Julius Caesar<\/a> particularly, and trying to channel his own efforts in life to become a new Caesar.<\/p>\nThere was a lot of internal frustration for him when he wasn\u2019t getting the postings that he wanted, and this is part of the reason that he\u2019s actually in Paris during the Vend\u00e9miaire uprising, which leads to the famous \u2018whiff of grape shot\u2019 moment depicted in the trailer. The reason he\u2019s there is he\u2019s turned down a posting in the Vend\u00e9e because he believes it is beneath him.<\/p>\n
So you have this intense guy, somewhat self-absorbed, very impressed with himself, and that\u2019s actually quite accurate at this point in Napoleon\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
Napoleon and Josephine<\/h2>\n
One of the things that\u2019s really exciting about what\u2019s come through in this trailer is the huge significance of Josephine de Beauhernais.<\/p>\n
Again, this is really reflective of reality. Josephine was Napoleon\u2019s emotional rock, just as Napoleon needed Marshall Berthier to be able to translate his military vision into reality, so Josephine was the one who \u2013 in the words of historian and commentator Rachel Stark \u2013 made Napoleon palatable for French society.<\/p>\n
She took Napoleon\u2019s kind of reserve and his insular tendencies and made him much better able to engage in a way that enabled him to more effectively charm his contemporaries.<\/p>\n
Napoleon in Sergei Bondarchuk\u2019s Waterloo<\/i><\/h2>\n
The lack of emotion of Phoenix\u2019s Napoleon has been contrasted with Rod Steiger\u2019s portrayal of Napoleon in 1970\u2019s Waterloo<\/i> by Sergei Bondarchuk. There we have a much more emotional Napoleon, and that is again reflective of where Napoleon was at that point in his life.<\/p>\n
The historian Clare Siviter has made the point that if you take any two years of Napoleon\u2019s life, he\u2019s different in terms of his emotions and his psychology. In Waterloo<\/i>, Napoleon is depicted as reflective and depressed Napoleon, which is, accurate to a point \u2013 though perhaps that\u2019s slightly truer of Napoleon during his exile on St Helena.<\/p>\n
In Waterloo<\/i>, there\u2019s also very much that sense that Napoleon is barely in control, which is in stark contrast to what we\u2019re seeing in the Ridley Scott trailer. In Ridley Scott\u2019s Napoleon<\/i>, we have a guy with a vision who\u2019s just frustrated about being held back. When it comes to Waterloo<\/i>, we\u2019ve got this sort of almost Trumpian twisting of reality, which is reflective of Napoleon\u2019s exceptional use of propaganda.<\/p>\nNapoleon in Abel Gance\u2019s 1927 silent movie<\/h2>\n
The other great depiction that we can contrast this with is, of course, Abel Gance\u2019s 1927 silent movie Napoleon<\/i>.<\/p>\n
The challenge we have here is this is a different medium and it belongs to a different time. We\u2019re talking a hundred years ago, not only in terms of film production, but also in terms of historical research, and there have been massive shifts in both.<\/p>\n
Gance was a visionary without question. He had a genius that showed the potential of the moving medium that in some respects has never been realised to this day. His film was meant to have been the first of five installments on Napoleon\u2019s life. And it is five and a half hours long.<\/p>\n
In this respect, some people just were quite pleased that he didn\u2019t go and produce the entire thing, because it would\u2019ve taken the rest of his life. But what\u2019s interesting is that he\u2019s using different techniques to try and show what goes on in Napoleon\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n
He layers multiple shots simultaneously over a single scene kind of showing Napoleon as this visionary genius.<\/p>\n
You have a sort of a flashing of the eyes, algebra sort of flickers across the screen, and underneath that is laid out a map. And then you\u2019ve got troop movements and arrows sort of going in different directions.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s trying to show Napoleon as the person who can just almost click his fingers and see everything, have everything played out in his mind, and that is very much a \u2018great man of history\u2019 way of looking at the guy, which is reflective of the time.<\/p>\n
In the 1920s, we were still in that age of grand narratives of history, focusing on the \u2018big men\u2019 who made big decisions and historical interpretation has moved on.<\/p>\n
Napoleon \u2013 the visionary and the genius \u2013 is not what we\u2019re getting through Ridley Scott. What we\u2019re getting in his film a much more human Napoleon, and as far as I\u2019m concerned, it\u2019s a much more exciting depiction because of that.<\/p>\n
Dr Zack White is a military historian and author specialising in the British Army in the early 19th century<\/strong><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n
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