Abel Gance’s five-and-a-half-hour propaganda piece, magnum opus “Napoléon” (1927) is one of the most impressive movies ever made and a film that invented numerous cinematic techniques that are still in use today. It is regarded by many film critics, such as Roger Ebert and Peter Bradshaw, as the pinnacle of silent cinema. Ebert even called it a “miracle” that the film was able to be restored so well after many thought most of it was lost forever. Famous film directors that have become household names today like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese regard it as one of the greatest movies ever made and even Stanley Kubrick, my favorite director, has given it praise. Hopefully I can convince you to check this masterwork out and witness its brilliance.

For those who aren't aware, Napoleon Bonaparte was Emperor of the French and widely regarded as one of the greatest military leaders in human history, along with Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Alexander the Great. He was so beloved by the people of France as a successful military general and the people were so discontented with King Louis XVIII that Napoleon took power from the monarchy through a coup d’état and declared himself emperor in 1804. As emperor he established a set of laws that brought legal equality to citizens, he created the Bank of France to improve the nation’s economy, he reorganized the education system, and attempted to expand the French empire through conquest. He would remain emperor until the Battle of Waterloo on June 18th 1815, where he was defeated by a coalition made up of the countries of Austria, Prussia, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Sweden and Sardinia.

The movie doesn’t go through his whole life though, instead it just shows us from his childhood to his first few battles as a military general. There’s also a lot of interesting things the movie makes up, like when young Napoleon is leading a legendary snowball fight at his military school or when he steals the French flag from the war council at Ajaccio and uses it as a sail on a boat to flee from Corsica to France. I love these moments because it ends up creating more of a mythological aura around Napoleon as a historical figure. This is the most effective propaganda film I’ve ever seen because it just makes him out to be so badass (and taller and thinner than he actually was).

The film was originally over nine hours long but was significantly shortened for later releases. What’s even crazier is that it was intended to be just the first part of a six-film series covering his whole life, but that never happened unfortunately. For the 1929 U.S. release, they cut it down to just two hours, removing roughly 78% of it. Kevin Brownlow restored the film in 2000 making it just over five-and-a-half hours long, this is the version I and most others are familiar with. Nowadays the closest we have to the original is the seven-hour cut by Netflix and the French Film Board in 2024, although I wasn’t able to find it anywhere online after lots of digging. They might still be working on it or maybe they want to show it in as many theaters as possible before releasing it on their streaming service.

During the last act they implement the first ever use of polyvision, a technique using three cameras and placing the frames side by side to create a wider cinematic view. This is also referred to as a triptych, like many of the Renaissance paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. I had never seen anything like it when I first saw it and, unlike the other innovative techniques this movie uses, I haven’t seen it be used in another film since. The movie also uses superimposition: the process of layering images on top of each other to add visual depth or a deeper meaning. For instance, early on when Napoleon is leading the snowball fight at his school the camera repeatedly cuts to young Napoleon’s face as he orders his friends and smiles with glee. Eventually the shot is superimposed onto the frames where the kids are snowball fighting, making for a very cool, very unique effect. This is just one of many examples throughout the whole movie, but you can see this technique used in future classic films like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) and Orson Well’s “Citizen Kane” (1941).

They also made use of rapid cutting all throughout, but it’s most noticeable in the final act of the movie when Napoleon is riding off to his destiny. Images and clips flash rapidly in each box, showing his childhood, his rise in the military and his many victories, practically summarizing the entirety of the film. You can see how this kind of rapid editing was revolutionary for action movies. While you might assume the film is strictly black-and-white, lots of the scenes are tinted with different hues. They use red for many of the battle scenes and blue for some of the more somber ones. They also use yellow for triumph and green for nature and beauty. In the final act, when the movie switches to the ultra-widescreen triptych I mentioned earlier, they use blue, white, and red to make a French flag out of the screen, which I thought was very impressive and like nothing I’d ever seen before. If any one person is to be primarily credited with the film’s impeccable presentation, it's the film's editor. Marguerite Begugé was a renowned film editor during the silent era and is responsible for editing masterpieces such as “the Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928) and “the Raven” (1943). Both of which use similar techniques to Gance's film and you can definitely feel her touch on those movies as well.

Although the film was originally silent, it is almost always presented with a soundtrack. Multiple soundtracks have been done for the film over the years, including the original score by Arthur Honegger and what I consider the improved score: Carl Davis’ 1980 version. The music really adds a lot to the epic feeling of it all and makes the audience members feel even more inspired than they were already. I also can’t believe I haven’t mentioned the cinematography yet, this movie has so many mesmerizing shots, like when kid Napoleon is resting on the telescope with his eagle, or when he’s on top of a rock, gazing off into the distant sea, or when he goes to the National Assembly Hall at night and is cheered on by hundreds of ghosts of the people who set the revolution in motion. The cinematographer Jules Kruger did an excellent job and it’s odd that he never worked on a production this big again.

Some moviegoers might be turned off by the fact that the film seems so unfinished and rough, but I respect it and find it even more interesting that it remains incomplete. One can’t expect the pristine quality of a Wes Anderson or Stanley Kubrick film from a silent movie made in the 20s anyway. The atmosphere of this film and what it makes you think and feel is what’s most important. Many shots will drag on and on but there’s always so much to look at, so much to think about, and so much to research that someone as interested in the subject as I could never get bored while watching. If you aren’t used to silent movies, before jumping straight into Gance’s novel-length “Napoléon”, I’d say you should watch something like “the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” or Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “the Passion of Joan of Arc” first to become more familiar with European silent drama film styles.

Overall, I think Napoléon is a motion picture everyone should see at some point in their life. Whether you’re an aspiring filmmaker or not, you can still learn a lot and get a lot of entertainment out of this piece of art. There’s nothing else like it and it might be the most important movie ever made. It was extraordinarily innovative and helped shape cinema into what it is today. Many other filmmakers have tried to make movies and miniseries’ about Napoleon Bonaparte including, Sergei Bondarchuk with “Waterloo” (1970), Yves Simoneau with “Napoléon” (2002), Ridley Scott with “Napoleon” (2023), and even Stanley Kubrick was planning on making one before he died, but none of them ever matched what Abel Gance was able to create in the roaring twenties. I hope I’ve encouraged the person reading to check this out. You won’t regret it and you won’t forget it.