"Napoleon" in Oakland, CA

[robcat2075]

It's the most GI-MAZING silent film ever made. I saw it today. Second mortgage your house and go see it.

 

http://www.silentfilm.org/napoleon-home.php

 

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/17/148758170/na...quer-the-screen

[robcat2075]

trailer:

 

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/431288/...m-Festival.html

[robcat2075]

Leonard Maltin, America's most beloved movie critic, was there...

 

http://blogs.indiewire.com/leonardmaltin/napoleon-triumphant

 

 

[robcat2075]

I was... THERE...

 

[fae_alba]

If I'm not mistaken, I saw that movie when I was like a freshman in high school, sometime around 1976. Parents thought a little bit of culture would do me good. It didn't.

[robcat2075]

If I'm not mistaken, I saw that movie when I was like a freshman in high school, sometime around 1976. Parents thought a little bit of culture would do me good. It didn't.

 

You must have seen something else, the first real reconstruction of this didn't happen until 1980.

[Gerry]

Wow, quite a rave from Leonard Maltin. What I like about his reviews is that when he really likes something, he isn't ashamed to let his enthusiasm show. Maybe we'll get to see it on the East Coast sometime.

[robcat2075]

Part of what makes this amazing is that the subject, Napoleon, is not something most people, myself included, would go out of their way to see, but you are roped in very quickly none-the-less and by the end of the movie you are wishing you could go join up.

 

Part of it is that you know that it's all really there. Except for a few miniatures and maybe a few matte paintings it's all real and you are gobsmacked by the knowledge that Gance somehow assembled all this in front of a camera without drowning or trampling or killing anyone.

 

Part of it is that it looks so different from other films of that time. There's an enormous amount of hand-held camera footage doing crazy viewpoint stuff.

 

It has no "stars" that we remember and yet they all do a great job.

 

When it's funny, it's FUNNY, when it's sad it's HEARTBREAKING, when it's exciting it's AMAZING. How often do you get a film by anyone that is all that?

 

The presentation with a live orchestra adds a lot. It can never be as loud as a modern theater sound system but the fact that they are there is exciting.

 

And then the "Polyvision" finale is beyond anything I've ever seen and I have seen a real Cinerama movie too which is about the only thing similar.

 

Technically the Polyvision was very rough, the panoramic images never quite line up, but what he does with it in terms of montages and superimpositions and plain wild spectacle is so powerful that none of that matters. I can't imagine how he was able to conceive it all in a time when non-linear editing just didn't exist. Obviously a very powerful brain at work.

 

After you've seen "Napoleon" like I've seen it, all movies will be trifles from here on out.

[robcat2075]

Additional cool thing... I don't think I've ever watched a movie with 3000 people before. That doesn't happen anymore today. A multiplex theater seats maybe 500(?) and I've only seen one full once ("Fahrenheit 9/11" in 2008).