Bondarachuk was anxious, it seems, demonstrate his knowledge of advanced film techniques and make the move as up-to-date in style as possible. Accordingly, War and Peace contains many jump cuts, shots alternating from extreme long shots to close-ups, slow motion and fast motion, freeze frames and sequences shot in different types of film stock. In many ways, the handheld camera and the quick, jerky editing betrays a fascination with the French New Wave -- in fact, I think the film's style can be fairly characterized as an extravagant blend of New Wave pyrotechnics and old school Soviet film making evoking Sergei Eisenstein. Often Bondarachuk uses ironic analytical montage, for instance, in a sequence alternating between scenes showing the death of Count Bezukhov and the Natasha's father doing the "Daniel Cooper" dance at her family's palatial estate. Furthermore, the color scheme often seems influenced by the strange palette used in the technicolor sequences in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Part Two). Faces appear waxen and cadaver-white against glowing backgrounds infused with deep greens and purples -- Prince Andrei stalks through the soirees like a zombie, pale and white amidst the plumage of the other guests; the scenes in which Count Bezukhov is shown dying are clearly derived from imagery in Ivan the Terrible and have a horror-film expressionism about them. After the film's ecstatic and pantheistic invocation of Mother Russia's verdant landscape, we see the famous party scene that begins Tolstoy's novel -- the second shot in the sequence, showing dandified aristocratic Russians in a stark and artificial tableaux is pure agit-prop and could have been extracted from a film made in the twenties: the image has a weird silent movie powdery sort of appearance. But, in general, the film is pretty apolitical -- it's a prestige product for export and not intended to be offensively Communist.
The first section of War and Peace involves Prince Andrei. Inevitably, the viewer who knows Tolstoy's book looks to the film for exemplary highlights -- that is, favorite passages as staged by the director. We see madcap drinking parties, Andrei and Pierre wandering the white night at St. Petersburg, Pierre's stilted courtship of the bovine Helene as well as Pierre's first encounter with the radiant Natasha -- the second half of the film shows the battles at Schoengraben and Austerlitz (these were cut into a single sequence in earlier American versions of the film but here are specifically delineated): of course, these sequences are majestic and disturbing at the same time. Bondarachuk captures Tolstoy's view that war is fundamentally alien to human nature and the battle scenes have a terrible inhuman and science fiction-like aspect. The first part of the movie, about an hour and forty-five minutes long concludes with Napoleon on horseback surveying the fallen and paralyzed Andrei, draped in a flag that he was carrying when he was shot, remarking "A splendid death." (In fact, on additional viewing, I find that the first part of the film -- "Movie One" as it is named -- extends for another forty minutes, encompassing the harrowing death of Andrei's wife in childbirth, Pierre's duel and, then, his separation from his wife, Helene, some philosophical dialogue with Prince Andrei (illustrated by more swooning aerial shots of the watery Russian landscape) and, at last, Andrei's first encounter with Natasha.
