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Something tells me this is going to go down well.

Particularly if you're planning to be anywhere near the West Coast of America next March...

Here is a trailer.

Further posts may follow, so long as I can stop screaming with incredulous, insensate joy...

Drive six hours and see the event of a life time or sleep? Decisions are tough.

!!!!
Already tried to buy tix and contrary to the claims of the video, they are not on sale yet. However this is the weekend of the Silent Film Festival, so I expect them to come up shortly after...
Btw, the Paramount is absolutely gorgeous.

Yeah, tickets won't be available until July 18.

More info here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/tgl ... y_id=93197" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It turns out tickets are actually on sale today. If you want a ticket for the March 24, 2012 show, follow this link.

For those familiar with the Paramount, what's your take on best seating for the money? I typically like to sit closer than most other people, so I'm thinking Rows A-C ($40) might be a great value, or D-G ($55), but I don't want to be too close to comfortably watch the "Polyvision" part. Sounds like they're making the Paramount's screen a full three times wider than normal for that.

Don't know. Constantly walking by the theatre on the way to BART, but I keep missing stuff there (really wanted to see Dreyer's Joan of Arc with the live chorus a couple months ago, but alas one child and a pregnant wife got in the way.)

Did splurge and get the $90 tix, as it is the week of my wife's birthday and the last SFSFF movie we saw was Gance's J'Accuse which she loved (and cried at the end of).

The film is being presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival "in association with American Zoetrope, the Film Preserve, Photoplay Productions, and the BFI."

Zoetrope, the Film Preserve, and Photoplay are Francis Coppola, Robert Harris, and Kevin Brownlow, respectively. I assume that this means Coppola and Brownlow have come to some sort of understanding. They seemed to happily share the limelight at last year's Oscars.



For the first time, it seems reasonable to speculate that this might lead to an eventual Blu-ray release via Zoetrope (and their distributor, Lionsgate). It would be pretty easy these days to include multiple versions with both the Coppola and Davis scores. I assume that BFI's financial contribution ensures that they'll handle the eventual U.K. release.

I want a Blu-ray with the option to set up three separate TVs!

jwd5275 wrote:I want a Blu-ray with the option to set up three separate TVs!

Three tube TVs, you mean? Or 2.25 16x9 displays if the Triptych sequence has to be played in the correct aspect ratio. #-o

I saw the Coppola version back in the 80s at my University (Penn State) for free in the largest auditorium on campus.
(Universities used to have free movies, concerts & lectures when I was in school...practically unthinkable today). I was quite impressed as I was just getting into film at the time.

Just purchased my tix....3rd row, smack in the center next to the aisle. Hope I'm not too close, but I've never spent so much for a movie ticket...closest has to have been Koyaanisqatsi live w/ Philip Glass & SF Symphony.

I haven't bought a ticket from Ticketmaster in probably a decade....50% of the ticket price added on to the price in a number of dubious fees, ouch. I can't believe they haven't been investigated for fraud yet...or that SF Silent Film Fest would use them for tickets.

would love to see criterion release both sets of films

No. The movie has lots of quick cuts/fast pacing followed by slower scenes. The Coppola version (24fps) really screws up the timing of the movie... I wanted to see it again just because it felt disjointed. Given that Coppola only cut it & sped it up was so that the movie ended before midnight & he wouldn't have to pay the musicians overtime, I don't see any reason for including his version. The Coppola score was completely random & out of sync with the pacing of the action in the movie.

jwd5275 wrote:Don't know. Constantly walking by the theatre on the way to BART, but I keep missing stuff there (really wanted to see Dreyer's Joan of Arc with the live chorus a couple months ago, but alas one child and a pregnant wife got in the way.)

Too bad you missed the film in 35mm, but the oratorio can be skipped. I saw "Voices of Light" a number of years ago here in Atlanta and found it to be a frustrating experience. The choral passages competed with the film's many intertitles, and the music didn't really fit the spare and anguished atmosphere of the film. It actually impaired my ability to connect with the film. I've also seen the restored print with live piano accompaniment--just ordinary music cues--and that actually worked better. For that matter, the film also works well completely silent, which is how I always watch the DVD.

The notion of seeing J'ACCUSE on the big screen makes me wish I lived in the Bay Area! To say nothing of Brownlow's restoration of NAPOLEON...

SamLowry wrote:No. The movie has lots of quick cuts/fast pacing followed by slower scenes. The Coppola version (24fps) really screws up the timing of the movie... I wanted to see it again just because it felt disjointed. Given that Coppola only cut it & sped it up was so that the movie ended before midnight & he wouldn't have to pay the musicians overtime, I don't see any reason for including his version. The Coppola score was completely random & out of sync with the pacing of the action in the movie.

