SILENT SUMMER, Part 1

Abel Gance's epic length (weren't they all???) masterpiece starring the fantastic Albert Dieudonné is a marvel of editing and is my highly endorsed first entry into SILENT SUMMER 2008.

Senses of Cinema gives the lowdown:

Dieudonné, so the anecdote goes, won his part as the French hero, with whom he was obsessed, by dressing up as Napoléon and appearing at Fontainbleau palace, in which Gance was working on the script, proclaiming that Bonaparte had come to see the director regarding his part. However, it wasn’t only the lead actor who had Napoléonic pretensions, for the morale-building speeches that Gance regularly issued his troops of extras were deliberately designed, it seems, to emulate those of the emperor himself. For example, during the filming of the climactic march into Italy, Gance addressed his cast in the following manner:

'You have not eaten for two days, but you are about to enter Italy. […] You are about to make this superhuman effort for the headstrong man leading you on. You will make him glorious throughout the world and he will lead you a long way forward!'

For a moment, you have to stop and consider whether “the headstrong man” is Gance or Napoléon, so similar are their roles. Indeed, Gance’s film seemed less concerned with recreating history than in reanimating it; for instance, during one scene, Gance’s extras were reportedly so enthusiastic that they cried “Vive Abel Gance!” instead of “Vive Napoléon”. Observing the spectacle, Émile Vuillermoz wrote:

'If Abel Gance had 10000 extras under his command, drunk with history and a determination to obey that overcame all reason, he could have invaded the Palais-Bourbon or the Élysée and been proclaimed dictator.'









Indeed Gance, the silent era avant-gardist, was so adept at finding new techniques for manipulating images that he was often celebrated for elevating film into the plastic arts. There are some montages in Napoléon – for instance, the snowball fight at his childhood boarding school of Brienne with which the film opens – which are edited so quickly that the shots themselves are often indistinguishable. Napoléon’s victorious face is superimposed heroically upon images of snowballs flying through the air and the enemy snow fort being stormed by his children’s army, in dramatic anticipation of his later military prowess.
Effectively, what Gance had achieved was to reinvent the pictorial language of Impressionism for the cinema, just as Germans such as F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang were experimenting with Expressionism. It is clear that Gance intended Napoléon to be a test of the art of cinema; Napoléon’s revolution was thus presented metaphorically as æsthetic as well as in historical and political terms. Frustrated at some critics’ reaction to the film’s abundance of technique, Gance wrote a letter addressed directly to his audience, which reveals his artistic vision in no uncertain terms:

'In certain paroxystic sequences, I have created for the first time a new technique, based on the strength of rhythm, dominating the subject and violating our visual habits […] if you do not understand entirely do me the favour of believing that maybe your eyes do not yet have the visual education necessary for the reception of this first form of the music of light. It is the future of cinema that is at stake. If our language does not stretch its potential it will remain no more than a mere dialect among the arts.'