Napoleon

[matrixschmatrix]

Do we know if this will be region locked yet? If so, that's going to make getting the full setup impossible for me, since three blu-ray players is a lot easier to put together than three Region B blu-ray players.

[swo17]

It's long been confirmed as Region B.

[GaryC]

I'm seeing the digital presentation of this next month at the Southbank Centre, and I'm now wondering how they'll show the triptych sequence across the extended screen. A zoom and blow up of the 4.00:1/16x9 version, or 3 digital projectors showing each 4:3/16x9 panel?

The former. I saw a preview of the DCP of Act I and Act IV last month at NFT1.

[MichaelB]

It's long been confirmed as Region B.

Given the rights situation, there was never the remotest possibility of it being anything else.

[FrauBlucher]

Beaver. This looks like an exciting package. Very cool.

[rwaits]

That looks phenomenal. Ten years ago I wouldn't have dared to dream that this film would ever receive such a presentation.

[Luke M]

I was searching top 10 and 20 silent film lists today and this film was nowhere to be found. I have to imagine that was a blindspot based on accessibility instead of content. Anyway, I just ordered this from Amazon.

[lubitsch]

I was searching top 10 and 20 silent film lists today and this film was nowhere to be found.

That's some profound research.

I have to imagine that was a blindspot based on accessibility instead of content. Anyway, I just ordered this from Amazon.

As you may gather from the discussion, Napoleon was never a blindspot and it was available on DVD in a lesser version. Be however warned that it's a stupid, unrelentingly fascist film with bad acting whose only merits are on the aesthetic level.

[swo17]

Also, the real Napoleon was a diminutive twerp.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

I have to imagine that was a blindspot based on accessibility instead of content. Anyway, I just ordered this from Amazon.

As you may gather from the discussion, Napoleon was never a blindspot and it was available on DVD in a lesser version. Be however warned that it's a stupid, unrelentingly fascist film with bad acting whose only merits are on the aesthetic level.

This thread eventually leads to an interesting discussion I had with long-lost member La Clé du Ciel on this very subject of fascism, Napoleon, and Gance's film. I learned a lot from him or her about the complex context of this epic, even if I still share lubitsch's (facetious?) resistance toward the fascist elements.

[lubitsch]

I learned a lot from him or her about the complex context of this epic, even if I still share lubitsch's (facetious?) resistance toward the fascist elements.

Nothing facetious about my disdain for this film. Silent film history is unfortunately often written along the lines of the big epics which from today's viewpoint have most often exactly these two weaknesses, a histrionic acting then thought appropriate for historic events but today often contributing to the feeling that silents are overdone plus hair-raising melodramatic claptrap stories which stress the limits of modern viewers regarding political correctness.
There may be French who appreciate Napoleon but those coming from countries he occupied and whose youth he e.g. sent to die in Russia as was the case with Germany aren't likely to appreciate a fascist pro-Napoleon tirade this film is.

[domino harvey]

Thank God someone is finally willing to take Napoleon down a peg

[Jonathan S]

Welles didn't think much of Gance's Napoleon (see 1:23:10 here) though I'm not sure which version his opinion was based on (Kevin Brownlow suspects that, even in 1981, Welles was remembering the 1935 sound reissue).

[Big Ben]

"I'm more interested in films about people. I don't think he made one." - Orson Welles.

Damn that's harsh.

[Luke M]

I have to imagine that was a blindspot based on accessibility instead of content. Anyway, I just ordered this from Amazon.

As you may gather from the discussion, Napoleon was never a blindspot and it was available on DVD in a lesser version. Be however warned that it's a stupid, unrelentingly fascist film with bad acting whose only merits are on the aesthetic level.

This thread eventually leads to an interesting discussion I had with long-lost member La Clé du Ciel on this very subject of fascism, Napoleon, and Gance's film. I learned a lot from him or her about the complex context of this epic, even if I still share lubitsch's (facetious?) resistance toward the fascist elements.

Thank you for this helpful response. I look forward to seeing the film and subsequently learning more about the film.

[AK]

Horrible packaging. I wonder why we're getting these "deluxe" editions (Murnau, Quay, Apu Trilogy by Criterion, Napoléon) and they're housed in the slim cardboard. That's rhetorical. I know it's about money, right? Well, good luck to you if your copy looks fine and dandy, but mine is battered. Unless that's the whole point, since this is a war film, after all. It's Napoleon, so who's to mess with Napoleon? He does whatever he pleases with my Blu-ray set. And the discs... they jump up and down as if they were alive.

I suppose this is even more infuriating because at least MoC used to use the thicker boxes, and there is a nice company that still does. (I'll return to this post when Arrow no longer do, and we get their boxset discs in individual envelopes.) Having this next to the Dekalog set, for example, is a bit too ugly duckling for my taste, so I'll just let it sit next to the aforementioned travesties. You know, the kick-the-bucket section of your collection, which is just too embarrassing to show to anyone. "Looks like a dog has eaten that Blu-ray! Didn't know you had a dog!" "I don't. It's always been that way."

Ah, okay. Deep breath. Thanks for that. Feels better. Really looking forward to watching this, and the book does look stunning.

[Ann Harding]

There may be French who appreciate Napoleon but those coming from countries he occupied and whose youth he e.g. sent to die in Russia as was the case with Germany aren't likely to appreciate a fascist pro-Napoleon tirade this film is.

