[Patrick McCart]

I've heard from someone that Optimum Releasing will be releasing Napoleon in the UK (R2) on May 28th. They don't seem to have anything on their website about it. I'm hoping this means rights issues have been resolved. To my knowledge, the film has never had a UK video release. They're also releasing Gance's Austerlitz on the same day.

Anyone know if this is actually happening?

[David_B_K]

I also am interested, so I will bump this one.

[Mark Zimmer]

The Australian DVD of Napoleon seems fine, other than it's missing over an hour or two of footage Brownlow has been able to track down. This would certainly be worthwhile to pick up if they're able to include that additional footage, though.

[Alan-A]

I hope this has the Carl Davis score and not the Coppola one, which I find bombastic and boring.

[John Hodson]

This does appear to be happening.

[Jonathan-S]

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Hodson

This does appear to be happening.

It may be significant that play.com are calling it Napoleon Bonaparte, which is the title of Gance's own dubbed and heavily cut (140 minutes) 1934 edition of the 1927 film. I've never seen this sound version but a friend (who greatly admires the original) tells me it's a disaster, partly because Gance filmed linking scenes that did not match the grain of the film stock used in the 1920s.

This would perhaps explain how this release could circumvent the legal complications affecting the restoration.

[Patrick McCart]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jonathan-S

It may be significant that play.com are calling it Napoleon Bonaparte, which is the title of Gance's own dubbed and heavily cut (140 minutes) 1934 edition of the 1927 film. I've never seen this sound version but a friend (who greatly admires the original) tells me it's a disaster, partly because Gance filmed linking scenes that did not match the grain of the film stock used in the 1920s.

This would perhaps explain how this release could circumvent the legal complications affecting the restoration.

According to Kevin Brownlow's book, the biggest difference is that the silent footage runs too fast, a lot of the 1934 footage was shot with rear projection, and the silent footage had to be overdubbed. Gance unfortunately cut the original negative (the main one) to make the 1934 version... so the quality doesn't degrade from shot to shot.

It had a stereophonic soundtrack, so I wonder if it still exists.

[oscar_merkx]

I have heard so much about this silent picture.

What is the best source ?

Where do I buy Brownlow's book ?

[Patrick McCart]

Quote:

Originally Posted by oscar_merkx

I have heard so much about this silent picture.

What is the best source ?

Where do I buy Brownlow's book ?

There's an extremely expensive laserdisc that's rarer than gold (U.S./NTSC only) and the VHS. Both are obviously out of print. The R4 Australia and R2 Spain DVDs are PAL conversions from the NTSC master, so they suffer from artifacts (not to mention very heavily compressed on the R4).

I got my softcover book from eBay for $24 (brand new condition). Looks like it's in print in the UK by the BFI Press: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Napoleon-Kev...e=UTF8&s=books

[Patrick McCart]

http://www.zetaminor.com/whatsnew.htm

"Optimum have clarified some details of their forthcoming Napoleon DVD, which I will reproduce verbatim, since there seems to be little to be gained from paraphrasing it: "the version that we are releasing is the silent version restored by Francis Ford Coppola in 1980 with a new score composed by his father Carmine. The running time is 223 mins and the DVD has been encoded with a 16:9 aspect ratio. For those of you that know the film, you will be aware that Abel Gance shot it envisaging a three screen Polyvision projection technique to create a huge panorama for some scenes. This proved impractical and so this was only actually used by Gance for the final 20 minutes or so of the film. In our release, the 16:9 encoding allows for the three screens to be viewed as one widescreen for these last 20 minutes as Gance originally intended, with the preceding footage appearing as 4:3 on a 16:9 widescreen""

I'm hoping this doesn't mean the entire film is pillarboxed since it's easy to encode the finale as 16x9 with just a title change.