The new soundtrack, prepared by Simon Cloquet-Lafollye, includes nearly an hour of music taken from four Florent Schmitt orchestral scores.
The epic film Napoléon is rightly viewed as one of the greatest cinematographic feats in motion picture history. And this distinction is even more impressive when we consider that Napoléon was a silent film produced all the way back in 1927 — nearly a century ago.
Abel Gance (1889-1981) was the illegitimate son of a doctor and a working-class mother. Gance left school at age 14 and was largely self-taught as an actor, writer, film director and producer. Although he produced dozens of films over his lengthy career, Gance is best-remembered for his work during the silent-film era — Napoléon (1927) being the best-known and most highly celebrated of his creations.
The creative force behind making this pathfinding film was Abel Gance, a French director, producer, writer and actor. Born Abel Eugène Alexandre Péréthon in 1889, Gance lived to the age of 92, and his career spanned the eras of both silent film and “talkies.” He is best-known for three films from early in his career – all of them with storylines based on historical or socio-political themes: J’accuse (1919); La Roue (The Wheel) (1923), and Napoléon (1927).
Largely self-taught in literature and the arts, Gance began his career in the world of theatre, working as both as a director and writer. Famously, he wrote his five-hour drama Victoire de Samothrace in the years prior to World War I, in hopes that the actress Sarah Bernhardt would agree to star in the leading role. (Those plans came to naught, in part because of Gance’s refusal to shorten the play for staging purposes.)
American film director D. W. Griffith (1875-1948)
Gance’s postwar silent film J’accuse, which focused on the impact of war in both physical and psychological terms, made a powerful impact and achieved international distribution, as did La Roue two years later. It was during this period that Gance met the famed film director D. W. Griffith while on a publicity tour of the United States – a meeting that would spark Gance’s interest in creating an epic film chronicling the consequential life of Napoléon Bonaparte.
Abel Gance (r.), pictured with financial backers at his studio in Boulonge during the filming of the Brienne Military College scenes from the 1927 film Napoléon.
Abel Gance’s original plan was to make six sequential films covering the life and career of Napoléon Bonaparte. As it turned out, only the first part of Gance’s vision was destined to be made, tracing the protagonist’s early life through the French Revolution and up to the invasion of Italy.
In this film, Gance’s cinematography has long been recognized as a masterpiece of fluid camera motion, produced in an era when camera shots were static. Indeed, the film was chockfull of a wide range of novel experimental techniques combining rapid cutting, hand-held camera angles, super-imposition of images, plus widescreen sequences.
French silent film actor, director and author Albert Dieudonné (1889-1976).
Gance employed a system of filming that was later referred to as “polyvision” by French film and music critic Émile Vuillermoz– a process that required triple cameras (the simultaneous projection of three reels of silent film arrayed in a horizontal row) to achieve a spectacular panoramic effect, enabling Gance to create meticulously choreographed historical scenes featuring scores (and sometimes hundreds) of characters. The selection of Albert Dieudonné to play the role of Napoléon Bonaparte was considered a masterstroke, in part becuase of the actor’s uncanny resemblance to the real-life character.
Other techniques employed by Gance in Napoléon included location shooting (then almost unheard of), underwater camera scenes, POV shots, kaleidoscopic images, and film tinting. To say that the film was a revolutionary project would be an understatement!
Abel Gance’s epic silent film Napoléon is recognized as a masterpiece of fluid camera motion, produced at a time when camera shots were static. Among the innovative techniques employed in making the film were location shooting, handheld camera shots, extensive closeups, super-imposition, and kaleidoscopic images.
The Apollo Theatre in Geneva, Switzerland during the premiere of Abel Gance’s film Napoléon in 1927.
When the original version of Napoléon opened in theatres in May 1927, it clocked in at an extraordinary 7+ hours. Its length was reduced for European distribution of the movie, and it became even shorter when it was released in America. The majority of the film’s soundtrack consisted of incidental music composed by Arthur Honegger (Werner Heymann in the German release), but the famous Marseillaise anthem was also featured prominently in several scenes of the movie.
A promotional poster for the first USA release of the Abel Gance film Napoléon (1928).