Actually you are wrong. In France nowadays Napoleon is not considered a great leader, far from it. It's a very controversial figure. I've been to screenings of Napoleon both in France and in the UK. What struck me is how the British public reacted to the film as "entertainment". They laughed, they really got into the Gance's jokes. They took it as a great book of images like a Dumas novel mixing fiction and history. In Paris, the screening brought no laughs and the public was inert. Some giggled when they saw Robespierre and others looked bored. I guess the awful music by Marius Constant didn't help... nevertheless it was really depressing. Obviously nobody cared about Napoleon or Gance for that matter.
(FYI at school I never studied the Napoleonic period.)

[tenia]

Yes, there's some kind of ambivalence towards Napoleon in France.
He is perceived and taught in school as a powerful leader that gave France a widespread aura but also as, well, an emperor which lead France in lots of wars. In terms of internal actions though, while I don't recall the details, I have the remaining feeling his overall work was relatively positive.

Horrible packaging. I wonder why we're getting these "deluxe" editions (Murnau, Quay, Apu Trilogy by Criterion, Napoléon) and they're housed in the slim cardboard. That's rhetorical. I know it's about money, right? Well, good luck to you if your copy looks fine and dandy, but mine is battered.

While I don't like the sleeves at all (especially this kind that gives the discs the possibility to go away from them almost totally), it seems that you just had a share of bad luck during transportation. My copy is only oh so slighlty creased at the top and bottom, but that's it.

I don't mind the packaging as a whole, though. I still prefer that to standard Amaray cases, which feels very, well, standard. True though, it gets damaged easily during transportation.

[La Clé du Ciel]

It is perhaps worth mentioning that the right-wing press in France were (to say the least) not keen on Gance, nor particularly on Napoleon.

The (not uncommon) view of the right-wing press in the 1920s was that Napoléon was only worth watching for (some of) its technical innovations. Maurice Bardèche (wartime fascist and post-war Holocaust denier) and Robert Brasillach (executed in 1945 for collaboration with the Nazis) wrote that Gance’s film was a “barbarous” 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”. Lucien Rebatet, another pro-Nazi collaborator (who narrowly escaped a death sentence after the war), wrote that Napoléon was an example of Gance’s “deliriously bad taste”: an “immoderate, chaotic, monstrously uneven” film, awash with “idiotic sentimentalism” and “stupid allegories”. Rebatet subsequently wrote a vicious review of La Fin du Monde, in which he labelled Gance a Jew and a “raving primitive”. (Many of Gance’s peers thought he was Jewish, and the right-wing press in France used this against him in the 1930s-40s.) During the war, Rebatet dubbed Gance “the Victor Hugo of the synagogue” and said the filmmaker’s book Prisme was a work of “puerile messianism” that “exudes a potent Jewish stink”. Fascists thought Gance was neither relevant nor prescient, but hopelessly old-fashioned. Bardèche and Brasillach said that the 1938 version of J’accuse was an example of Gance’s “obscene pacifism”. Rebatet went even further: “J’accuse may well become the official film of a regime that sabotaged our victory, whose whining demagogic Jewry degenerates and emasculates one of the oldest and proudest nations of the West.” In sum, the fascists didn’t think Gance was a fascist.

The nastiest reviews of Gance’s work came from L’Action française, a paper which was a voice for monarchism, Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and fascism. Their favourite French historical figure was certainly not Napoleon, but Joan of Arc – to whom they devoted much space in their pages. (Not surprisingly, they liked Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc.)

I've been to screenings of Napoléon both in France and in the UK. What struck me is how the British public reacted to the film as "entertainment". They laughed, they really got into the Gance's jokes. They took it as a great book of images like a Dumas novel mixing fiction and history.

The live screening of Napoléon in London earlier this month got at least one “political” reaction from the British audience. This came in the scene where Bonaparte delivers his speech to the ghosts of the Convention, promising that “Europe will soon become a single people, and anyone, wherever they travel, will always find themselves in a common homeland. (Historical)”.* At the performance in London, this title received a massive ovation and loud cheers of approval. (One or two people booed, as well.)

*This is a more direct translation of the original French (“L’Europe ne devra bientôt faire véritablement qu’un même people, et chacun en voyageant partout se trouvera toujours dans la patrie commune.”). The 2000 restoration unfortunately genders the line as: “Europe will become a single people, and anyone, wherever he travels, will always find himself in a common fatherland.”

[Big Ben]

Thank you so much for these incredibly informative posts (I am including the older posts as well.) La Clé du Ciel! I've learned so much!

[bearcuborg]

Can't say I'm crazy about this packaging...

[perkizitore]

why is this unavailable on amazon? is it temporarily sold out, or were sales suspended because of complaints about the poor packaging?

[TMDaines]

Probably the latter. I'm responsible for the Studio Canal Godard set being pulled, because I received two squashed when outer packaging is fine. Some of these recent boxsets have shit packaging.

[jsteffe]

This needs to be confirmed by another source: one of my colleagues told me that the initial 7,000 unit pressing sold out very quickly and that it will be reprinted very soon, but with a less lavish booklet.

[MichaelB]

The first print run of Napoleon has indeed sold out, and a second batch has been ordered.

The second pressing will have a smaller booklet and a standard Amaray case - I imagine the two facts are connected, since 60 pages is well in excess of the upper limit for Amaray-compatible booklets (technically 40, although I've pushed it to 44 on more than one occasion). But in compensation, it will be slightly cheaper.

(Source: PM from the project's producer.)