| Napoleon Links In 1925, the French filmmaker Abel Gance began filming one of the most anticipated movies in the history of film: Napoleon. Exotic locations, casts of thousands, and (to the French) the greatest story of heroism and the human spirit came together in what Brownlow (1983) called "so far ahead of its time that it seemed set to become the most famous [film] ever made." The film premiered in April 1927 at the Paris Opéra to a full house and ran three hours forty minutes. When it ended the audience gave Gance a standing ovation which lasted fifteen minutes. The most innovative achievement of Gance's Napoleon was his use of three screens side by side to make an enormous triptych, 40 feet wide at the Opéra. Gance filmed several scenes with three cameras with the intention of creating a long continuous panorama. This technique, which he called "Polyvision," was the early predecessor of Cinerama, the popular three-screen movies of the 1950s. Napoleon has personal resonance because I had the opportunity to see it, when Francis Coppola re-created it in the early 1980s, complete with a live orchestra. Two moments stand out as emblematic of the opportunity and challenge of new media. The first was a scene depicting the first singing ever of La Marseillaise (the French national anthem), a scene so dramatic it was used to end of the first act. The second moment was at the end of the film, where the single screen opened up into a panoramic 3-screen trypich, when Napoleon, on his white horse, rides through all three screens. The first moment was high emotional drama; the second was high technical drama. They were theonly two scenes that resulted in an explosion of applause from the audience. Submitted
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