The original release was just the beginning of the film’s career. Gance reused some of the material in later films, and several restorations of Napoléon in the 1980s confirmed it as Gance’s most consequential work. The various 1980s iterations clocked in at around five hours in length, with new music contributed by contemporary composers Carmine Coppola (1980), Carl Davis (1983) and Marius Constant (1989). All in all, no fewer than 20 different versions of the film had been released as of the turn of the 21st century.
Beginning in 2008, a quest was undertaken to restore Gance’s film to its original glory, including searching for missing scenes that had been omitted following the 1927 Apollo Theatre premiere. It would take 15 years for the project to come to completion, assisted along the way by financial support from the Golden Globe Foundation, the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, and Netflix. Various archival sources were tapped to resurrect the original storyline, with reels and footage found at the Cinémathèque française, Cinémathèque de Toulouse and Cinémathèque de Corse as well as locations further afield (Italy, Denmark, Luxembourg, New York City, and even Serbia).
Film restoration expert Georges Mourier led a team of specialists who worked frame-by-frame to review and utilize reams of film footage. Abel Gance’s original editing notes and related correspondence, found on file at the Bibliothèque National de France, helped make it possible to re-edit the film to conform as closely as possible to Gance’s artistic conception.
A publicity poster for the cine-concert premiere of the 2024 version of the Abel Gance film Napoléon, presented at La Seine musicale in Paris.
After several delays in seeing the gargantuan project through to its conclusion, the first part of the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, followed by the premiere of the full two-part movie at La Seine musicale in Boulogne-Billancourt (Paris) over two evenings on July 4 and 5, 2024. The Paris premiere was attended by an audience of over 3,000 people that included Abel Gance’s own daughter, scriptwriter Clarice Gance, in attendance.
In the program booklet distributed at the Paris premiere, the scope of the project was described in epochal terms: 16 years of work … 1,000 boxes of material examined … 300 kms. of celluloid gathered, sorted and studied.
British TV/film producer, historian and critic Paul Cuff, author of the 2015 book A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance’s Napoléon, was present at the Paris premiere and shared his thoughts about the event in an article that included the following observations:
The futuristic La Seine musicale in Paris, site of the premiere of the 2024 version of the Abel Gance film Napoléon.
“What does the new restoration offer? For a start, it looks stunning. The ‘giant screen’ promised did indeed present the single-screen material in superb quality … [with] great depth and detail. Throughout, the photography is captivatingly beautiful. I was struck anew by the sharpness of Gance’s compositions in depth, by the landscapes across winter, spring and summer, by the brilliance of the close-ups. I fell in love all over again with those numerous shots in which characters stare directly into the camera, making eye contact with us nearly a century later.”
Simon Cloquet-Lafollye
As for the new soundtrack for the movie, a score of 148 cues from 104 works by 48 composers, spanning ~200 years of music was curated and assembled by film composer and arranger Simon Cloquet-Lafollye, marking a major departure from earlier releases of the film. Rather than attempt to match musical phrases to specific frame-by-frame action on the screen, Cloquet-Lafollye elected to employ full excerpts (movements) from existing classical music scores. In the event, it was a strategy that may not have been fully successful. Paul Cuff noted in his reporting:
“As stated in the concert program, Cloquet-Lafollye’s aim was to produce ‘a homogenous, coherent piece, in perfect harmonic synchronization with the rhythm imposed by the images,’ a ‘score totally new and hitherto unheard that takes its meaning solely from the integrity of the images.’ But these ambitions were only intermittently realized, and sometimes entirely abandoned.
Rhythmically, aesthetically and even culturally, the music was frequently divorced from what was happening on screen. My impression was of blocks of sound floating over the images, occasionally synchronizing, then drifting away … To me, this seemed symptomatic of the way Cloquet-Lafollye tended to use whole movements or repertoire works rather than a more elaborate montage of shorter segments. Using blocks of music in this way also made the transition from one work to the other more obvious, and sometimes clunky … Too often, the score is working in a different register and/or at a different tempo to the film.”
Abel Gance (l.) pictured with composer Arthur Honegger in 1926, a year before the release of the original version of the film Napoléon, for which Honegger composed the musical score.
