A Big One
In the 1970s, when network television programmers had the courage to sometimes show unusual movies, Sergey Bondarchuk's roughly six hour long adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, the dubbed American version, aired over a few nights. My father watched the whole thing--I remember one tracking shot over a battlefield covered with corpses wearing the fancy colorful uniforms of the Napoleonic Era, a memory of death in warfare from my childhood.
Voyna i mir (1965-1967), an epic in four parts and in Russian, with its utilization of the Soviet Army as military extras, features the most colossal battle sequence ever filmed, a depiction of the Battle of Borodino in 1812, soon before Napoleon took and briefly held onto Moscow. Single shots in this battle sequence literally contain many thousands of men marching in formations, cavalry, artillery, explosions, a brown, white, and gray smoky atmosphere that makes the battlefield a nightscape during a sunny day.
A scene with cannons going off in rapid sequence sounds like a modern electronic fluttering noise, the timing on the firing is so close. Legs blown off, officers shouting exultantly to their men to keep their spirits up only to be silenced, with shocked eyes, before dropping to the dirt. Napoleon sitting in his portable chair, like a film director, watching the spectacle with his spyglass, indifferent to explosions going off nearby, waving away a servant holding his lunch on a silver tray. The carnage of close combat, bayonet thrusts and explosions always, turning men into body parts. This is the battle sequence Peter Jackson wanted to do, in its humongous scale and with actual human beings, in The Lord of the Rings, but he settled for a heavy reliance on computer generated imagery.
A battle sequence like this, and as far as my cinema-watching experience goes, I've never seen a vaster depiction of war with real people, can't be possible without the cooperation of a studio, or a state, willing to expend hundreds of millions of dollars as evidently Bondarchuk's backers were willing to do in order to bring to the screen a decidedly Russian version of Tolstoy's novel. In the 1950s, Hollywood made its own adaptation of the novel, casting Audrey Hepburn as the great character Natasha. As I watched Voyna i mir, especially its second part which deals with Natasha a great deal, I thought that Hepburn had the right look for the character, but the young actress who plays her in Bondarchuk's version, the breathtaking swan-necked and blue-eyed Lyudmila Saveleva, is marvelous, her character an imaginative, sparklingly-witted girl prone to love at first sight.
Vyacheslav Tikhonov plays her first betrothed, Andrey, an officer and son of an old-fashioned retired general. Tikhonov looks like Christopher Plummer but at times has Alain Delon-like screen presence. After his first wife's death in childbirth, he adopts a resigned and dark view of life as something to be endured. Wounded at the Battle of Austerlitz in the film's first part, flat on his back, the sounds of the battle go away and he looks at the clouds above.
"Why have I never seen the sky before?" he asks himself.
The film uses interior monologues extensively. It's hard to distinguish voices sometimes, but I had less problems with the technique than some film critics have had with it. One problem with adapting a huge novel with numerous characters and situations like War and Peace (for the record, I haven't read it) is trying to figure out what to include and what to leave out.
Director Bondarchuk was an actor, too; in this film he plays Count Pierre Bezukhov, an observer of the society shattering events depicted--in a loveless marriage, he watches, troubled, the dramas of the life and loves of his own romantic obsession, Natasha.
Bondarchuk adopted a lyrical visual style, interior monologues, compromised with the story's vastness by taking dips into it and weaving plot threads together. I don't know what he left out, but the film seems like an impression of the novel rather than a complete adaptation as one might see in a long TV miniseries.
The experimentalism that was long an aspect of Soviet cinema is on display throughout the film. Bondarchuk's camera roams over battlefields, through corridors, over the heads of ballroom dancers in splendid costumes, over the bodies of dead soldiers, pans sometimes encompassing 360 degrees, like in the films of the Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó who was coming into prominence in Eastern European cinema at the same time.
There is, of course, peace in the film, too. Matters of betrothals, yearning for distant loves, aristocrats gossiping and talking their shit in salons, Natasha and her siblings telling stories to each other, dreams, hunting, enjoyment of the passing of seasons.
Into this idyllic world intrudes the maniac, Napoleon Bonaparte. The film's depiction of him, the man's coldness, his inability to appreciate culture, someone whose idea of canvas was not as something to make a painting on, but as the material of a tent, a man, in short, who wished to impose his will on the entire world--Napoleon was one of the scariest motherfuckers who ever lived, but he couldn't beat Nature's Russian winter.
Overall, as I watched the film over three days, I mostly stayed alert throughout. It's a challenge, due to its length, but the most impressive scenes (of armed conflict as it was practiced by European civilization two hundred years ago but also of woods, lakes, Natasha's wondering face as she looks at moonlight) make it a beautiful and poetic film. It certainly doesn't have any peers when one considers its epic employment of extras. The only film I've seen that comes close to this colossal presentation is the 1963 Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor, another good film that juggles the big with the small.
