The last time Abel Gance’s nearly six-hour 1927 silent film “Napoleon” screened in New York City, it was in a truncated version — only four hours. In 1981, Francis Ford Coppola rented out Radio City Music Hall for a three-night run, but union rules that prevented staff from working late made showing a fuller version impossible.
Film scholar Kevin Brownlow was reluctant to cut it down. He’d spent decades restoring the lost classic frame by frame, after stumbling across an old reel at a local shop as a boy and becoming obsessed. But the chance to finally screen any version at all, with the star power of Coppola and Radio City behind it, was irresistible. The showing sold out eight nights at the 6,000-seat venue. VIPs from Lillian Gish to John Travolta attended.
Film Forum has fewer seats to fill, but 44 years later, the arthouse cinema on Houston Street sold out its two-day run of “Napoleon” last weekend — at the length Brownlow prefers. It’s part of the forum's tribute series to the influential scholar, which ends this week.
“That’s controversial, whether it’s a definite version,” Film Forum’s repertory artistic director Bruce Goldstein said. “But at five-and-a-half hours, that’s definitive enough for me.”
The film is rarely shown due to a complicated web of rights holders, but Film Forum received special permission from the British Film Institute to screen their version of “Napoleon." The day-long screenings sold out immediately, prompting Goldstein to look into bringing the film back for a longer stretch.
“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen in a silent movie or even a sound movie,” he said. “Even in modern times, the editing would be avant garde.”
“Napoleon,” which Roger Ebert called “the last great silent epic,” opens with a schoolyard snowball fight pitching the young Bonaparte and 10 companions against a group of 40. It ends with his incredible conquest of Italy in 1796.
French director Gance challenged the limits of the form with innovations that wouldn’t arrive in mainstream cinema for years: fast cutting, montage, multiple exposure, split-screen, stop-motion animation. His camera rides on horseback during a chase sequence, swings from the ceiling over a crowded French senate and dips under the waves during an ocean storm.
Outside the first sold-out all-day screening Saturday, a standby line formed for people hoping to spend a gorgeous fall day inside a cramped theater. The run time stretched past eight hours, including intermissions and a dinner break.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever even heard of it being shown somewhere,” said John Diaz, who came from New Jersey an hour before the screening and was first in line. He likened it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s landmark Michelangelo exhibition in 2017 — a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see art that may never return here again.
Diaz and a half-dozen other hopefuls on the stand-by line eventually got in.
Roger Bow said he saw “Napoleon” at Radio City when he was a Fordham University student, and kept the poster taped up in his dorm room. Four decades later, he still owns the poster and saw the film for the second time.
“My grandmother introduced me to silent films when I was a little kid,” Bow said. “She came from China. She didn’t have the language, so silent films were definitely something for her.”
He said some of his fondest memories are of his grandmother dragging him to the TV every time PBS showed a silent film, so they could watch it together.
“Places like this, it’s amazing that we have this resource to see all these restored or unrestored movies,” Bow said. “Because it’s a different world on the big screen.”