Only a single excerpt from Arthur Honegger’s original music for the 1927 original release of the film — a selection titled Les Ombres — was incorporated in the soundtrack for the 2024 version. As to why this was the case, Cloquet-Lafollye’s program essay about the music mentions Honegger only in the context that both the composer and Gance were dissatisfied with the soundtrack at the premiere showing.
Interestingly, of the 7+ hours that make up the 2024 soundtrack, nearly an hour’s worth of music has been taken from four scores by Florent Schmitt.
The soundtrack developed by Simon Cloquet-Lafollye for the Brienne Military College scenes in Abel Gance’s film Napoléon includes music by Mendelssohn, Philippe Gaubert, Benjamin Godard and Florent Schmitt.
The selections include one of the orchestral preludes from Schmitt’s early-career Soirs (1890-96), the final two dances from his ballet La Tragédie de Salomé (1910 version), the full first suite plus excerpts from the second suite of incidental music composed by Schmitt for André Gide’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Antoine et Cléopâtre (1920), as well as the middle movement from Schmitt’s late-career Symphony No. 2 (1957).
In Simon Cloquet-Lafollye’s soundtrack for the 2024 version of Abel Gance’s film Napoléon, Florent Schmitt’s music is used extensively in the scenes portraying Bonaparte’s poverty in Paris, and then the mobilization and invasion of the royal residence at the Tuileries Palace on August, 10, 1792 when King Louis XVI of France was arrested and effectively deposed, leading to his execution in January 1793.
Perhaps most controversially, Cloquet-Lafollye’s choice of music for the final scene of the movie came as a letdown to some attendees at the premiere. Cuff, for one, noted:
”In the final few minutes, Napoléon’s ‘destruction and creation of worlds’ bursts across three simultaneous screens: lateral and consecutive montages combine; shot scales collide; spatial and temporal context are intermingled. Finally, the screens are tinted blue, white, and red – just as Gance simultaneously rewinds, fast-forwards, and suspends time. After this incalculable horde of images flies across their breadth, each of the three screens bears an identical close-up of rushing water. This is an image we first saw during the Double Tempest when Bonaparte sets out to confront his destiny – there, the water churns in the path of his vessel, borne by a sail fashioned from a huge tricolor; now, the screen itself has become a flag: the fluttering surge of the ocean is the spirit of the Revolution and of the cinema. The triptych holds this form just long enough for the spectator to lose any sense of the world beyond it, then vanishes with heart-wrenching suddenness. The elation of flight is followed by the sensation of falling to earth.
But what music does Cloquet-Lafollye chose for this visual apocalypse, this lightning-fast surge of images? During the last passage of the Mahler, I saw the choir troop back onto the stage to join the orchestra. Was this to be another performance of La Marseillaise? No. As the Army of Italy marches into history, the choir and orchestra on stage began their rendition of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus – music of the utmost slowness and serenity, of absolute calm and peace. It is perhaps the most ill-conceived choice of music I have ever seen in a silent film score. I’ve sat through far, far worse scores, but none has ever disappointed me as much as this single choice of music. When the choir started singing, I honestly thought it must be a mistake, a joke – even that I was dreaming, the kind of absurd anxiety dream where something impossibly awful is happening and there is nothing you can do to stop it. While Gance was busy reinventing time and space, hurling cinema into the future, my ears were being bathed in shapeless placidity. Instead of being bound up in the rush of images, I sat in my seat as my heart sank through the floor.
How was I meant to feel? What intention lay behind this choice of music? Why this sea of calm tranquility, this gentle hymn to God, this sense of exquisite grace and harmony? Onscreen, Gance explicitly compares Napoleon to Satan in the film’s final minutes – the “tempter” who offers the ‘promised land’ to his followers; and our knowledge that this hero is already doomed to corruption and to failure is suspended in the rush of promise that history might – could – should have been different, that the fire of the Revolution might yet inspire other, better goals. Yet from the Paris stage … Mozart’s hymn to God carried serenely, blissfully, indifferently over the fissuring, rupturing, exploding imagery on screen – beyond the last plunge into darkness, beyond Gance’s signature on screen, until – having reached the end of its own, utterly independent itinerary – it faded gently into silence.
