If you love silent movies, Kevin Brownlow should be your hero. He was recognized with an honorary Oscar in 2010 for decades of pioneering work, including The Parade’s Gone By, a definitive history of the silent era, and its companion TV documentary series, Hollywood. And over the years he and his partners have supervised meticulous restorations and presentations of such classics as The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney, and Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (both 1925).

And then there’s Abel Gance’s Napoléon. Brownlow first encountered a fragment of Gance’s 1927 masterpiece as a film-obsessed English teenager, and he spent nearly six decades reconstructing this vast historical epic, which is unlike anything made before or since. Gance ushered in every technical innovation imaginable (he put the camera on horseback, among other places, and his editing makes today’s movies look sedate), and he created a grand finale in three-screen “Polyvision”—an enormous technical challenge then and now. In the early 80s, Francis Ford Coppola presented a four-hour road show with the Polyvision climax and live orchestral music, composed and conducted by his father, Carmine. It was a genuine sensation.

Over the years, Brownlow kept searching. Those first few fragments have now expanded to five and a half hours—the most complete Napoléon since its premiere, at the Paris Opéra. This month, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will present Brownlow’s full restoration for the first time in America, at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, an Art Deco palace, with a score by his longtime collaborator, Carl Davis. Don’t wait for it to come to a theater near you—getting Gance’s magnum opus up on a screen is a herculean task. This is a major event.