The Era of the Image Has Arrived

     In making Napoléon, Gance strove to create a massive film synthesizing all the arts and acting as the “Gospel of the future, a bridge of dreams leading from one era to another.” Earlier films like J’accuse (1919) and especially La Roue (1923) had already established Gance as a central figure in French debates over cinema’s status as an art. Gance’s writings frequently compared his films to symphonies and frescoes, and, like Napoléon, many earlier Gance works cited canonical masterworks, such as the Beethoven pieces visually “performed” in La Dixième Symphonie (1918) and the reproduction of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485) used as the backdrop for the allegorical “Dance of Death” sequence in J’accuse. For many of the era’s most important theorists and critics, these were retrograde elements in the work of a prodigious innovator whose main achievement was his control of rhythm and the concomitant liberation of cinematic plasticity from the constraints of narrative.
     In La Roue, for example, Gance alternates shots of a train with increasingly brief shots of pieces of the rail and the surrounding landscape, gradually reducing the number of frames per shot until he is finally intercutting barely perceptible images. These montage bursts had an enormous impact on Gance’s contemporaries and elicited rhapsodic praise from many of the artists and filmmakers interested in raising cinema’s cultural status. Fernand Léger (who designed the film’s poster) spoke for many of his colleagues in writing, “With La Roue, Abel Gance has elevated the art of film to the plane of the plastic arts.”
     Napoléon employed virtually every technique at Gance’s disposal, and invented several others, including a 360-degree camera mechanism that could be operated from a distance. All of these were intended to increase the viewer’s affective participation, to, as Gance put it, “make the spectator become an actor... to involve him at every level in the unfolding of the action... to sweep him away on the flow of pictures.”
     Gance’s objective was to enhance collective involvement in the diegetic process, and he frequently used combinations of camera movement and rapid cutting to achieve this effect, thematically connecting them to emblematic events. The triptych sequences in Napoléon fuse Gance’s interest in maximizing the sensory impact of his imagery with his desire to engender a greater degree of spectatorial engagement. Gance had been experimenting with masking and screen proportions since at least 1917; his original idea was to increase the breadth of the image by deploying additional screens to the right and left of the center, creating a "panoramic screen.” Since Gance initially had no way to see what the three images would look like projected together, he concentrated on creating "panoramic triptychs" of Napoleon’s proclamations to the army in Italy and of the Battle of Montenotte. Gance was able to supplement these panoramic shots with additional triptychs created by combining images shot with a single camera, sometimes amplifying the effect with superimposition.
     The concluding triptych begins with Napoleon riding his white horse back and forth among the troops, his movement linking massed units of soldiers as well as the three triptych panels. These immense, detailed crowd shots, which often foreground lateral motion as a way of emphasizing their breadth, are overtly panoramic, but they are counter-balanced by triptychs operating on a more symbolic level, such as a set of marching soldier images tinted to look like a Tricolor flag. For the Opéra de Paris, the three images were projected together on a screen 15.3 meters wide by 3.85 meters high, with apparently spectacular results: "When the curtains are drawn back, opening out in the wall of the theater that immense breach of light, the effect produced is one of an astonishing power,” critic Emile Vuillermoz wrote: “Gance’s triple screen... has allowed him to reach effortlessly the highest peaks of the lyricism of the image.”     Art historian Élie Faure went so far to argue the use of three images opened the cinema up to “extremely fertile territories,” mounting an implicit defense of the “plastic form of film against the continuous encroachments of naturalism.”
     Gance differs from panorama painters in interlinking multiple perspectives on the same battle, which suggests an affinity with contemporary practices like Orphic simultaneity and points towards a much older antecedent, Uccello’s three panel treatment of the Battle of San Romano (1438–40, below). Uccello’s three paintings are now divided between London’s National Gallery, the Louvre (Paris), and the Uffizi (Florence), but they were commissioned and intended for display as a group, with the figures’ perspectival arrangements creating both geometric and metaphoric resonances between the individual scenes. 
     Similarly, Gance used the triple screen to create polyphonic arrangements of distinct but related images, the triptychs serving a musical as well as a structural function. As critic Jean Arroy put it, “One imagines the composer manipulating a giant keyboard under the screen.” This approach’s symphonic aspects are abundantly evident in the film’s final few moments, in which many motifs used earlier are interlaced across the three screens, grounded by arch-Romantic images of Napoleon looking out over the foggy landscape from a mountain peak, like the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818). The orchestration of these visual elements builds in intensity until, finally, both the protagonist and the film achieve a joint apotheosis signaled by the cuts from a symbolic eagle flying across all three screens to a series of tinted images connecting Napoleon’s face to Promethean flames, mathematical formulas, and the waves of history.
     The premiere version of Napoléon included an even more radically contrapuntal triple-screen sequence, the “Double Tempest” montage derived from Hugo’s Ninety-Three (1874), unfortunately now lost. Gance used Hugo’s text as the basis for an extended montage that deepens the implied relationship between the assembly’s disintegration and Napoleon’s absorption of its revolutionary energies. The dynamic fusion of superimposition and rapid editing was pronounced in the original triptych, in which Gance was able to compose “a veritable apocalyptic fresco, a mobile symphony in which, with eight superimpositions per frame, there were sometimes twenty-four interconnected visions.” 
     Within this maelstrom of densely layered images, movements were able to resonate with one another across all three screens, and although it would be impossible for viewers to relate all the individual fragments together, the cumulative effect must have been extraordinarily intense. This triptych would also have provided a structural echo of the final sequence (above), making much more apparent the fundamental interdependence of physical scale (the triple screen) and explosive montage within Napoléon vu par Abel Gance.