In the canon of the silent cinema, only once has it been truly silent. The purifying beam of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, whose images are so searing — so totally self-sufficient — that they need no musical accompaniment. The film is to be viewed as though in some state of piety, before religious ecstasy. A stillness and a quiet; the air of a cathedral; a stifled sob in the pews. Only then, they say, can the film defeat those musical instruments that would otherwise stand between an audience and God. So profound is this belief in The Passion of Joan of Arc’s silent exhibition that the Masters of Cinema Blu-ray makes the silent playback of the film its primary option, as though actively muting the film is insufficient — it must be, on the disc, already silenced. We might think to Anna Karina who, in Vivre sa vie, watches The Passion of Joan of Arc, and watches it in silence, and weeps. Her illuminated face seems to mirror that of Falconetti’s; between Nana and Joan is only the hissing passage of the film strip. A Frenchman briefly mutters “Falconetti,” and in this muttering, we feel that crystal tower struck by a hammer; we feel a sudden urge to shush across the stalls. The only problem faced by exhibitors who intend to follow Dreyer’s mythical stipulation for a fully silent screening is just that fact: the stipulation is mythical. The Passion of Joan of Arc premiered with a live score, and — until some misunderstanding in the 1950s, with Dreyer disapproving of a specific score layered onto his then-rediscovered film — was always accompanied as such. In a sense of religious confusion, we have silenced, we have made silent, The Passion of Joan of Arc; but in doing so, we have given it another kind of music: an anti-music. The sound-world still dominates the frame, here by its absence; it is impossible to watch The Passion of Joan of Arc without music and not think, with some regularity: there is currently no music playing.
But this preference, its many defenders, and Dreyer’s initial grievance — that a score might deprecate his masterpiece — reveals in it the ironic prominence of music within the so-called silent cinema. In the silent era, this music was frequently outside the control of the filmmaker, determined instead by exhibitors, depending on their resources, taste, and available auditoria. King Vidor went so far as to say, “probably 50% of the emotion came from the music.” While some silent scores survive, most are fragmentary, or reduced for piano; in many cases, it is impossible to hear what a contemporaneous audience would have heard performed with the classics of the silent cinema. As such, the rediscovery and proliferation of silent film poses a question: how are these films to be accompanied? Underpinning this question is the more substantial query: how might these films be altered by the music we give them? With exception to the most popular films — the Chaplins and the Keatons and the Potemkins — most silent film re-releases will become married to whatever score they are packaged with; the sound and the image, despite disparate origins, will merge into a single artwork, and exist that way in the mind and the memory of all who see them. Approaches vary substantially in the scoring of silent cinema. On certain occasions, it is preferred to emulate, as much as possible, a score in the style prominent at the time of the film’s release. Or, according to whatever instruction remains from the director. Or — in the case of its survival — an adaptation or re-recording of a contemporaneous score. Such scores were often built of existing classical or popular themes; a mélange of extant music, arranged according to the procession of the film. Otherwise, the score might be wholly original, or experimental, or anachronistic, or improvised. Sometimes, in more grievous occasions, a musician might be so taken with the notion of their own music that they forget they are accompanying a film, and instead decide that the film is accompanying their music. Such was the case during a 2019 screening of the 1927 film Heaven on Earth at London’s BFI Southbank. A charming Weimar comedy that was overwhelmed, pummelled, bludgeoned, and finally shot by a cacophonous electronic soundtrack at the behest of one Helen Noir. Here, the film was demoted to the station of “visual.” Such is the power of music.
