Abel Gance's Napoléon is the closest thing I know to a waking dream. A silent film from 1927 that ends by tearing its single frame into three, the screen widening into a triptych so the eye cannot hold all of it at once. Music with lights, the director called it. He was right.
One screen is not enough
The first six hours play on one screen, and they already do too much. Snowball fights shot like a battle. The camera strapped to a horse, a pendulum, a guillotine. Fast cuts decades before fast cuts had a name. By the time the army crosses the Alps to invade Italy, you have forgotten that cinema is supposed to be a rectangle.
Then the rectangle splits. The two side projectors come on. What had been a single image becomes a panorama three times as wide, sometimes a single landscape unfurled across all three, sometimes three different angles on the same act, sometimes a center image flanked by two mirrored echoes. Gance called the technique Polyvision. It is the moment the film stops being a film and becomes an apparition.
Music with lights
Gance kept saying the silent image had to be composed like music. Not narrated, not illustrated. Composed. The cuts are the bar lines. The camera moves are the phrasing. The triptych at the end is the orchestra coming in for the final movement, brass on the left, strings on the right, the whole hall vibrating because nothing in the frame is standing still.
When you watch it with a live orchestra, which is the only way the film makes complete sense, the music does not accompany the picture. The picture and the music are the same gesture, played twice in two different mediums. You stop knowing whether you are seeing the score or hearing the screen.
The image is the most powerful, the most universal language ever invented. It is the music of lights.
A film that kept being lost
Almost no one saw the full version when it came out. The triptych required three synchronised projectors, three operators, a theater wide enough to hold the panorama. Most distributors cut the side reels and showed the center alone, which is a little like releasing a symphony with only the cellos. The film was edited, re-edited, lost, recovered. Kevin Brownlow spent decades reassembling it. The most recent restoration, by the Cinémathèque française, finally gave us something close to what Gance intended, with a new score by Simon Cloquet-Lafollye and a length that demands an interval.
Sitting in a theater in 2024 watching a 1927 film in its restored seven-hour form, with the side screens unrolling for the first time in most viewers' lives, is itself a small historical event. The audience knows it. The room is quieter than it should be.
What I take from it
What Gance shows is that a medium is never finished. He had cinema for thirty years, decided it was too narrow, and pushed it sideways with two extra projectors and the gall to ask audiences to see three things at once. Most of his bets did not stick. Polyvision did not become a standard. Cinerama copied the format three decades later, and even that fell out of fashion.
But the bet itself, the willingness to assume that the rectangle on the wall could be wider, that the eye could be asked more of, that an evening at the cinema could be closer to a religious vigil than a piece of furniture, is the part that stays with me. Every time I work on something and ask myself whether the constraints I am respecting are real or just inherited, I think of the side screens coming on.
If you ever get the chance to see the restored Napoléon with an orchestra in the room, take it. Bring water. Bring a friend. Bring patience. You will not see another film like it, because nobody since has been mad enough to ask for that much screen at once.