For twelve years, the Cinémathèque française has been orchestrating the restoration of Abel Gance's "Napoleon", shown for the first time in 1927. A delicate operation, when there are more than twenty different versions of the film and many elements have been lost over time.
The result should be projected at the end of the year.
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To say that Georges Mourier is an encyclopedia of cinema would be an insult to him.
The researcher, also a director, knows it, but in order to realize the character, it is necessary to speak of the passion that springs from each of his words, of this verve à la Audiard, of this appetite for existence and the seventh art that the characters in a Bertrand Blier film would not have denied.
"I think it's a bit like Fort Boyard," he blurted out, pointing to the stone decoration around him.
We are in the "enormous Gruyère" labyrinthine galleries of another fort, that of Saint-Cyr, a stone's throw from Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, in the Paris region.
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Napoleon
, a monster movie ...
It is there, under a vaulted ceiling and a blower as deafening as it is essential to preserve the temperature and the appropriate humidity level, that thousands of boxes containing kilometers of film are piled up on metal shelves.
"
The metro of death, I love you, I love you, La Sierra
... I also saw
My Fair Lady
earlier
... We may have the impression of being in a tomb , you don't have the impression of working on relics at all when you remember how many emotions these films have aroused around the world, and for how many people. "
Rectangular glasses on his nose, a greedy smile that even a mask cannot hide on his lips, Georges Mourier trots in the corridors in the middle of the 40,000 films that make up the entire collection of the French Cinémathèque.
But there is one, in particular, which occupies all his thoughts:
Napoleon
, a silent work in black and white by French director Abel Gance.
Georges Mourier was commissioned by the French Cinémathèque to "assess" the films of the film that the institution had in its possession.
It was in 2007, it was supposed to last six months at most.
Fourteen years later, our enthusiast is still there, the expertise has become a complete restoration, the total cost of which is estimated at 2 million euros.
To understand why, we have to go back in time and keep in mind that
Napoleon
is not a film.
It is, to use the word used by Georges Mourier himself, a "monster", even a hydra, which, each time one thinks of having tamed it, reveals a new secret.
... butchered over the years
Because there are, from the start, two versions of the film.
Abel Gance screened the premiere, a short version of "only" 3:27, in April 1927 at the Opéra Garnier in Paris.
It became the "Opera" version.
A month later, another version, called "Apollo", and which this time lasts 9.40 am, is shown to professionals and journalists.
Abel Gance, eternally dissatisfied, then continued to feed the monster by putting together, from the "Apollo" version, a third "Large version" of 7 hours, sold to be exploited in theaters in November 1927. It is this- here that the Cinémathèque wants to restore.
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But the task is immense.
Over the years, Abel Gance has made and remakes his film (which was initially conceived to be only the first in a series of six), each time changing his outlook and narrative techniques, adopting new technologies in adapting, in particular, to the arrival of talking cinema.
The filmmaker will even, for financial reasons, reuse his films for other feature films.
"It's difficult to understand but Gance is a director. What interested him was only the film to come", underlines Georges Mourier.
"As cruel and brutal as it may sound, his feature films represented for him only a stock of plans on which he was going to be able to draw for the next. Nothing more."
Five restorations before this one
The
Napoleon
disintegrates, elements are lost.
Five restorations were undertaken between 1953 and 2000. A valuable job, of course, but which further added to the general confusion.
There are about twenty different versions of the film.
One thing, on the other hand, is immutable.
Every time
Napoleon
is thrown, he makes a triumph.
When the American director Francis Ford Coppola, himself fascinated by the monster, decides to show a version to the American public in 1981, he is laughed at.
A silent film, in black and white, French, which lasts 4 hours, really?
The screening at Radio City Hall in New York, 6,000 seats, will be sold out.
"
The film was pulverized. We had to dismantle everything and put Napoleon back in the right direction.
"
But one question remains: what does the famous "Large version" really look like?
Georges Mourier and his assistant editor, Laure Marchaut, quickly got to know the hydra.
To the first 300 "boxes" of reels from the Cinémathèque that they had to examine were quickly added another 300 provided by the Center national du cinéma (CNC).
Nine days before submitting their expert report, they discovered 179 additional boxes.
The adventure goes on.
"Then, we found 202 boxes hidden at the Toulouse film library."
