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A New Alphabet for the Cinema : the Tragic Irony of Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927)
Author:
Peter Verstraten
About Peter
Peter Verstraten is Assistant Professor of Film and Literary Studies as well as chair of MA Media Studies, track Film and Photographic Studies at Leiden University. Among his key publications are
Film Narratology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009) and
Shooting Time: Conversations on Cinematography (Rotterdam: Post Editions, 2012), a volume which he co-edited with two directors of photography. Some recent online articles are on Bruno Dumont´s film
Hadewijch and another one on the ´cinema of modernist poetic prose´ of both Michelangelo Antonioni and Terrence Malick. In addition to this he also publishes on ´psychoanalysis and film´, on modernist and postmodernist cinema; and on film genres.
Résumé
In the present-day period, on the eve of destruction of analogue cinema, there seems to be a remarkable interest in the last gasps of silent film. Encouraged by this fascination, this article delves into an analysis of the highly formally innovative Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance, 1927). This film will be discussed as an oblique variant within the relatively new genre of the historical reconstruction film in France. Addressing four paradoxes and an irony, the article will examine the tensions between Gance’s attempt to create a historical biopic and his ambition to delineate a new aesthetics of cinema. It will do so, among others, by contrasting Gance’s ideas of both the cinema as a visual Esperanto and as the ‘music of light’ with the theatrical trans-historicity of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 1928), produced as a complement to Napoléon.
How to Cite:
Verstraten, P., (2012). A New Alphabet for the Cinema : the Tragic Irony of Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927). RELIEF - Revue Électronique de Littérature Française. 6(1), pp.48–65. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18352/relief.760
Publié le 09 Oct 2012.
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