Kevin Brownlow

Napoleon dynamite

Kevin Brownlow on how he rediscovered Abel Gance’s epic 1927 silent film <em>Napoleon</em> in a library in Bromley

issue 05 November 2016

I shall never forget my first encounter with Abel Gance’s Napoleon. I saw it under the most unpromising circumstances — fragments of the great original, shown on a home projector, 25 years after its original release. Yet those fragments changed my life.

I was 15, still at school in Hampstead, and already obsessed by the cinema.

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