Napoleon, one of the most represented historical figures in cinema

The film Napoleon by director Ridley Scott was warmly welcomed at the opening of the CinemaCon festival in Las Vegas, high mass for the bosses of American cinemas. This feature film was the star of the festival’s opening night on Monday evening, April 24th.

The emperor, who reigned over France for 15 years and conquered large parts of Europe in the early 19th century before dying in exile on the island of St. Helena, holds a place of honor in cinema history.

“With more than 700 appearances by Napoleon on the big screen (…) and about 350 on television, the Emperor is one of the most represented historical figures on screens.”The historian and film critic Antoine de Baecque even stated in the review in 2014 The history.

Napoleon, directed by the Lumière brothers

The Lumière brothers highlight him in an anti-clerical film, Interview between Napoleon and the Pope, from 1897. In 1903 Ferdinand Zecca produced Napoleon Bonaparte. The long line of films dedicated to the Emperor continued to grow between 1907 and 1915, a period when works dedicated to him continued to proliferate in the United States, France, Italy, Belgium and Denmark.

How can this fascination be explained? For Philippe Raxhon, cited on Property from the University of Liège, this arises from the ambiguity of the character. “He spreads the constitutional principles in Europe, he is a son of the revolution”, begins the researcher. But Napoleon is also a “Autocrat, enemy of free speech, rules practically alone, does not hesitate to put people to death”, he continues.

An infinitely malleable figure

“We celebrate less the personality of Napoleon than his image, the promise of future victories,” the historian Hervé Dumont considers in his study Napoleon, the epic in 1000 films. Hence the interest in the figure of the emperor in France at the beginning of the 20th century, after the defeat by Prussia in 1870 and in the context of colonial conquests.

Outside of France, the infinitely malleable figure of Napoleon is used to convey various and varied messages. In Wishproduced in 1954, the conquering emperor, interpreted by Marlon Brando, symbolizes the threat of communism.

Goodbye Bonaparte, directed by Youssef Chahine and released in 1985, is also critical of the Emperor. Accordingly Center for Film Studies at the University of Lausanne he enrolled in a “Context shaped by the criticism of French Colonial Action”.

Abel Gance’s “Napoleon”

The most emblematic work dedicated to the Emperor remains the Napoleon directed by Abel Gance and published in 1927. It traces his life from the still Bonaparte of 1781 to the Italian campaign in 1796. A restoration of this film was due out in 2022 but has yet to see the light of day. «Thousands of extras, just as many costumes, 60 guns…Napoleon is disproportionate in every way, like the grandiose destiny of the hero he pretends to embrace”, writes Guillaume Evin in History makes its cinema.

The film was a huge success, largely because of its technical audacity: the filmmaker installed cameras on horses, for example, which gave the image a mobility unprecedented for the time.

Albert Dieudonné’s interpretation is also celebrated, so much so that he is contacted to play Napoleon in several other films. Rumors even falsely state that he has gone insane and thinks he is the Emperor. The actor is still buried in the costume that brought him fame.

The aborted project by Stanley Kubrick

Among the other famous films about Napoleon, one that never saw the light of day is that of Stanley Kubrick, who wanted to make it “The Greatest Thing Ever Filmed”. In pre-production, the director of glowing had taken 15,000 photos and collected 17,000 documents about the emperor before the project failed.

Ridley Scott’s was actually supposed to be released on November 22, 2023. It focuses on Napoleon’s rise to power and will star Joaquin Phoenix in the role of the Emperor. The Oscar-winning actor can expect his first experience of being an emperor as he played Commodus in the novels gladiator de Ridley Scott, published in 2000.