Search Results

“... Precipitations fall thickly and heavily in Abel Gance’s Napoleon: snow in the courtyard of the college in Brienne, feathers from savaged pillows, rain and hail on the drums at the siege of Toulon, song-sheets fluttering down at the National Convention, confetti at the extraordinary Bal des Victimes, at which everyone present had to have lost a relative on the scaffold or to have been reprieved himself ...”

“... One​ of the lasting impressions left by Abel Gance’s film Napoléon (1927), now showing in a new, digitally remastered print at the BFI and the Lumière, is that it consists solely of close-ups and crowd scenes. This impression is too simple, but it doesn’t go away when you correct it with the modest, more diffuse truth ...”

“... declare it all the same. I spent most of last Sunday watching the silent movie Napoleon, made by Abel Gance some fifty years ago. The scenes of the French Revolution seem to me very unlikely: the principal characters make very strange faces and wear very rough clothing. Napoleon specialises, in rushing from the left-hand side of the screen to the right ...”

“... but Macmillan is certain that the British do not care who he is. Macmillan has not discoverd Abel Gance; Longman tells you he made the film Napoleon, but you already knew that, you looked him up because you had seen the film; you will have to go to the Grand Larousse to discover what a curious person ...”

“... and trivia by four new biographies: Richard Koszarski’s Erich von Stroheim, Roger Icart’s Abel Gance (in French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s Chaplin. All have one vital quality in common, and are preceded in this respect by Alexander Walker’s book on Garbo: they ...”

“... commemorative practices where others have seen cultural rupture, innovation, irony. Consider Abel Gance’s film J’Accuse. It is about an increasingly insane wounded soldier who escapes from hospital and returns to tell his village about a dream in which the dead of battle rise from their makeshift graves in a great black cloud and walk the roads ...”