Heaven on Earth is a film rarely screened and rarely accompanied — like much of the silent cinema, it will appear in some retrospective festival, and then vanish into the ephemera from whence it came. But we might consider an opposite scenario. Abel Gance’s legendary Napoleon, a film that is in a state of constant revival, a film that has been born and reborn countless times across the century of its existence. In the 1920s, it existed in versions ranging from 90 minutes (in an especially savage MGM cut) to nine hours, in Gance’s most ambitious edit. Since the schoolboy Kevin Brownlow set to resurrect the then semi-lost film in the 1950s (beginning with another 90-minute version on 9.5mm film), it has again ballooned to editions ranging between four and seven hours in length. The latest version, by the Cinémathèque française, premiered this year and runs 425 minutes; a new American version is expected within the next year, in the range of 305-320 minutes. To detail the history of Napoleon’s ever-tessellating runtime, and the differences between each version, would require a monograph. In the interest of brevity, there are three differences of note. First, a smattering of additional footage. Despite the three-hour distance between the longest and shortest presentations of Napoleon, one would be surprised how little additional footage exists between cuts, and how in almost every case this footage merely adds to pre-existent scenes, rather than adding a “deleted” sequence altogether. The substantial difference in runtime is therefore explained by the second of the differences: framerate. Kevin Brownlaw’s restoration runs at 20fps, with a sequence in 18; Brownlaw’s longest version (2000) comes in at 332 minutes. The Francis Ford Coppola release of Brownlaw’s 1980 restoration runs at 24fps, and comes in at 240 minutes. The new Cinémathèque française version runs the slowest of all, with the entire picture locked in at 18fps; with orchestral accompaniment, it is shown over two nights. The third difference is then implicit: the music.
Of all the variations and competing editions of Napoleon that exist, I would argue it is the music that most substantially transforms the work. Not only are these alternate versions; they seem, at times, to become different films, which speak differently to an audience, altering the inherent mood of the work. Napoleon’s unusually fraught restoration history has produced an unusually ripe crop of musical offerings: there are at least four fully orchestrated, symphonic scores available for the film in its various iterations. Only one, a 1992 edition put together by Bambi Ballard, makes central the music of Arthur Honegger, who composed about 30 minutes of music for the 1927 premiere. Marius Constant, Honegger’s protégé, adapted Honegger’s cues into new, original compositions. As Honegger’s music had been in the film’s original premiere, Constant’s new score was a fiasco: “boring” was the word in the French press. Perhaps for this reason, no full recording of this score is available. We are left with three options. Two originate from screenings of Brownlaw’s restoration in the early 1980s. In the United States, Francis Ford Coppola presents the film at the Radio City Music Hall, with music by his father, Carmine. The film is played fast — 24fps — in order to avoid paying the orchestra overtime, keeping the film within 4 hours. Carmine Coppola’s score is almost wholly original — with very occasional quotations of classical or revolutionary music. In Coppola’s own description, it “abounds with drums,” on the apparent justification that Napoleon’s favorite instrument was the field drum. This leads to an incessantly militaristic rhythm, a continuous banging on the head with drumsticks, in what might be described a barrage of constant noise. This is not entirely inappropriate to Gance’s Napoleon, and is successful in making the shortest version of Brownlaw’s restoration feel something like the longest. A few months before Coppola’s New York premiere, Napoleon was shown in the Empire at Leicester Square, with a score by Carl Davis, the picture running at 20fps (and so nearly an hour longer). Davis’ approach is substantially different to Coppola’s. He limited himself largely to the quotation of classical or traditional music, and within this constraint gave himself a year-boundary of 1810, beyond which no music would be taken. The only exceptions are the original themes Davis provides the film, most centrally the ‘Eagle of Destiny’ motif, which serves to represent the subjective aspect of Napoleon’s character. This sudden modernity resembles, in its way, the hand of Abel Gance, entering history. All around this hand, the aural textures of revolutionary France predominate. Since its first premiere in 1980, this score has been extended and edited in line with Brownlaw’s ever-expanding restoration: the last version, from 2000, required over half an hour of additional music. Finally, we come to the most recent addition to the infinite recursion of Napoleon: Simon Cloquet-Lafollye’s score to the 2024 Cinémathèque française restoration. Cloquet-Lafollye takes yet a different tack to Coppola and Davis. He was commissioned on the instruction that no original music be used whatsoever; his score, then, is entirely made up of quotation and arrangement. This puts his score in a similar sonic dimension to Carl Davis’, but Cloquet-Lafollye does not delimit himself by year. His musical choices span from the 18th century through to the late 20th; his justification follows: “Several hours of purely tonal melodic music [would] be just unbearable.” As such, his score is the most eclectic, finding in Napoleon not a strictly historical mood, but some combination of the old and the new. Several of Coquet-Lafollye’s musical selections were written in 1927 — he brings into the film the soundworld of Gance himself, and all the swirling modernity there implied.
