本帖最后由 蓝色拿破仑 于 2011-11-15 09:15 编辑
我打算将这个帖子做成国内关于阿贝尔·冈斯《拿破仑》信息最全的一个帖子。
家里有两种版本的拿破仑。Carl Davis配乐，2004年，5小时13分。另一个版本是3小时54分的。
需要人来综合整理下以下的影评，我英文水平不行。
www.imdb.com的影评
9 January 2005 | by Quibble (Berkshire, England)
Perhaps the greatest film ever made, but still being suppressed by legal battles...
I was lucky enough to see the very latest restoration of Napoleon by silent film expert Kevin Brownlow at the Royal Festival Hall in London earlier this month (December 2004). Carl Davis was there in person to conduct the London Philharmonic Orchestra in a live performance of his own brilliant score. It was the most moving and overwhelming cinematic experience of my life and I doubt whether it can ever be bettered. The film is decades ahead of its time, the bravura editing and inspired direction reveal Gance as the true genius that he was.
However...
The very performance I attended was under legal threats from Coppola, who wished to ban its screening. Back in 1980-81, he and his Zoetrope Studio helped fund a restoration and he got his father to compose a score. He helped get the US audiences to recognise what a remarkable work of genius Napoleon really is, and all credit to him for trying to do so. This would all seem very well and good, but even in 1981 Coppola wasn't showing the best version of the restored film that he could have. He had cut it down from Brownlow's (then) latest version to fit the score his father had written. He also showed it at 24 fps instead of the intended (and more realistic - the movements are at a normal rate, not unnaturally sped-up) 20 fps. Throughout the 1980s, Brownlow and others in Europe kept finding better elements and more footage. Yet, Coppola's version was still being called "THE restoration" and not altered at all. Brownlow also found prints with more authentic editing, giving a much better idea of the order and number of cuts in many sequences (so many versions/reels of Napoleon have had inferior takes/editing put in by people other than Gance that it took time to discover the best and most authentic). It was becoming increasingly clear that Coppola's version was very much flawed and out-of-date with the new discoveries. In 2000, the latest and most complete version available (including the authentic tints, near-definitive editing in line with Gance's intentions, and the best print so far etc.) was screened in London. Carl Davis had altered and lengthened his magnificent score to match the latest version. Even after this showing in 2000, elements were still being improved to make the film as close as possible to Gance's intentions. The 2004 screening which I attended had a print that ran for nearly 5 and a half hours. Coppola's version runs for less than 4 hours and it hasn't been touched to include any improvements in print quality or more authentic tinting or editing.
The Coppola version of Napoleon, with a run time of 223 minutes (3 hours and 43 minutes) is out on DVD in Australia. I do not know when or even if it will come out on DVD in the US. Rest assured, it will NOT be the best version of this great film, or anything close to it. Coppola and Zoetrope sold rights to their version of the film to Universal in the 1980s and so now the issue of rights has become entangled with a major studio (Universal Studios, incidentally, destroyed all their silent film negatives in 1947 - a very (in)appropriate choice of distributor for a film whose failure and subsequent neglect was mainly due to a horrendous re-editing by studios (MGM) in 1927).
The Australian DVD, released by Universal, is filled with faults. Apart from inferior image quality (unlike the 2004 print, which was superb and scarcely a speck of dirt was visible any time during the whole 5 and a half hours), the final triptych sequence is horrendously cropped from 3.99:1 to 2.55:1 and isn't even adjusted for widescreen televisions. It's also exactly the same version from 1981 which, even back then, wasn't the best there was available. The music, admirable though it is, cannot compare to Davis' score (he has worked on many other silent film scores with great acclaim) - especially now that Davis has reworked the score for the latest version.
Coppola's efforts to suppress the latest restoration are a dreadful example of precisely the kind of money-driven censorship and selfishness that Napoleon has been dogged by for eighty years. Not just the 90+ minutes of extra footage, but the score and print quality itself, makes the latest print by the BFI/BFA/Brownlow indispensable. Anyone who claims to have rescued this film (as Coppola did in 1981, even though Brownlow had been working for decades before then, alongside Gance himself, to remaster the film) and yet tries to ban a closer version to the original film is monstrously hypocritical. As much as I welcome any hope of seeing Napoleon on DVD, I recoil at the thought of thousands of people being forced to watch a terribly flawed and inferior version of this masterpiece. Even as I type, there are rumours of even more lost footage from Napoleon being found in Denmark - with any luck this will lead to an even better restoration than the 2004 one.
This ongoing saga of restoration (and much credit is due to the person who seems to have the least legal rights out of the whole cast of those involved in the restored film: Kevin Brownlow) means that a DVD release of the Coppola version, with its many flaws, seems absurd and remarkably selfish and damaging. This film desperately needs to be released on DVD, but only in as close a form as possible to Gance's original masterpiece of 1927, seen by far too few people. That US rights-holders are trying to ban better versions with over 90 minutes extra in them is just another sad chapter in the story of this much-abused wonder of cinema. This is a magnificent film and deserves better than the shoddy and selfish treatment it has been given in America.
