Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Napoleon
1927 · Abel Gance · Napoleon on Sightlines
A small boat on a real sea, pitching hard. Bonaparte is in it, running from Corsica, and the camera isn't watching him ride the swell. It's riding the swell. Gance had the rig mounted so it swung with the boat, then cut that heaving against the Convention in Paris, where the deputies are having a storm of their own. Two tempests on one rhythm. For a few minutes in 1927 the weather over the Mediterranean and the French Revolution are the same event.
That sequence is the whole film in miniature, and it points at Gance's actual invention, which was not a story about Napoleon. It was a camera with no fixed address. Jules Kruger and his operators strapped cameras to the chests of running men, bolted them to horses, hung them from pendulums and wires, set them on sleds, and threw them. The tripod, in 1927, was not a piece of equipment. It was an assumption about where a viewer stands. Gance got rid of it.
Deleuze has a useful name for what a shot does when it moves like that: the mobile section. In his account a shot is never simply a view of something. It's a slice cut out of movement, and once the camera itself is in motion the slice starts reporting on something larger than its contents. Not "a man in a boat." A world in upheaval, sampled here, at this angle, at this speed.
This is also why the editing feels so unlike the Soviet montage of the same decade, even though both are cutting fast. Deleuze sorted 1920s montage by what each school wanted from it. Eisenstein's collisions want you to conclude something: two shots strike, a third meaning jumps out. The French school — Gance, Epstein, L'Herbier — wanted quantity of movement. Maximum mobility, superimposed layers, water and machines and crowds, images piled up until the sheer amount of motion overflows what you can take in. Deleuze calls the perception this produces liquid. Solid perception is the perception of a creature with feet, planted, judging distances. Take the feet away and vision starts behaving like a current. The double storm is that idea at full power. Nothing in it argues. Everything in it surges.
Then there are the frames themselves. Some shots here are a few frames long — Gance and his editor Marguerite Beaugé cut down to bursts that land below the threshold where you can name what you saw. Deleuze thinks cinema's founding wager was exactly this. Older arts chose the privileged instant, the posed climax, the attitude a statue could hold. Cinema gave that up and took the any-instant-whatever, any instant at all, sampled mechanically, and rebuilt movement out of moments with no privilege whatsoever. Gance takes the wager all the way to the floor. At that length an image isn't a picture of anything. It's a beat.
And then, in the same film, he spends enormous effort building privileged instants back up. Eagles. Flags. The Marseillaise staged as collective delirium. Albert Dieudonné's Bonaparte held in sculpted shadow, severe, unmoving, more emblem than man. Deleuze would call a face like that a qualisign: a face gone still, reflecting rather than reacting, holding a single quality until it stops being an expression and becomes a sign. The crowds work the same way. They aren't a lot of people. They're one feeling with many bodies, what Deleuze calls a dividual.
So the most modern machine in 1920s cinema runs at full speed in the service of the oldest thing a picture can do, which is make an icon. That tension isn't a flaw in the film. It's the film's subject. Gance stages the Brienne snowball fight as a military campaign, the schoolboy marshalling his forces, and the entire Bildungs-epic runs on that pun: destiny read backward out of childhood. The Revolution bears down on the man, the man masters the chaos, and the film stops at the threshold of Italy with the mastery still ahead. That is the action-image in what Deleuze calls its large form, a vast situation pressing until a decisive act transforms it. Handled with this much confidence it becomes providence. The film is a nationalist pageant and it does not blush. Worth knowing going in, and worth noticing how much of the biopic's grammar ever since was borrowed from a film making that particular argument.
Which brings up the triptych. Deleuze insists the whole is not a big container holding all the smaller sets. The whole is the Open: what changes, and what no frame can close around. Every frame implies an out-of-field, and he splits that in two. There's the relative kind, the room next door, space you could walk into. And there's the absolute kind, a sense of something beyond the frame that can't be located anywhere in space at all.
Gance hit that wall as a carpentry problem and solved it with carpentry. Three screens, three synchronized projectors. Sometimes the panels join into one panorama, and that's the relative out-of-field simply annexed, the adjacent space brought inside. Sometimes they carry three different images at once, mirrored or contrasting, and that's the stranger move: the elsewhere that was never next door, handed a surface of its own. No filmmaker has taken the absolute out-of-field more literally. Polyvision anticipated widescreen and multi-screen cinema by decades and was close to unshowable within a year, because it needed an auditorium nobody had built.