The second movie is entitled Natasha Rostova. It's shorter than the first installment and follows Natasha's adventures between about 1807 and 1812. There are no battle scenes in this part of the film which is about an hour and 38 minutes. Bondarchuk pulls out all the stops, however, in the famous ballroom scene at the imperial palace and, then, stages some spectacularly melodramatic episodes involving Natasha's planned elopement with the serpentine Anatoly Kuragin (the brother of Pierre's wife, Helene). After dancing with her at the Czar's ball, Andrei becomes infatuated with Natasha and proposes to her, after first soberly discussion the matter with the young woman's mother. (His own elderly father, the fierce Prince Bolkonsky, is opposed to the union and makes himself ridiculous dramatizing this opposition.) Andrei is concerned about Natasha's age and inexperience (appropriately enough) and puts off the marriage for one year. Natasha is resentful and bored. She spends the period waiting for her marriage to Prince Andrei by engaging in weird soothsaying activities, cross-dressing for sleigh parties, and riding to the hunt in a bravura scene involving a desperate wolf and packs of handsome-looking Borzoi hounds. After the hunt, Natasha dances to the balalaika at her uncle's rustic chateau, another famous scene both in the novel and Russian cultural history -- in a voice-over Tolstoy's narrator marvels that this daughter of privilege, "raised by French governess" could be so "thoroughly and completely Russian in every fiber and vein" when she dances to the music made by peasant instruments. At the opera, a highfalutin' affair that Tolstoy compares adversely to the folk music at the hunting cabin springing, as it were, from the Russian soul, Natasha's pretty head is turned by Anatoly Kuragin and she makes plans to elope with him. These plans are thwarted by her family members who lock her in her rooms and repel the attack by Kuragin. Pierre, who loves Natasha, almost beats Kuragin to death, but, then, buys him off. Prince Andrei coldly concludes his relationship with Natasha, Pierre declares his love for her and Napoleon, standing on a river bluff, admires three enormous columns of troops crossing the river into Russian -- the invasion is an event, Tolstoy says "both contrary to human reason and human nature." A comet shines in the sky and the peasants think the end of the world is at hand. Bondarchuk applies every possible film technique to this episode -- he uses split-screen both for grandiose effects (the treaty between Napoleon and Czar Alexander) and for intimate scenes: Andrei and Natasha at their respective abodes excitedly telling others of their love. There are long spooky scenes in which action just stops -- these equate to similarly weird and surreal sequences in the novel that dramatize Natasha's boredom waiting for the year to elapse before her nuptials with Andrei. The wolf hunt filmed in an autumnal palette is spectacular -- the camera gliding along the tawny hillsides behind the horsemen and packs of ravening hounds. There is much voice-over, mostly whispered asides by the characters -- Natasha, at the Ball, wondering if anyone will dance with her, Nicolai, her brother, hoping desperately to distinguish himself by taking the wolf, and, even, the wolf himself memorably speaking in a voice-over: "Forward? Backward? It's all the same." Tolstoy's art is to give everything voice and Bondarchuk follows the author's lead -- at times, the movie seems like a precursor to Terrance Malick: the whispered voice-over asides, the half-spoken prayers on which we eavesdrop -- this technique is similar to the ubiquitous voice-overs in Malick's films, particularly The Thin Red Line. Tolstoy's characteristic estrangement effects, his ability to make the familiar seen uncanny and bizarre, are hard to replicate on screen -- for instance, Tolstoy's novel describes the opera at which Natasha is seduced as if an anthropologist were patiently narrating the events to a Martian: it's his thesis that the profoundly unnatural ambience of the opera seduces and almost ruins Natasha.. But this sort of thing can't be effectively caught on film -- film is too literal a medium for many of Tolstoy's estrangement effects and, of course, a movie can't really do justice to prose that is based, in large part, on irony. Natasha, as played by the Bolshoi ballerina Ludmila Savelyeva is radiant and charming (she resembles Audrey Hepburn who played the same role in King Vidor's 1956 version) -- one can readily see why all the men in the film are in love with her. It's a bold performance, like one of Griffith's heroines, she literally flits about scenes, dashing this way and that with youthful effervescent energy -- Bondarchuk takes this to the verge of what is plausible (it's an expressionist performance) but never tilts over into absurdity.