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By Steven D. Greydanus
One of the crowning achievements of the silent era, writer-director Abel Gance’s Napoléon is a monumental but unfinished masterpiece, originally intended as a series of back-to-back productions covering the whole of Napoleon’s life. Unlike his subject, Gance was unable to proceed beyond the Italian campaign of 1796, Napoleon’s first major expansionist operation, at which point the shoot ran out of money. (Napoleon’s army also didn’t have any money, but he let his troops live off the land, an expedient Gance couldn’t reproduce.)
Instead of a series of films, Gance wound up with a massive, incomplete epic, reportedly six and half hours in length originally, but slashed by American distributor MGM to less than an hour and a half for its 1929 US release. Due to this butchery — not to mention the burgeoning sound revolution — Napoléon was a stateside flop, and Gance was never able to raise the money to tell the rest of Napoleon’s story.
In subsequent decades Gance kept tinkering with the film, producing versions ranging in length from 135 minutes to 275 minutes. The original six-hour silent epic, however, was thought lost, until a 1979 restoration reconstituting approximately two-thirds of the original film, painstakingly reassembled and restored by film historian Kevin Brownlow and featuring an original score by Carl Davis. Two years later, an edited version of this restoration was released in the US by Francis Ford Coppola — who had sponsored Browslow’s work — with a new score by Carmine Coppola, Francis’s father. Premiering in Radio City Music Hall, it was subsequently released on VHS.
Since then, Brownslow has completed at least two further restorations, the latest and best, his 2000 version, runs about 5½ hours. Unfortunately, due to Coppola’s exclusive US rights, this optimal version is unavailable in the US.
Even the four-hour 1981 Coppola VHS, though, remains an impressive testament to Gance’s monumental ambitions and technical wizardry. Gance creates an aura of dynamism and mythic power around his protagonist and his times with strikingly mobile camera effects, from shots photographed on horseback or with handheld cameras to footage of the revolutionary Convention taken from an overhead swing, which makes the tumultous Convention physically heave and toss like the raging sea seen in intercut footage of Napoleon on a dinghy battling a storm.
Startling split-screen effects create a dreamlike, mythic quality about even the opening snowball fight featuring an imperious young Bonaparte (Vladimir Roudenko) at military school in Brienne. But Gance’s boldest innovation is preserved only in the climactic Italian campaign sequence, originally one of four sequences Gance shot in a technique he called "Polyvision" (the other three Polyvision sequences are lost). This was an early form of widescreen projected in triptych across three separate screens from three projectors, a technique later developed as Cinerama.
Some shots in this climactic triptych sequence are true widescreen panoramas, photographed simultaneously with three cameras and projected in more or less sychronized continuity. Others break up the screens into separate panels, often focusing on the grim visage of Napoleon (Albert Dieudonné) in the center screen. In the rousing finale, Gance tints the screens to match the blue, white, and red fields of the French Tricolor flag. It’s a robust feat of cinematic mythologizing.
This mythic quality, and the reverence with which Gance treats his subject, has unsurprisingly occasioned sharp political criticism of the film — not entirely fairly, perhaps, given his unrealized intentions of additional films portraying the later Emperor Napoleon. Still, however Gance might subsequently have nuanced his portrait, unquestionably his Napoleon is larger than life, a godlike figure whose mere presence is enough to quell rioting mobs and mutinous officers, whose words inflame populations and armies. Almost as fearsome, too, are the architects of the Reign of Terror, Robespierre (Edmond von Daële), whose striking tinted, round-lensed eyeglasses and powdered wig are somehow oddly evocative of a villain in a Matrix sequel, and Louis Saint-Just (Gance himself), dandyish and implacable.
Napoleon’s restless energy and imperious authority have their humorous sides. At his civil wedding to Josephine (Gina Manès), the impatient young general brusquely waves aside one formality after another, snapping "Skip all that!" Later, riding in a horse-drawn coach, Napoleon becomes fed up with the carriage’s pace, stops the carriage, unhitches the horses, and rides galloping off on one of them.
The imagery that surrounds Napoleon is first iconic (eagles, fire), then openly messianic, and finally, in the Italian campaign climax, a startling combination of satanic and divine, as Napoleon becomes "the tempter" showing the "promised land" of Italy to the French armies — a blending of the Devil showing Christ all the nations of the world to entice him to worship him and Yahweh leading His chosen people into Palestine.
In spite of all these worshipful over-the-top overtones, I find it impossible, at such a chronological and cultural remove from Gance, not to say Napoleon, to regard Napoléon as any kind of living political or moral document. It is an extraordinary artifact from another culture, a mythology as remarkable and as alien as the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Icelandic Eddas. For students of silent film, this is one of those indispensable landmarks you must see before you die.
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楼主: 蓝色拿破仑
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发表于 2011-7-3 19:00:48
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