A clas­sic epic made to play on three screens returns

This is a big deal. Books have been writ­ten and, no doubt, stern words have been trad­ed on the sub­ject of Abel Gance’s stu­pen­dous 1927 his­tor­i­cal epic, Napoleon, main­ly with regard to film preser­va­tion and eth­i­cal ques­tions regard­ing cin­e­mat­ic recon­struc­tion. Piec­ing a vin­tage film togeth­er from mate­ri­als secured from sources around the globe isn’t just a sim­ple case of find­ing the seg­ments of a sprawl­ing puzzle.

It’s about sec­ond guess­ing (as best you can) the inten­tions of a long-dead direc­tor, as well as attempt­ing to cre­ate a ver­sion of a film which hasn’t been manip­u­lat­ed and ​“improved upon” by mod­ern tech­niques. The BFI’s three-disc Blu-ray is the prod­uct of years of ded­i­cat­ed work by film his­to­ri­an Kevin Brown­low who per­haps knows this film as inti­mate­ly as the direc­tor him­self once did.

With­out mean­ing to sound too reduc­tive, this rous­ing biog­ra­phy of the great­est mil­i­tary tac­ti­cian of the mod­ern age plays like a super­hero saga, replete with ori­gin sto­ry, self-real­i­sa­tion and then, final­ly, a tri­umphant gal­lop into bat­tle, filmed with three sep­a­rate cam­eras and tint­ed to resem­ble the French Tri­colour flag.

The film runs to five-and-a-half hours and not a frame is wast­ed. The com­plex polit­i­cal machi­na­tions of Europe before, dur­ing and after the rev­o­lu­tion are ren­dered through clever sym­bols and scenes of high dra­ma, all of which piv­ot around a gal­vanis­ing cen­tral per­for­mance by Gance reg­u­lar, Albert Dieudon­né. The film’s mid-sec­tion burns slow­ly, but its cli­max – scored to Carl Davies’ rhap­sod­ic fan­fare – is the sort of cin­e­ma which stops the blood in your veins and draws the tears from your eyes.

This Blu-ray edi­tion should be con­sid­ered an essen­tial pur­chase for any­one unable to make one of the screen­ings around the UK from 11 November.