"Movie Three" as identified in the Criterion two-disk box is entitled 1812. This installment is the shortest of the four pictures, clocking in at about 1 hour and 21 minutes. About two-thirds of this episode involves the Battle of Borodino, an awesome if, somewhat, repetitive and obvious spectacle that seems to have involved tons of pyrotechnic ordinance and about half the Red Army (apparently, some scenes employ 130,000 extras). Before the battle, we see the daunting Prince Bolkonsky who has now become senile -- he is confused and restless and dies begging forgiveness from his long- suffering daughter. (No priests are anywhere in evidence at Bald Hills where the old man dies -- he's a man of the Enlightenment and an atheist.) Pierre again expresses his love for Natasha and, then, wearing a ridiculous white top-hat and cream-colored suit departs for the Front. Bondarchuk's exhaustive presentation of the huge battle is consistent with Tolstoy's novel -- Borodino occupies about a hundred pages in most versions of the novel and Tolstoy took pains to present the battle on the basis of the best-existing historical accounts. In many ways, the battle is central to Tolstoy's conflicting theses about history: first, the chaotic fighting shows the idiocy of carefully devised military strategy (as Mike Tyson used to say: "everyone's got a plan until you get hit in the face."); second the battle contrasts Napoleon's icy and inhuman calculus with the warmth of the Russian general Kutuzov. Kutuzov is a big fat man, apparently a lecher, drunkard, and glutton -- we see him lasciviously eyeing a plump serf who is holding a big roast chicken for him. But Kutuzov is kind, cares about his men, and, ultimately, understands that battles are won by those who are willing to sacrifice themselves and are persuaded of the justice of their cause. No one has invited the French to Russia and Kutuzov, who falls asleep at councils of war, gnaws on chicken during Borodino, frequently kissing people and weeping, vows that he will make the French "eat horsemeat." Napoleon paces around giving orders while his armies of toy-like soldiers march up and down the green hills as orange explosions rivet the horizon. The difference between the two men is that Napoleon thinks that he controls the battlefield; Kutuzov has no such illusions -- as the day progresses, the battle takes on a horrific life of its own, monstrously murdering men by the tens of thousands. Bondarchuk stages the battle as a kind of pageant at first -- armies of men build trenches and embankments for artillery batteries, the icon of the Virgin of Smolensk is carried among the troops and Kutuzov himself kisses the ground beneath the ancient image, then, vast numbers of men form into groups of two or three hundred and march this way and that, all keeping in step, while cavalry darts back and forth over the green fields and cannons spout fire in all directions. Bolkonsky's men are held in reserve. (He has rejected Kutuzov's offer that he stay near him as a member of his staff -- Bolkonsky wants to be commanding his troops on the battlefield even though he knows the battle will likely kill him.) As the battle scene progresses, the imagery becomes more agitated and confused -- ultimately, the screen roils with clouds of black-powder smoke, impenetrable walls of cordite fumes and fire billowing up over heaps of corpses. In one long pan to the left, the camera tracks the embankment where batteries are firing, one after another, under lowering clouds of smoke and fire -- at the end of the tracking shot, one of the cannons rolls off the embankment almost hitting the camera as it explodes. The camera, then, tracks to the right, a series of shots showing cavalry attacking through walls of orange fire -- more batteries flash and dozens of horses smash to the ground pitching riders through the air. In a burning village, the camera tracks to the right for hundreds of yards, rolling through fiery stables and houses, passing by duels between frenzied men with bayonets, ending in plumes of explosion and fire that fill the entire screen. The sky darkens and still the nightmarish battle rages, chiaroscuro of fire and blue sub-aqueous shadows. Bolkonsky is badly wounded. Pierre's white hat and suit are smeared with mud and gore. At a field hospital, Bolkonsky watches as surgeons ampute the leg of the screaming Anatoly Kuragin, his nemesis. The battle is unlike anything ever shown on film and, certainly, a tremendous and horrifying assault on the audience (although it is not nearly as gory as a modern version would be) -- this was all done before any kind of CGI: the explosions and burning villages at the horizon, the towering clouds and the fog of gunsmoke, the thousands of men running desperately in one direction and, then, another, all of this is palpably real -- this chaos was staged over what appears to be locations four and five miles deep and as many miles broad. You can't tell who is killing whom and, of course, this is ultimately Bondarchuk's objective, that is, to render the whole thing as an incomprehensible chaos like a storm at sea or a volcano or earthquake. The episode ends in intellectual chaos as well -- a voice-over representing Tolstoy proclaims two completely opposite and irreconcilable concepts: Napoleon, an evil man, is the architect of all this violence, solely to blame for what is mass murder on an apocalyptic scale, and he is defeated because the Russians are good and merely defending their motherland. But Tolstoy also declares: the battle is beyond all human control and, in fact, represents the fact that history proceeds according to quasi-statistical rules: there is no causation and so-called "great" men, despite their megalomaniacal urge to control things are the victim of supra-human forces unleashed, more or less, at random.