To illustrate the transformation of Napoleon in these three versions, three sequences will be compared between them. It should be noted that these are all symphonic scores written for similar forces and instrumentation: it is not that Napoleon is different when the score is performed by a jazz quintet, or by a large number of kazoos. But that, within the same genre, a different film begins to emerge. The sequences are as follows: The Marseillaise; the Double Tempest; and the aftermath of Toulon. The situation of the first of these is especially curious, as it represents a forced convergence. At this point in the film, the composer is compelled to use the Marseillaise, given the central drama of the scene is the first performance of what will become Revolutionary France’s anthem. Here, the image firmly dictates the sound. Yet the structure of the scene — before the Marseillaise is sung, and after it is acclaimed — allows for much variety. To begin with the Coppola score: the scene begins, as so often do his scenes begin, with a triumphant banging of drums and blasting of horns. This first call quickly segues into a fearsome kind of march, occasionally flitting to a more genteel countermelody led by a harpsichord, and then back to the muscular march. Here is Coppola’s idiom in micro: all stamping feet and swinging sabres, with the occasional lip-service to a more sophisticated style of sound. We feel as though we are already marching to war. The Three Gods — Danton, Marat, Robespierre — are introduced by brass cannonade. Robespierre himself receives, in addition, a wash of romantic strings. In this scene, Desmoulins hands Danton the sheet music for the Marseillaise; immediately, the theme plays on the woodwinds, against a vigorous beat on the low strings. Danton goes out to the hall, and the music becomes more bold, with (another) thumping drum. As soon as Rouget de Lisle begins singing, the Marseillaise is announced in full character, a big thick arrangement, which grows and grows. Save for a small bridge after the first performance of the song is completed, Coppola continues to build on this theme, an ever larger Marseillaise, bigger and bigger, louder and louder; the introduction of the adult Napoleon (for the first time in the film) can do nothing to staunch the flow of infinite Marseillaise. If one would like to approximate the feeling of being clobbered by a Marseillaise-shaped cosh, it is this experience Coppola achieves. The entirety of the scene follows on this military theme: the Marseillaise itself is a marching song, succeeding from Coppola’s own.
Davis takes the sequence differently. He explodes into Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, which will serve thereon as the revolutionary theme. There is a rabidity to the Coriolan, a brewing, building motion. We feel as though we are in the midst of a cauldron. Here the Marseillaise first peeks its head — as soon as Desmoulins is handed a copy of the music, the theme begins to play on the score; the Marseillaise begins its career in some degree of opposition to the Coriolan. As soon as Desmoulins enters the cove of the Three Gods, the Coriolan swoops back into the music with those commanding orchestral chords. Beethoven’s drama meanders about as the Gods argue — Desmoulins slips into the room. As soon as Danton sees the score, the music suspends. The opening bars of the Marseillaise repeat, but cannot yet gain purchase. The march swirls around the score in the mood of Beethoven — Danton susses out the atmosphere in the Club de Cordeliers. Where by now the Marseillaise had full sway in Coppola’s score, it has yet to gain ascendency in Davis’. De Lisle climbs the pulpit — all anticipation, the music trading phrases of the Coriolan with the Marseillaise. All silent, a drum roll, and then a single horn carries the tune! De Lisle alone! Strings join in the higher register. As he finishes his song, we shift into variations on the Marseillaise, until the Coriolan suddenly sweeps back into the score as de Lisle’s audience demand their lyric sheets. With de Lisle’s motion, Davis restarts the Marseillaise — but in a detail largely ignored by Coppola, de Lisle stops the crowd after a false start. Davis breaks the music here, and shifts into a lower, less certain Marseillaise, only to then build from this seed into the full figure of the march. A cut back to Marat and Robespierre returns with them the Coriolan, but the Marseillaise overcomes it: the camera holds on a defiant Robespierre as the anthem builds in intensity. And then, as we spot Napoleon in the crowd, the “Eagle of Destiny” theme rings out, interwoven with fragments of the Marseillaise. Here, Napoleon’s destiny is wound up with that of the new France; where in Coppola’s score he is merely part of the crowd, the Davis score suddenly freezes time — freezes sound — to allow Albert Dieudonné his John Wayne entry. Afterward — triumphant — the Marseillaise returns in its most assured version. We have arrived here not by the straight path — the clanging repetitions of Coppola — but by a weave of several tunes, implying several things. Here, the revolution is as one, but already are its seams exposed: already does Beethoven imply the internecine, while the Marseillaise fights for the universal. Napoleon’s theme, when it appears, cuts through the both.
