For our discussion of Ridley Scott’s new historical epic, Napoleon, we have the privilege of being joined by Paul Cuff, a film historian and expert on the Napoleonic era in cinema, including and especially Abel Gance’s Napoléon from 1927, about which he wrote A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance’s Napoleon. Together, we ask whether Scott’s film has anything to say about the man whose life it depicts – and if so what? – whether its ahistoricity matters, and how substantially it fleshes out its characters and the events and relationships dramatised.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Listeners may be interested in Paul Cuff’s book:

Paul Cuff adds: ‘the New Yorker piece I mentioned: https://www.newyorker.com/…/ridley-scott-director-profile “Ten days before filming, Phoenix went to Scott and said, ‘I’m agonizing over this. I don’t know how to do it.'” The article also briefly mentions the Gance film, about which Scott said, “I couldn’t get through it, honestly”. (In a piece I saw in Empire, Phoenix also said much the same thing about the one biography of Napoleon he had tried to read.)

José Arroyo