“The first time I saw Napol\u00e9on vu par Abel Gance<\/i>\u00a0(1927) was on a boxy old television via a VHS tape. Even then, the extravagance of Gance\u2019s ambition to put on-screen the surging tides of history and the flicker of thought in a human eye, all through what the director called \u201cthe music of light,\u201d set a high-water mark for my idea of what cinema can be. I had yearned ever since to see it again, while following the never-ending saga of restorations and disputed screenings of the mangled epic (now clocking in at 562 minutes).
\nAll of this supercharged my excitement when I took my seat this past June in the balcony of the Cinema Modernissimo in Bologna\u2014a subterranean theater itself recently restored to its art-nouveau splendor\u2014to watch part one of the Cinematheque Fran\u00e7aise\u2019s new restoration of\u00a0Napol\u00e9on.\u00a0<\/i>The film is now as legendary among cinephiles as its self-mythologizing subject, so even a screening of the first half was a major event, and a centerpiece of this year\u2019s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, the annual feast of restorations and rediscoveries that turns the medieval city of Bologna into a cinematic time machine”.<\/p>\n