Coquet-Lafollye finds yet another dimension in this scene. He opens with a similar intensity to Davis, with Albéric Magnard’s Hymne à la justice, but this music is even more charged than Beethoven’s Coriolan, a reaching, vibrating work, springing forward, all urgency. It breaks into an swelling, emotive theme, but it’s hard to keep a grasp upon: this is music in constant transformation. The strong brass presence is common to all three scores. Like Davis, we understand that something vivid is taking place; unlike Davis, this music is not set to become the motif for the revolution, nor those at its head. Coquet-Lafollye instead exploits the energy of this music, and then its quieter, interior qualities. The search for justice is not made so plain. Gone is the military self-evidence of Coppola, but also the determined consistency of Davis’ selection. Perhaps this is the revolution that has not yet taken its final shape. Again we follow Desmoulins into the chamber with the Three Gods, and again he hands Danton the Marseillaise. Again, a small hint — perhaps the smallest yet — permeates into the score. But Coquet-Lafollye’s decision here is curious: he introduces the slow movement of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony, an initially rumbling, and then airy work of reflective character. It’s spacious music, with rich strings and a reaching, aspirational character. An ascending figure is heard in the horns, building and building, discovering an unusual, perhaps unsure completion in the orchestra. It is sunlight cutting through the fog. And so, de Lisle takes to his pulpit, and the music dips into silence — there is just an echo of the Marseillaise. Then, from the silence, alike to Davis, a single voice springs out. But unlike Davis, this is the voice of a man. Singing! Leaping from the silent screen, the sudden incurrence of synchronized sound. In a silent movie, the human voice is something like a thunderstorm. After de Lisle finishes, we break into a celebratory suite by Massenet, all cheerful pomp, before returning to the anthem. Now, de Lisle sings with a chorus. And it’s in this instance that the false start is most keenly realized: the singers, disorganized, are made to stop, and begin again. The unstoppable verve of Coppola or the sinuous adaptation of Davis make for a very different moment. Here, the film seems to stagger, before reawakening with yet more fervor. The instruments join the singers, in an arrangement by Berlioz; Napoleon himself is — as in the Coppola — afforded no special presence here. That these voices were included is something of a miracle. The film as it survives (and perhaps as it was first edited) does not contain sufficient frames for a typical rendition of La Marseillaise. It required a series of complicated alterations to the time signature to synchronize the music to the mouths; it is achieved seamlessly. But this is not a radical innovation by Coquet-Lafollye, and rather a reflection of Gance’s own exhausting genius. On the night of its premiere, Napoleon was accompanied by a full chorus, and the Marseillaise was sung in synchronization by Alexandre Koubitzky. The song, and its words, become so significant as to exit from the screen; the ultimate “silence” of the silent screen cracked to allow the revolutionary spirit to beam both in image and in sound. The effect of the scene is therefore totally changed; it becomes not merely the Marseillaise scene, but the Sound scene; it becomes the point at which the restriction of the medium is thrown off. In Davis, the scene rumbles with conflict, and with the seed of later motivic collision — for Davis, this scene is the root of a later tree. And in Coppola, it is a forward march, it is a grand gesture, the rush of the Revolution becomes the rush of its music, thoughtlessly pummeling through and forward, banging the drum. The same song in each scene, but altered so drastically in mood and position.
