PARIS: In a mammoth restoration task for one of cinema’s most audacious and elusive treasures, a team of obsessives has spent 12 years recreating the original seven-hour cut of Abel Gance’s 1927 silent classic Napoleon.
“It’s an act of madness,” admits Georges Mourier, head of the €2.5 million (96 million baht) project.
When they began in 2008, he and editor Laure Marchaut had only planned to spend a few months tidying up Gance’s archives in the basement of the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris.
But in the process, they realised that previous restorations had mixed up two versions shown at the original premieres: a short one for the general public (still some three hours long) and a longer…