Vic Neptune
In the 1970s, when network television programmers had the courage to sometimes show unusual movies, Sergey Bondarchuk's roughly six hour long adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, the dubbed American version, aired over a few nights. My father watched the whole thing--I remember one tracking shot over a battlefield covered with corpses wearing the fancy colorful uniforms of the Napoleonic Era, a memory of death in warfare from my childhood.
Voyna i mir (1965-1967), an epic in four parts and in Russian, with its utilization of the Soviet Army as military extras, features the most colossal battle sequence ever filmed, a depiction of the Battle of Borodino in 1812, soon before Napoleon took and briefly held onto Moscow. Single shots in this battle sequence literally contain many thousands of men marching in formations, cavalry, artillery, explosions, a brown, white, and gray smoky atmosphere that makes the battlefield a nightscape during a sunny day.
A scene with cannons going off in rapid sequence sounds like a modern electronic fluttering noise, the timing on the firing is so close. Legs blown off, officers shouting exultantly to their men to keep their spirits up only to be silenced, with shocked eyes, before dropping to the dirt. Napoleon sitting in his portable chair, like a film director, watching the spectacle with his spyglass, indifferent to explosions going off nearby, waving away a servant holding his lunch on a silver tray. The carnage of close combat, bayonet thrusts and explosions always, turning men into body parts. This is the battle sequence Peter Jackson wanted to do, in its humongous scale and with actual human beings, in The Lord of the Rings, but he settled for a heavy reliance on computer generated imagery.
A battle sequence like this, and as far as my cinema-watching experience goes, I've never seen a vaster depiction of war with real people, can't be possible without the cooperation of a studio, or a state, willing to expend hundreds of millions of dollars as evidently Bondarchuk's backers were willing to do in order to bring to the screen a decidedly Russian version of Tolstoy's novel. In the 1950s, Hollywood made its own adaptation of the novel, casting Audrey Hepburn as the great character Natasha. As I watched Voyna i mir, especially its second part which deals with Natasha a great deal, I thought that Hepburn had the right look for the character, but the young actress who plays her in Bondarchuk's version, the breathtaking swan-necked and blue-eyed Lyudmila Saveleva, is marvelous, her character an imaginative, sparklingly-witted girl prone to love at first sight.
Vyacheslav Tikhonov plays her first betrothed, Andrey, an officer and son of an old-fashioned retired general. Tikhonov looks like Christopher Plummer but at times has Alain Delon-like screen presence. After his first wife's death in childbirth, he adopts a resigned and dark view of life as something to be endured. Wounded at the Battle of Austerlitz in the film's first part, flat on his back, the sounds of the battle go away and he looks at the clouds above.
"Why have I never seen the sky before?" he asks himself.
The film uses interior monologues extensively. It's hard to distinguish voices sometimes, but I had less problems with the technique than some film critics have had with it. One problem with adapting a huge novel with numerous characters and situations like War and Peace (for the record, I haven't read it) is trying to figure out what to include and what to leave out.
Director Bondarchuk was an actor, too; in this film he plays Count Pierre Bezukhov, an observer of the society shattering events depicted--in a loveless marriage, he watches, troubled, the dramas of the life and loves of his own romantic obsession, Natasha.
Bondarchuk adopted a lyrical visual style, interior monologues, compromised with the story's vastness by taking dips into it and weaving plot threads together. I don't know what he left out, but the film seems like an impression of the novel rather than a complete adaptation as one might see in a long TV miniseries.
The experimentalism that was long an aspect of Soviet cinema is on display throughout the film. Bondarchuk's camera roams over battlefields, through corridors, over the heads of ballroom dancers in splendid costumes, over the bodies of dead soldiers, pans sometimes encompassing 360 degrees, like in the films of the Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó who was coming into prominence in Eastern European cinema at the same time.
There is, of course, peace in the film, too. Matters of betrothals, yearning for distant loves, aristocrats gossiping and talking their shit in salons, Natasha and her siblings telling stories to each other, dreams, hunting, enjoyment of the passing of seasons.
Into this idyllic world intrudes the maniac, Napoleon Bonaparte. The film's depiction of him, the man's coldness, his inability to appreciate culture, someone whose idea of canvas was not as something to make a painting on, but as the material of a tent, a man, in short, who wished to impose his will on the entire world--Napoleon was one of the scariest motherfuckers who ever lived, but he couldn't beat Nature's Russian winter.
Overall, as I watched the film over three days, I mostly stayed alert throughout. It's a challenge, due to its length, but the most impressive scenes (of armed conflict as it was practiced by European civilization two hundred years ago but also of woods, lakes, Natasha's wondering face as she looks at moonlight) make it a beautiful and poetic film. It certainly doesn't have any peers when one considers its epic employment of extras. The only film I've seen that comes close to this colossal presentation is the 1963 Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor, another good film that juggles the big with the small.
Vic Neptune
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