Later: the Double Tempest. This feted scene follows Napoleon’s flight from Corsica, as his little boat is buffeted about by a storm. Gance intercuts this with a scene in the National Convention, expressing the persecution of the Girondins — the two tempests, one actual, one metaphorical. Coppola takes this scene as one would expect: very loudly. The sounds of peril. A fearsome ostinato measures Napoleon’s maritime adventures, until the music sharply cuts with the image, introducing heavy drumming (oh, the drums) and a complicated string figure for the chaos at the Convention. When the film cuts back to Napoleon, the music is maintained: a new ostinato enters the strings, and we somehow segue into yet another drumming march. Then, suddenly, into the Marseillaise. The French flag Napoleon is using as sail might have some responsibility for an unusually chipper musical shift. At this point, Gance’s second-most audacious compositional trick is introduced: the camera swings forward and backward in the Convention, as though a visual pendulum. For whatever reason, Coppola here shifts into what could be described as a genteel nautical tune; indeed, the overall feeling of this scene becomes comic. The mass of jostling politicians is taken (as it is possible to take it) as a ludicrous scene of wigged men in conflict. As the Terror is announced, the Marseillaise returns, only slightly out of character: it seems as though Coppola is depicting the march of history, in all its violent, ridiculous quality. As soon as Napoleon is out of the bluster, Coppola returns to an earlier theme depicting Napoleon’s family; it is an utter calm, belying all that has come before. Coppola takes the scene as pure action, as pure incident, and takes Napoleon’s survival as the paramount detail. There is little reflection in this music, and far more a sense of bombast. Ever beat the drums.
Davis instead begins with the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral, which opens with stabbing violin patterns, before launching into high drama — deep brass, shimmering strings, into the storm. The music grumbles until the second crescendo, at which point we are tossed into the Convention, where the music morphs into a sinister cast of the Marseillaise. And then — as Robespierre accuses the Girondins — the old Coriolan returns, that excited tune of discourse and friction. The overture continues as the montage returns to Napoleon in his skiff, now representing the attitudes of the sea, and the flashes of lightning in the far distance. The brass then enter with a variation on Beethoven’s theme in C minor, which had earlier been used to depict the first massacres of the revolution: the Double Tempest is met by a doubling of Beethovens. The Club de Cordeliers is summoned, as are the massacres: the two become one. An overlay shot of a guillotine then reintroduces the Marseillaise, though in an ironic, haunted pose. The Coriolan masters them all and conquers the scene again, until that C Minor theme once more slithers around it. As the camera begins to shake, the Coriolan builds, until the pendulum shot, at which Beethoven’s Pastoral reclaims its crescendo and brings with it that first notion of the storm — the two storms are made one. An intertitle announces the Terror: as the sequence ends, the first notes of Beethoven’s Eroica theme seem to sound out. The symphony once dedicated to Napoleon; perhaps here, the call for a restorer, amid the cacophony. It is only in the following scene, in the calm, that the “Eagle of Destiny” will emerge from the squall: after being tied up in the fate of the Republic, Napoleon’s own survival is finally given over to the film. In this complex arrangement of themes, Davis brings out of the Double Tempest scene its pivotal content. He builds in relationships to the previous scenes of the revolution; he pays off his musical associations; and brings these into the stormy gait of Beethoven’s Pastoral — the scene becomes greater than associative montage, but an associative score, bringing together the jealous scope of Robespierre; the atrocities of the revolution; the symbol of the Marseillaise; the violence of the storm; and then the image of the Eroica. Davis does not merely abet the mood of Gance, but sures up his structure: the climax is not simply that of this sequence, or of the Corsica episode, but of the first third of Napoleon.
