Discover the 7-Hour Epic Film on Napoleon That’s Been Unmatched for Nearly 100 Years!

“With over 700 portrayals of Napoleon on the big screen […] and around 350 on television, the Emperor is one of the most depicted historical figures in media,” noted historian and film critic Antoine de Baecque.

In literature, Napoleon’s allure is arguably even greater. In 2014, historian Jean Tulard, a leading expert on the subject, cited an astronomical (and unverifiable) 80,000 published books on Napoleon; more than one per day since his 1769 birth in Ajaccio. Despite Ridley Scott facing harsh criticism for his portrayal of Napoleon, it ultimately represents his artistic vision.

Creating an ambitious work on such a character is not without challenges. Stanley Kubrick spent years on a Napoleon project before abandoning it when MGM withdrew support after the box office failure of “Waterloo”—a decision many felt was unjust.

Years earlier, however, filmmaker Abel Gance embarked on this monumental journey. His pharaonic endeavor was powered by his leading actor, Albert Dieudonné, whose portrayal of Napoleon not only defined his career but was so iconic that he later dedicated himself to lecturing on the First Empire and was even buried in his Napoleon costume.

A Cinematic Epic

In the early 1920s, Abel Gance aimed to create an extensive cinematic saga on Napoleon Bonaparte, planning six to eight films from the “Eagle’s” youth to his captivity in Saint Helena. Filming for the first chapter began in 1925, resulting in a seven-hour film that leaves the viewer in Montenotte, 1796, with the emperor. Gance never completed the series due to financial constraints.

The film cost 17 million francs, against a planned budget of 20 million for the entire saga. The editing involved four to nine kilometers of film reels, far exceeding the limit set by producers, with the full version reaching thirteen kilometers.

Nevertheless, this first episode, released in two versions—a shorter “Opera” version for public viewing and a longer “Apollo” version for the press and distributors—achieved phenomenal success. The film was also a technical marvel, featuring split screens, kaleidoscopic images, rapid montages, overlays, and other visual effects that highlighted the most personal and epic sequences. The climactic 20-minute final battle scene used a three-camera system called polyvision, breaking the traditional single screen into three interconnected images, creating a vast panoramic effect and amplifying the epic feel of the film.

Abel Gance spent his lifetime re-editing his film, producing different versions like the 1935 sound version, which offered a narrative structure distinct from the silent 1927 version, and the 1971 version, titled Bonaparte and the Revolution. His masterpiece underwent so many edits—and with the loss of the original negative—the original version’s exact form was long indeterminable.

A Quest for the Holy Grail

The story of the film’s restoration is as captivating as that of Bonaparte himself. For film historian and director Kevin Brownlow, a prominent expert on Abel Gance, finding the most complete version of the director’s work became a lifelong quest. “I spent 50 years tracking down existing archives across the globe since I first discovered the film as a child in 1954 on a 9.5 mm film copy,” he shared in an intriguing article published in The Guardian in 2013.

Brownlow’s first encounter with Gance’s Napoleon occurred while rummaging through his school’s library where he found a film canister he initially thought was an educational film. “When I projected the film on a wall at home, I had never seen anything like it,” he recounted. He soon realized he only had two of the six planned reels, sparking his quest.

“I even wrote a letter to its director, Abel Gance, […] because I couldn’t believe what I had seen.” The filmmaker, then heading the French Cinematheque, was touched that a young Englishman had taken an interest in his film and traveled to the British Film Institute for an unexpected meeting. “My mother called my school; I was in the middle of an exam, but they let me go see him.”

Years later, after extensive research in cinemathèques worldwide, including the one in Paris where he was dubbed “the thief,” Kevin Brownlow managed to gather enough material to restore a five-hour version of the film, which he showed to Gance and premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in 1968 and later at the Telluride Film Festival in 1979.

The experience left Gance, nearing 90, bewildered and tense, initially thinking he was going to see a documentary about the restoration of his film: “I remember Gance saying it felt like he had made all his sound films blindfolded. He was so kind, so amazed to meet this young child passionate about his work. […] The only drawback for him was his level of English, even though enthusiasm doesn’t really need translation.”

Brownlow’s copy was screened in British cinemas, while Francis Ford Coppola handled the distribution in the United States with his company, American Zoetrope, creating a new edit and score by Carmine Coppola based on this restored version. The film also succeeded in the U.S. In January 1980, Coppola rented the immense and famous Radio City Hall, with 6,000 seats, for a screening. The event sold out!

Netflix Joins the Scene

Since 1927, Abel Gance’s Napoleon has been restored five times, three of which were undertaken by the French Cinematheque. In 2000, Kevin Brownlow completed a third restoration on his own; this version was released by the BFI on Blu-ray in 2016. But that was not enough.

Meanwhile, director and researcher Georges Mourier also embarked on a long and costly restoration under the auspices of the French Cinematheque, which commissioned the work in 2007. Initially, his task was to inventory the boxes containing the multiple reels of the film, which comprises over 600,000 frames.

“After two years of work […], we realized that all previous restorations had indiscriminately mixed two original negatives. Namely, the negatives from the first version, known as the ‘Opera’ version, screened at the Opera Garnier in April 1927, and those from the second version, known as the ‘Apollo’ version, shown to the press and professionals two months later in a longer version at the Apollo cinema,” he revealed in an interview with Radio France in 2020.

This massive preliminary restoration effort, which took ten years, “On March 3, 2009, we were supposed to deliver our first expertise to the Cinematheque. With Laure Marchaut, my assistant, we realized that one of the CNC boxes had a strange code.

In reality, behind this number were not one but 179 boxes. On site, another surprise, the slip indicated a different number: 487. All these boxes had been stored at the Cinematheque of Toulouse years earlier by Claude Lafaye, a great lover of Gance’s work, to save them from a planned destruction.” Mourier’s team ended up with nearly 1,000 additional boxes to inventory.

“It’s a Frankenstein Film!”

As reported in an intriguing article on the CNC website detailing the steps of this restoration, it was not until 2017 that the restoration work could actually begin. The process was so lengthy and costly (4 million euros) that it required the support of a patron. Netflix announced in January 2021 that it would financially support the reconstruction of the work.

In May 2021, Georges Mourier presented his work during Cannes Classic, hoping to complete this restored version by the end of that year, which also marked the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death. “It’s a Frankenstein film,” he explained.

“The 2021 audience will never know where we started from. Here, to find a shot, it had to be reassembled from four pieces. It’s more than sewing; it’s lace-making because we had to undo the laces made by our predecessors, not break the thread, and reweave it with the right sense, which is the sense of the grand version.”

17 Years of Waiting for a Definitive Version

Unfortunately, no screening of the restored work was planned for that year… Ultimately, it wasn’t until the summer of 2024 that the ultimate version of Abel Gance’s masterpiece premiered in a select few theaters. This was 17 long years after what was initially “just” a simple inventory task.

This thoroughly restored and complete version was supposed to air last September on the public channel France 5. However, due to a technical issue, it was postponed. Airing in two parts, 231 minutes and 207 minutes, Napoleon as seen by Abel Gance finally secured its spot this November 22 on France 5. Brace yourself for a 7h18 marathon starting at 9 PM. The experience is well worth the candle.

In the end, for those who love physical media, know that this extraordinary version will not be released until December 2025. Yes, that’s still a long wait… All the more reason to be captivated, in the meantime, by this miraculous work.