Griffith and applying to the screen every expressive and technical trick at his disposal, roving through aesthetic textures from harsh realism and high melodrama to the surreal and poetic. Whilst not his first epic, J’accuse saw Gance embracing the better example of D.W. Gance had made himself the toast of French cinema with his international hit J’ac c use in 1919, an earnest and blistering broadside against the recently ended First World War and the sullen attitude of the peacetime atmosphere, transmuted into a bizarre stew of message movie, melodrama, war film, domestic tragedy, and postmodern horror flick. And, like many of the major pioneering works from the age of cinema’s fitful adolescence, Napoleon has never been an uncontroversial film. Few filmmakers have dared anything like what Gance attempted in even a vaguely similar context, in freely and furiously blending classical narrative and experimental film technique. Gance’s innovations, including split-screen effects, handheld camerawork, associative montage and passages of non-linear technique, and the legendary eruption of widescreen, actually a kind of prototypical Cinerama, used in its climax, and doing so throughout with an entirely sovereign purpose in expressing a personal vision, make Napoleon an eternally modern and challenging as well as intoxicating in its cinematic impact. With Napoleon cinema finally gained the complete expressive freedom open to other art forms, even if it was cursed to emerge at a moment when a new and dominant orthodoxy was taking a firm grip over what audiences would expect for the new thirty or more years – and, indeed, still persists for the most part. Though nearly a century has intervened since its release, scarcely any work of feature filmmaking has so completely revised and expanded what the form is capable of in terms of artistic invention and range of technique. There is no other film like Abel Gance’s Napoleon. Director / Screenwriter / Actor: Abel Gance
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