Once more, Coquet-Lafollye marks this scene differently. On approaching the sequence he had this to say: “It’s like you want to puke, you want to vomit… So I found music that gave this feeling of getting sick on a boat. So the question was, what do I use? I used British music.” So be it. He begins the sequence with Arnold Bax’s On the Sea-Shore. A very smoky, atmosphere music, swaying somewhat, contrasting the high and the low. It has the motion of a tide. A sudden rise into crescendo — a strong brass figure — crashing into queasy string ostinatos. This music takes us from Napoleon’s boat into the Convention. The music shifts then to Frank Bridge, and his tone poem The Sea: this is sharper, more aggressive music, with piercing brass and pummeling orchestral ostinatos — these ostinatos seem present in all three scores for this sequence — the music crashes, recovers, crashes — seemingly without warning. It is music structured around bracing crescendos, around sudden crescendos — much as Gance’s editing implies. Coquet-Lafollye builds on this idea until the pendulum shot, at which point the overture to Sibelius’ The Tempest –— not a British composer, but a British text — commands the orchestra. This piece is determined by staggered scalic runs, against a layer of horn glissandi, rising and rising, then falling, then rising again; this is an angsty music, pitched on edge. The massive drama of both the Coppola and Davis scores is shirked for what is a more elemental approach to the scene; a physical music, which seems to resemble a heavy wind, a swaying of the ocean. It’s a music in motion: Coquet-Lafollye engages with the movement of Gance’s camera and arranges a sonic equivalent. These late- and post-romantic tone poems are not so melodically inclined as Coppola or as Beethoven; it becomes a sound world, to match the image. It is only after the storm, as Napoleon is recovered, that the music can find some proper form. Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music represents a sudden clarity. All atmospheric effects vanish in an instant. There is a heaviness, a drama to this music — the air of tragedy — but with space to breathe, a certain composure. Perhaps it represents, in its emotion, the tragedy at the Convention. But in its form, it represents a new stability, a new vision for a Napoleon survived.
Once again, in these three iterations, three different aspects of Gance’s Napoleon seem predominant. Coppola esteems the thundering bluster, and then the outrageous nature of the scenes he is accompanying: he undermines the larger rhythm of the film by instead scoring the scene exactly as it behaves in that moment. The scene is about Napoleon surviving the storm, and it is about the sorry decline of the National Convention into cannibalism — there is a heroism and also a satire in this iteration of the scene. Davis, instead, weaves his national tapestry, finding in the Double Tempest all the thematic heft of the film so far laid out in a massive montage sequence; he speaks in the music what is implied in the image. In this edition, the film is more intellectual; the interior design is opened up for mass gawping. Coquet-Lafollye then shrugs off this motivic knot for an atmospheric, even emotive, read of the scene. He uses music that specifically connotes the sea, he seeks the sound of a wave, or a rush of wind, so as to bring to life the storm, and import this storm into the Convention. Perhaps Beethoven’s Pastoral is also a form of programme music, which is to say, music that describes something specific in the world, but it is never so foggy as any of Coquet-Lafollye’s selections. Here, the importance is not what is laden upon the music, but its shape and its feeling directly; here is a more expressionistic Napoleon, which drifts into a modern sound so as to depict the modernity of Gance’s technique — the final version of Sibelius’ The Tempest dates from 1927, the year of Napoleon.
Lastly, there is the brief section that ends the siege of Toulon. Napoleon watches as the French fleet is sunk. A dying soldier looks up and asks for his name. We cut to the next morning, as the French brass celebrate victory — Napoleon is asleep, a drum for his pillow, and the film ends its first “epoch.” Coppola keeps it simple: for the sinking of the ships, a broadly mournful slice of symphonic music vaguely reminiscent of Grieg. As the solider looks up, a bell tolls. Here is grandiose tragedy, all swiftly undone at the cut — matching, we could say, Gance’s own swift change in mood — as Coppola returns to a la-dee-da celebratory theme met with, as we can reliably expect, the drumming of a snare. It is a bright, somewhat unconvincing march. There is a certain lightness it brings to the proceedings, a lightness made more substantial by the fact that the version of the film scored by Coppola is also running somewhat faster than intended. These characters seem more like cartoons when they move just that bit faster; Coppola’s music seems also to lack the necessary gravitas.
