstad Transfigurations: Violence, Death, and Masculinity in American Cinema, 2008 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 010 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 030 7 Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.) Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, 2009 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 013 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 012 3 François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cinema beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 083 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 084 0 Pasi Väliaho Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 140 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 141 0 Pietsie Feenstra New Mythological Figures in Spanish Cinema: Dissident Bodies under Franco, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 304 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 303 2

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Eivind Røssaak (ed.) Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 212 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 213 4 Tara Forrest Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 272 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 273 8 Belén Vidal Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 282 0 Bo Florin Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood 1923-1930, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 504 3 Erika Balsom Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 471 8 Christian Jungen Hollywood in Canne$: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 566 1 Michael Cowan Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde Film – Advertising – Modernity, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 585 2 Temenuga Trifonova Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 632 3 Christine N. Brinckmann Color and Empathy: Essays on Two Aspects of Film, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 656 9 François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 666 8

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A Revolution for the Screen

Volker Pantenburg Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 891 4 Paul Cuff A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance’s Napoléon, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 734 4