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There is wonderful hand-held camera work in an opening sequence where a young Bonaparte first indicates his strategic gifts in a schoolboy snowball fight. But Gance was capable of hanging a camera on anything—a galloping horse, a firing cannon, a storm-tossed boat—thereby forcing emotional involvement with what otherwise might have been mere tableaux. His tour de force is a sequence in which the pitching of Napoleon's boat as he escapes his Corsican political enemies is crosscut with scenes of riotous action in the Paris Assembly in which the camera is made to rock as it does when it is on the ocean. Gance's experiments with quick-cut editing—split-screening, double-printing, creating images that register almost subliminally—prefigure a style that has only now come into fashion.
Napoleon—like all the great silent epics—is a triumph of pure cinematic style over conventional expectations. There is no "characterization" in the usual sense, though in the title role Albert Dieudonné gives a great silent performance of looks, gestures and poses. Mostly, however, people are used as unparticularized symbols. Nor are there many dramatically pointed scenes, only groupings in which it is up to cameraman, editor and director to ferret out (and impose) meaning—to "photograph thought," in Griffith's phrase.
In short, it is purely through the resources of his medium that Gance (now 91, and too ill to attend last week's opening) involves us in large and distant events. His camera makes an audience feel his own sense of the movie's possibilities when the medium—and he—were young and full of heroic ambition. —By Richard Schickel