DOSSIER NAPOLEON

“I knew about Napoleon, then in some vague way. He was a great soldier who had come upon misfortune. I have seen an almanac, depicting him bidding goodbye to his troops at Fontainebleau, and it had impressed me and other prints of him look- ing brooding out at sea. His pose, the hand in the vest, the sad piercing eyes, appealed to me even more than the figure of Christ. I suppose because Napoleon’s expression was a living human grief – a tortured soul which came nearer to my understanding, while the divine, tortured innocent expression of Christ, with his eyes turned piously upward was a figure I saw objectively, but it never made any human appeal.”

The boundless geography of the Chaplin archives contains some crucial moments, almost like “geologic periods”, in which the filmmaker’s thought and artistic vision transpire from the pages revealing new aspects or completing the picture.

Within them the “political period” is undoubtedly one of the most enduring. In the annotated edition of A Comedian Sees the World, Lisa Stein shows a direct relationship between Chaplin’s travel experience in a Europe headed towards the Second World War, his social and polit- ical awakening, and the discovery of writing, which would become a constant feature of the years to come.
Before coming together in Chaplin’s quintessential films – Modern Times and The Great Dictator – these themes can be found in his unfinished work (and near obsession): a film about Napoleon Bonaparte. Hundreds of pages, ten different screenplay drafts, contracts, letters and cablegrams: different treatments, historical research and correspondence about Napoleon all bring to mind the words of Pierre Sorlin about the great French film archives “extra-filmic sources that are more cinematographic than film itself”.
Chaplin’s fascination with Napoleon is connected to childhood memories: of his mother, who with her natural theatrical abilities did comic impersonations of historical figures to entertain the children, and of his father, who was reminiscent of the Emperor Bonaparte: “I was hardly aware of father, and do not remember him having lived with us. He too was a vaudevillian, a quiet, brooding man with dark eyes. Mother said he looked like Napoleon”.

In the 1920s Chaplin considered the idea of a film about Joséphine de Beauharnais for Edna Purviance. Reading the memoires of De Bourrienne and Costant really struck Chaplin, and he decided to perform Napoleon himself, immortalizing his heroic deeds during the Italian campaign.

But it was not until the early 1930s that the idea became more concrete. Chaplin commissioned Jean de Limur with an adaptation of Jean Weber’s novel La vie secrète de Napoléon Ier and then asked Alistair Cooke to help him with historical research, which began with the works of Sir Walter Scott and Dmitry Merezhkovsky. Simultaneously, Chaplin began working on the script of Napoleon with the English left-wing intellectual John Strachey.

During Chaplin’s political years the Napoleon-hero of the 20s became the Napoleon-man in Chaplin’s first openly pacifist film, in which the speech to the crowd, identity change and exile foreshad- ow his later works and his gradual break from his adoptive home America.

Cecilia Cenciarelli

Programme curated by Cecilia Cenciarelli