most dazzling technical innovations in film history.
The legendary French director’s handling of time,
speed, and movement builds dramatically on D. W.
Griffith’s earlier experiments in awakening us to
the manifold possibilities of the cinematic medium
for manipulating both time and space. With aston-
ishing fluidity, Gance jumps forward and backward
in time, so that a moment in the present is fre-
quently related to events that preceded it and often
foreshadows the events that will follow. For exam-
ple, in the famous snowball sequence near the
beginning of the film, Napoléon’s participation in a
schoolyard snowball fight becomes a genuine
battle—on one hand, to restore the young man’s
reputation among his stupid, class-conscious
schoolmates and, on the other, to point toward his
destiny as a military genius. To extend his control
over Napoléon’s cinematic time, Gance introduced152 CHAPTER 4 ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE
135246Summary relationshipA sequence in Martin Scorsese’s
Raging Bull(1980; screenwriters: Paul Schrader and Mardik
Martin) covers three years (story duration) in a few minutes
(screen duration). Black-and-white shots of Jake La Motta’s
(Robert De Niro) most significant boxing matches from 1944
to 1947 are intercut with color shots from home movies that
show La Motta and his second wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty),
during the early years of their marriage.