Director: Abel Gance Year: 1927 Run-time: 5 hr 30 min Source: PAL region DVD I didn't need a 330 minute silent Napoleon biopic in my life. Despite the rave reviews I'd found comparing a screening of this movie to a religious experience, I was slightly dreading this one. To give a brief summary of the ambitious lunacy that French director Abel Gance brought to this production: Napoleon was envisoned in 1923 as a six-part film covering all of the dictator's life. Four years later, Gance had spent his entire budget filmed nine hours worth of material, covering 2/3 of the first part, and ending with a 27-year old military commander just beginning his campaign in Italy. The film never got any wide release, but instead a scattering of screenings, each with a different cut. Most of these screenings ended with the famous triptych sequence, in which the film played on three separate screens simultaneously. Today, film scholars have reconstructed ...
https://mubi.com/lists/kenjis-canon-the-big-1000