Antonin Artaud plays Marat. Gance plays Saint-Just. That casting turns into a joke history tells later, because Deleuze's name for the faith driving this whole enterprise is the spiritual automaton: the belief that an image can enter you without passing through argument and force thought, that a country could be made to think one thing together, in the dark, at twenty-four frames a second. Gance believed that about as hard as anyone ever has. Artaud became the great witness for the other side, the one who went looking for thought in the image and found an impower instead, a thought that cannot think. He is standing in the frame, inside the machine that believed.
The debts are specific. Pastrone's Cabiria moved a camera slowly through colossal architecture and taught European cinema that sets could be traversed; Gance unmoors that movement entirely and hurls it. Griffith's Intolerance supplied the grammar of massed extras cross-cut toward an accelerating convergence, which Gance keeps for his Revolutionary tableaux while changing what the cross-cutting is for: not rescue, rhyme. Epstein bolted a camera to a fairground carousel in Coeur fidèle to externalize a character's vertigo, and L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine made rhythmic cutting and superimposed abstraction into prestige spectacle; both are the Parisian air Gance was breathing. Karl Freund's unchained camera in Der letzte Mann was doing the same work in Berlin, strapped to bicycles and bellies. And Gance's own La Roue, cutting railway speed down to single-frame bursts, is the laboratory where Napoléon's montage was invented four years early.
Sound arrived within months of the April 1927 premiere at the Paris Opéra and stranded the film. Distributors hacked it down, the triptych was usually dropped, and it took Kevin Brownlow half a lifetime to put back together. What survives is the proof of two propositions we now take for granted: that a camera can be a participant rather than a witness, and that the shape of the screen is a variable rather than a given. Every handheld camera running alongside its subject today is doing with light equipment what Kruger's operators did with their chests.
Watch it for the moments where the camera stops being furniture. Then ask the question the film poses and cannot answer: was the problem that cinema couldn't think at that size, or that no room was ever built to hold the projectors?
Concepts in play
- montage-quantitative-french — Rapid rhythmic cutting, dense superimposition and multiple-exposure work pursued as 'ecstatic intensification rather than dialectical argument'; the double-storm's piled-up motion of sea, boat and Convention.
- the mobile section (plan) — Cameras strapped to the chests of running operators, fixed to horses, suspended on pendulums and wires, mounted on sleds, and hurled — Kruger realizing Gance's demand for a camera that moves as a participant.
- dicisign — The camera mounted to swing with Bonaparte's boat on the real heaving sea, so we feel the camera's own pitching presence as his; 'kinetic subjectivity: the lens becomes a body in the world.'
- reume (liquid perception) — The Corsican flight on a real, heaving sea, camera unanchored and rocking with the swell, cut into the political 'storm' of the Convention so the whole sequence flows rather than steps.
- any-instant-whatever — Shots cut down to a few frames — sometimes single frames — building 'rhythmic, almost subliminal accumulations of imagery' with Marguerite Beaugé, the instant reduced to a beat.
- privileged-instants — Charged tableaux organized around symbolic rhyme: eagles, flags, the Republic, the Marseillaise, figures held in emblematic composition so individuals dissolve into patterns of national meaning.
- icon of quality (qualisign) — Dieudonné's Bonaparte isolated in sculpted shadow, severe and hieratic, 'more icon than man' — a face held in close-up until it becomes a historical sign.
- dividual — The singing of 'La Marseillaise' staged as collective delirium; massed bodies in the Convention rendered as a single affective unit rather than as individuals.
- action-image-large-form — The Revolution as an encompassing situation that presses on Bonaparte until he masters it; the double storm framing him as the man who masters chaos, the film closing on the threshold act of the Italian campaign.
- the Open — Polyvision: the frame proving too small for the subject, so the film expands into three synchronized screens that sometimes combine into a single panorama of overwhelming scale.
- out-of-field-absolute — Triptych panels carrying three different images at once — a central action flanked by mirrored or contrasting views — giving a surface to an elsewhere that is not adjacent space.
- spiritual-automaton — The film's unembarrassed faith that montage and scale could make a nation feel one thing at once — with Antonin Artaud, later cinema's witness to thought's impower, cast in it as Marat.