Davis opens the sequence with a mournful edition of the Eroica theme, robbing it of its bounce and pep. Here, perhaps it suggests, are the wages of heroism. A violin prominently leads the dirge; the strings tremble as we watch the fleet burn. The Eroica seems as though it would like to take flight, but it is kept down; it takes a descending pattern and the dying soldier looks up to Napoleon. At last, it is not the Eroica, but the “Eagle of Destiny” that enters the soundtrack, building up from its simple opening tune. We then — after introducing this theme — make the cut, as the theme begins to swell. As Napoleon is declared the “victor of Toulon,” the theme is given to a single violin, then to a flute. And then: the brass take up the line, in a whirlwind of strings. The eagle! Cresting and cresting! Into a Wagnerian ostinato, as the sun dips: despite the calamities of war, this is the first great victory of Napoleon. The thread of destiny, which Davis lines throughout the film, again marks its passage. Practically speaking, the Coppola and Davis scores attempt a similar mood in this scene; they do, however, provoke a different reaction. Coppola is grandiloquent — and in the somber scene, he is effectively so — but in the finale he cannot find the spirit of a victorious Napoleon; his music seems more appropriate for the feather-capped ex-aristocrat who acclaims Bonaparte than it does for the man itself. Davis, however, brings with his music each of Napoleon’s previous victories, though here the theme is most triumphant, an ornamented, vivid recapitulation of a tune that started in Brienne.
Coquet-Lafollye takes this scene, and so the ending of the first part of Napoleon — which is to screen separately in the Cinémathèque française restoration — with a very different mood. He, like Davis, appeals to the Eroica. But he does not choose the boisterous music of the first or the fourth movement, and rather the death march in the second. It is this music that accompanies as Napoleon watches the French fleet sink; as the aftermath of Toulon becomes apparent. A march — Coppola will also fall into a march — but not in the military guise. The dying soldier looks up, he asks for the name — the music remains. We cut to Napoleon asleep on the drum — the music remains. Even being declared the victor of Toulon does not halt the march. Our minds remain with the fallen, and with the burning of the ships. Napoleon’s reclining on the drum may imply some kind of insouciant soldiery in the other versions, a captain for the people, but here we feel as though it is a true exhaustion. Rather than sever the line between this scene and the one it immediately follows — as Coppola and Davis both essentially attempt and achieve — Coquet-Lafollye instead interprets the sleeping Napoleon as a man still haunted by the events of the day prior. The death march does swell; there is a scale, a magnitude that grows out of it. But the mood is dour, dramatic. Coquet-Lafollye resists the victorious valedictorian, preferring to brood on that which has lately unfolded. It seems, in many respects, the symbol of his interpretation: where Coppola will approach any scene with the loudest, most exciting drumbeat he can conjure, and where Davis will weave a grand arc in and around themes (his own and others), Coquet-Lafollye always centers the atmospheric, bringing out from a scene its interior qualities, always taking each sequence on its own merit and style. So ends the First Epoch thrice — can we say it was the same epoch ending each time?
This becomes the lingering question in seeing these many Napoleons. The mind is tempted, in retrospect, to build an equilibrium between them, to approach an objectivity that will even their differences and find between it all the true intention of Abel Gance. This is — and not without reason — an enticing ghost to follow. But a determination to view these different scores as detachable components from an unchanging film is to deny the very power of that music; it is not that the score nudges the viewer in one way or another, but that it fundamentally changes the substance of a scene, even the mood of a film. The experience of Napoleon via Coppola — a muscular, Hollywoodian silent film epic — is of an entirely different character to the more technical and more intelligent motives of Carl Davis, who renders Napoleon a truly historical picture, one built with the textures of the 17th century, one that makes emphatic a narrative argument more than a simple proceeding of events. Then comes Coquet-Lafollye, whose own Napoleon instead fronts the emotional, expressionistic character of Napoleon, finding perhaps less the texture of the 17th century than of the 20th; seeing Napoleon par Abel Gance as just that — a film inseparable from its maker, and one around which the year “1927” might be held as a banner. His Napoleon is perhaps the most sensitive to the moment, outside of the grand scheme; his is a Napoleon which can give voice to the silence, and glory in the singing. That could return us to the very beginning of this essay, and the notion of a truly silent film. Because Napoleon was, once, such a thing. In 1979, Brownlaw premiered his first major reconstruction of Napoleon at Telluride Film Festival. It was screened outdoors, with Abel Gance himself watching from his hotel window. It was bitterly cold. There was no music. Can we say this Napoleon, this silent Napoleon, is the very same film as those which followed it, and those which came before? After seeing the premiere of Carl Davis’ score, Brownlaw wrote: “I looked at the picture as though I’d never seen it before.” Perhaps it would be fair to say that he hadn’t.
Comments are closed.