I did not understand. I still do not understand … In combination with the shrunken triptych, this musical finale seemed like the [most inept] imaginable rendering of Gance’s aesthetic intentions. (In the lobby afterwards, an acquaintance who was very familiar with the film put it more bluntly: ‘What a f*cking disgrace.’) … I still struggle to comprehend how [this finale] can have been allowed to take place at the premiere of such a major (not to mention expensive) restoration.”
German conductor Frank Strobel, a specialist in directing cine-concerts, has several Abel Gance films in his performing repertoire.
As part of the Paris premiere, German music director Frank Strobel conducted live orchestras (the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France for part one of the film, and the Orchestre National de France for part two) as well as the Choeur de Radio France. Maestro Strobel specializes in conducting silent film scores live with orchestras, including Gance’s La Roue presented in Berlin in 2019. According to attendees at the Napoleon presentation, Strubel led the combined musical forces with “immense skill.”
The premiere screening of the 2024 version of Napoléon was a cine-concert attended by an audience of 3,000. The event, presented at La Seine musicale in Paris, featured two full orchestras plus an eight-part mixed chorus. Frank Strobel directed the musical forces. Pictured onscreen in the photo above is actress Gina Manès in the role of Joséphine de Beauhamais, wife of Napoléon Bonaparte. (Photo: Valerio Greco)
Mr. Cloquet-Lafollye’s choice of music that he included in the 2024 soundtrack was noteworthy in that many selections were of relatively unfamiliar music. With the exception of La Tragédie de Salomé, Florent Schmitt’s scores could hardly be considered famous, and other less-known composers whose music was included are Benjamin Godard, Albéric Magnard and Philippe Gaubert.
Fabien Gabel
The new version of Napoléon is slated for worldwide release by Pathé Films and Netflix. French conductor Fabien Gabel was retained to lead the two French Radio orchestras plus Radio France Chorus in recording the 7+ hours of music for the commercial release of the movie. I had the opportunity to pose several questions to Maestro Gabel regarding making the soundtrack for the film:
PLN: How did you become involved in the Napoléon film project?
FG: I was contacted by Radio France during the middle of the COVID pandemic. At that stage there was little specific information about the soundtrack except that the project would be colossal, and a lot of symphonic music would need to be recorded for the film. I think I was chosen because I have strong ongoing relationships with both Radio France orchestras that were being engaged.
We recorded the music in the big studio located next to the concert hall in the Maison de la Radio.
Fabien Gabel records the massive soundtrack — 7+ hours of music — for the new 2024 version of Abel Gance’s film Napoléon. (Maison de la Radio, Paris, September 2023)
PLN: What are your thoughts about the repertoire that was selected by Simon Cloquet-Lafollye for the new Napoléon release?
FG: Simon’s work has been outstanding. He selected iconic works [from Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn and others] but also some nearly unknown pieces from various other composers – French gems but also some fantastic British composer as well.
PLN: Why were two orchestras retained to record the soundtrack, instead of just one?
FG: Two orchestras were involved because the amount of recording work was absolutely enormous – about 120 session hours all-told. The project was supported by Radio France – therefore it made sense to work with the two Radio France ensembles. In addition to them we also had the Radio France Chorus.
PLN: How did the recording sessions go?
FG: I must say that during our first recording session everyone – including me – was a little skeptical due to the difficulty of the project. But as it turned out, the musicians were excited about the repertoire and surprised to discover some very fine new music. And the movie itself is a masterpiece, with the musical selections fitting well with the imagery on the screen.
Following the July 4-5 Paris premiere of the 2024 version of Napoléon featuring the two live orchestras plus chorus, the same musical forces led by Frank Strobel reprised the performance at the Radio France Occitanie Montpellier Festival on July 18-19. National release of the movie (via Pathé Films) commenced thereafter, with afternoon/evening full screenings shown in French cinema houses throughout the month of July.
Next up, broadcast presentations of the film are planned for the end of 2024 and into 2025 on France Télévisions, as well as being offered worldwide on the Netflix platform in hour-long episodes. Movie and music buffs alike are looking forward to the opportunity to “see and hear” this great cinematic achievement — coming our way nearly a century after Napoléon’s first release.