And it is not over: the two indefatigable will discover two determining things, "our Rosetta stone and the secret of the pyramids".
100,000 meters of film tested
The Rosetta Stone is the sequencer of
Napoleon's
"Apollo" version
, which allows you to find the precise order of the film's sequences.
The secret of the pyramids is the discovery that "all the previous restorations mix the two original negatives of Napoleon", those of the "Opera" version and those of the "Apollo" version.
In other words, no restoration proposed so far completely respects Abel Gance's film.
And everything has to be redone.
In 2009, Georges Mourier therefore succeeded in convincing the Cinémathèque to begin reconstruction and restoration.
"The film was pulverized. We had to dismantle everything, like a lace of Delphi, without breaking the thread, and put Napoleon back in the right direction", tells our Champollion, who appealed to film libraries around the world.
Boxes arrive from Belgrade, Luxembourg, Rome, New York.
"We searched all over the world if such a plan hadn't survived somewhere."
In total, Laure Marchaut and Georges Mourier will examine more than 100,000 meters of film.
"It's a bit of crazy", recognizes the adventurer of heritage.
The magic of digital
Fortunately for the seventh art and for the ambition of Georges Mourier, this epic takes place in the 21st century.
Technology will save the restoration.
"We spent all the film on an editing table to make video captures. This could not be done by our predecessors, who all worked in film."
Not only does this make it possible not to damage the original films, which are sometimes very fragile, but in addition an immense post-production work, "impossible even if only 15 years ago", is then possible.
To find the original cut of the film, Georges Mourier works with 14 different sources.
A shot can be recomposed using pieces of film from all over the place.
A few milliseconds from Belgrade, the following from the copy of Rome, the following still from that of Luxembourg.
With a magnifying glass, Laure Marchaut examines the "headlines", that is to say the margins of the films, to detect instructions, clues left by the editors of Abel Gance on the procedure to be followed.
Numbers, for example, which would indicate the order of the shots.
"Fortunately Gance is not with us, he would still change things," says Georges Mourier.
He does not disassemble in front of the monster.
We can guess, under the passion, a certain sense of duty.
"Abel Gance used to say that cinema is the music of light. No one would think of playing a Schubert sonata by removing notes. For Gance, it's the same. You have to find all of them. the notes of the staff. "
It’s painstaking work… and this is, again, just the beginning.
"Hours and hours of work for five minutes of film"
Because once the film has been reconstituted, it must then be restored.
In 2015, the Éclair specialist laboratories developed the Nitroscan, a device that transforms low-definition files into 4K, synonymous with high quality.
"Then we send all that to the large cavalry, that is to say a whole brigade of outstanding technicians", explains Georges Mourier.
This "army of shadows" is responsible for homogenizing textures, removing scratches, or even calibrating images.
"We had to respect the heritage at every stage: keep the grain, the gray chart, the colors of the tint… These are hours and hours of work for five minutes of film."
For two years, three engineers were put on the tinting site, these colors applied at the time of black and white on film.
The
Napoleon
of Abel Gance contains scenes such as blue, orange, pink, green, red "and recently found a lavender plane!"
Each time, the sequences go back and forth between the restoration laboratories and the projection room in which Georges Mourier's intractable eye spots all the corrections that remain to be made.
A work for "all screens in the universe"
Today, Georges Mourier has almost tamed the hydra.
The restored film should be ready at the end of the year.
The restoration lasted 12 years, two years longer than the First Empire, and the researcher has lost none of his excitement.
"I think I would feel good from the moment I saw the public reaction," he breathes.
"Once I have finished this work, I will have to hear the people in the room during the film concert that will be organized. I need to find out that."
To ensure that this
found
Napoleon
rises to the height of the ambitions of Jean Cocteau, who considered that art should be a "very beautiful insult to habits".
While Netflix has contributed to the restoration costs, for an undisclosed amount, the question of the broadcast of the restored film arises.
Nothing is decided yet, everything is possible.
A series on the platform, for example?
Do not count on Georges Mourier to utter cries of orchard.
"Abel Gance, already at the origin, had a sense of reality. He had subdivided his film into several episodes so that people could return to the cinema."
In 1925, some time before Netflix therefore, the filmmaker had also read to his technicians a statement that today appears prophetic.
"My friends", he would say then, "all the screens of the universe are waiting for you".