I'm not a fan of the Coppola version either, though in fairness I should mention that I've only seen it on VHS, whereas I've been lucky enough to see the Brownlow/Davis version twice with a full orchestra (once circa 1988 in the original 1980 restoration, the second time circa 2000 in the more recent version). And another problem is that the Carl Davis score is so overwhelming - it really is a case of once heard, never forgotten - that the Carmine Coppola one just couldn't compete.

True, aside from the dramatically essential use of 'La Marseillaise' the Coppola score is entirely original, whereas Davis's score draws heavily on Beethoven and his contemporaries (plus an inspired use of the inexorable crescendo of Bach's D minor Passacaglia and Fugue during the height of the Terror), but that's part of the problem - just as poor Alex North couldn't compete with the Strausses and György Ligeti on 2001, so Coppola couldn't hold a candle to Beethoven.

Having heard all three scores written for Napoléon (Carmine Coppola, Marius Constant, Carl Davis), I must tell you that the Davis' one wins hands down. And it's not just because of his masterful use of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Paisiello, etc. I think the main issue is that Carl Davis understands the underlying emotions in each scene better than his competitors. Constant's score is dreadful. It's totally out-of-synch emotionally (and in pacing) with every scene, making the film dull and grey. Carmine Coppola's score shows more feelings than Constant (not difficult!), but it doesn't have the emotional power of the Davis. Many scenes go unnoticed with Coppola while they blossom with Davis. Coppola's music is also extremely repetitive: he repeats a theme constantly until the scene is over. (It's a just a technique to stay in synch.)
The battle scenes also gain enormously with Davis. He gives a direction and meaning to the most obscure and complex fight. The Toulon battle is marvellously paced by Beethoven's Egmont. It makes you understand when the battle reaches its climax (He does the same in his masterful score for Intolerance).
I envy the lucky San Franciscans who will experience the film at its optimum.

That's exactly correct. Scenes that had almost Wagnerian power under Davis had far less impact under Coppola, even allowing for the double handicap of 24fps and VHS unavoidably diminishing my experience to begin with.

The Double Storm is a case in point: Davis draws on two different Beethoven pieces (the bombastic 'Coriolan' overture and a set of comparatively obscure piano variations - both, handily, originally in C minor) which he clashes as inventively as Gance fuses the storm at sea with the pendulum-camera swinging over the Convention, building to a combined visual and orchestral climax that alone justifies Time Out's description of the Davis-scored live version as "an almost unimaginably thrilling experience". I don't recall Coppola's equivalent coming anywhere close.

Assuming that some sort of understanding has been reached with all concerned, is it conceivable that this might also be screened in Europe? I notice that the publicity indicated that this is the only time that Napoleon will be screened in any other American city.

I'm agonising over whether I should buy tickets for SF for next year, or take a chance that it might come to London, which is only three hours by train for me.

The present version has already been shown twice in London, in 2000 (when I caught it) and 2004. But I daresay there's a chance of a repeat if the rights really have been cleared up - and if it's playing in the US, that suggests they have.

I was told there is a planned screening in London in the next year or so, I can't remember who it was who told me this (wine haze), but it was someone of authority in all things silent and Napoleon.

On Sunday I was at the Castro Theatre and spoke with Patrick Stanbury of Photoplay very briefly. I posed the dilemma facing New Yorkers who almost never have to travel to get an opportunity to partake in notable film culture events; with a little patience just about everything comes to them. He assured me there are no plans to do this anywhere else in the world.

I pressed the point, asking "never?", and I wish I'd written down what he'd said verbatim, but it was along the lines of, "there's always a possibility, but there really are no plans". He seemed sincere, without a trace of the hucksterism that one sometimes detects when hearing someone in show business speak about an upcoming event that they want or need to obtain a certain amount of financial success.

Well, I'm shelling out to go and watch it on the 31st and the 1st. I just need to find a flight/hotel now...

I have never seen this film, but I am Obsessed with the opportunity of seeing it for the first time this way.

At his talk at the SFSFF, Kevin Brownlow made it perfectly clear that there will be no DVD/Blu-Ray release of Napoléon.

Well that's the stupidest thing I ever heard.

Is anyone else from the east coast going to take the time to fly out? If this is all true I'm definitely considering buying a ticket.
Any idea about how soon this will sell-out? Will I be able to re-sell tickets if I buy and can't make it out?

I just looked and there were several seats open on the first date, you probably have a little time. I'm an East Coaster and am toying with the idea of going... but I'm also sure that as soon as I buy my tickets and make arrangements, a NYC screening pops up