Napoleon

French director Abel Gance's epic silent movie Napoleon (1927) is widely regarded as one of the highlights in film history. For this screening at Amsterdam's Ziggo Dome, Carl Davis' score for the film

will be performed live by the Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Davis himself. In his masterpiece, Gance, whose other famous film J'accuse was presented at the Holland Festival in 2009, recounts Napoleon's early years, from his childhood in Corsica to his lightning career in the French army, his military campaigns and his amorous conquests. Being the writer and director of the production and determined to produce a film which in its grandeur would match its subject, Gance surrounded himself with some of the big names in French film at the time, including Alexander Benois and Simon Feldman. Gance introduced a range of technical innovations for Napoleon, including the use of colour, widescreen, stereoscopics, fast cutting and visual effects, but the most important novelty was the experimental use of moving cameras. At the time, the camera was mostly stationary in film making, but Gance wanted his audience to be pulled into the action more by the medium. Taking the camera off the tripod and mounting it on wheels, dollies, on the back of a horse and even on a flying trapeze, Gance created dynamic shots of scenery and action scenes, close ups of characters in movement, underwater shots etc. Initially, the complete life of Napoleon was to be filmed in six parts, but Gance had used up the whole budget before the first part had been finished, forcing him to end the film with Napoleon's Italian campaign. However, he did make a grand spectacle of this last act, developing his polyvision format, a technique which allowed him to create a triptych filmed by three cameras and screened by three projectors simultaneously.

The film premiered at the Palais Garnier, then the home of the Paris Opera, on 7 April 1927. The film had a length of three hours and forty minutes, but was cut to a shorter length for various subsequent screenings. The version which was released in the United States was cut to just 80 minutes, with the triptych scenes completely omitted. On top of that, in America the film had to compete with the first talkies, sound movies, which were just beginning to emerge. The end result was that despite its innovative merits, the film was received rather indifferently and was soon taken out of circulation. Gance's epic movie had come too late and ended up cut into various versions and fragments in film archives and private collections.

In 1954, The British collector, cinematographer and film historian Kevin Brownlow started collecting and reconstructing the film, soon helped by Gance himself. 25 years later, Brownlow's reconstruction of Napoleon was ready to be released, with the support of Thames Television, the British Film Institute, the Cinématèque Française and Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. Under Coppola an American version of the film was made, with a music score by his father Carmine Coppola. In England, Brownlow's long version was screened, with music by Carl Davis, who had created a score which was a mix of existing music mainly by composers from Napoleon's era and new, original music composed by Davis himself. Davis made extensive use of music by Beethoven, as Napoleon was an admirer and Napoleon's victory at Marengo had inspired Beethoven to write his Third Symphony, the Eroica. Davis completed his score with songs from the French Revolution (including the Marseillaise, which runs through his score as a sort of leitmotif) and folk music from Corsica, home of birth to 'Le petit Caporal'.

After restorations and recuts by Brownlow in 2000 and 2004, including the restoration of the original tinting of the film as carried out by Pathé Brothers, the current version of 5 hours and 32 minutes was screened in 2012 in the US and in 2013 in London. This meant that Carl Davis had to lengthen his score by more than 30 minutes. At Oakland's Paramount Theatre as well as at the Royal Festival Hall in London, the film, the music and the orchestra received standing ovations from a wildly enthusiastic audience, having witnessed an event they wouldn't have missed for the world.