The last film in the quartet of pictures comprising War and Peace as originally released in 1967 is called Pierre Bezukhov after the character whose story is threaded through the entire epic history and family chronicle -- Bezukhov is the homme moyen sensual whose adventures unify the novel and the film, a character who represents Tolstoy, I think, and serves as a surrogate for the audience as well. War and Peace, in large part, is Pierre's search for metaphysical meaning among the tragic and stupefying chaos of the Napoleonic Wars in Russia. Unfortunately, a sort of fatal exhaustion afflicts the film's final hour and forty-five minutes -- Bondarchuk is faced with illustrating interior states of mind, conversions, and ecstatic revelations, that don't have clear visual correlates. The attempt to portray what is essential invisible and deeply personal thwarts the mighty film's last episode and the viewer is left with a baffling series of images that seem rushed, tentative, and incompletely imagined. (I suspect that Tolstoy's Russian Orthodox piety exemplified in many passages near the end of the novel may have been suspect to the Soviet authorities and may have inhibited Bondarchuk's approach to this material.) Whereas the first four hours of the film, and, even, within the limitations of battlefield spectacle, the third installment, seem to tell a story, the fourth episode in grandiose but, also, strangely vague and uninvolving. The intense emotional connection to the characters forged in the first two films -- exemplified, I think, by Pierre's duel that is viscerally horrifying because of our fear that the hero will be killed or maimed -- now seems attenuated. By this point, as well, some of Bondarchuk's visual devices have grown stale -- one of his trademark camera motions is to begin with the lens hovering high over the scene, usually a battle or pictorially spectacular landscape (for instance, the wolf hunt): Bondarchuk launches the camera on what seems a zip-line soaring over the spectacle but also inexorably diving down into the chaos. (In some instances, at least, twice by my count, these shots simulate cannon balls falling in a deadly trajectory to the earth and end in big explosions.) He uses this showy camera device several times in this episode as well and, by this time, we've seen the dizzying zip-line descent from high overhead to the earth enough to be slightly jaded. The shot is so showy and spectacular that repeating it a couple of times in each episode tends to defeat the point. The destruction of Moscow by fire is a massive spectacle, shot with frenzied handheld camera that repeats the pattern of editing and imagery in the Borodino sequence -- what begins as a relatively comprehensible sequence of images ends in a roaring conflagration that fills the screen with pillars and clouds of fire. This part of the film also feels a bit derivative -- Bondarchuk uses Goya as his model for some horrific execution by firing squad scenes -- the man are being massacred in a cabbage field. He repeats Goyaesque compositions a little too readily and the images are too showy and "artistic" to have the terrible force that is intended. (I compare to their detriment these scenes with the images of the partisans being murdered in Rossellini's Paisan -- there's nothing "artistic" about these pictures; they are strictly documentary and, therefore, all the more terrible because of their plainness.) Pierre's death march as a French prisoner is not sufficiently horrific. His interactions with the peasant Platon, from whom he learns something of the meaning of life, are reduced to a few allusions -- this makes Pierre's later ecstatic discovery that "man is made for happiness" ring a bit hollow. This simple truth is something that Platon has established with his endless peasant proverbs -- this is another aspect of Tolstoy's novel that probably couldn't be filmed without a modern audience wanting to strangle the peasant sage. Tolstoy was obsessed and terrified by death and he returns repeatedly to scenes involving dying characters -- people dream about their deaths and we see their visions. Unfortunately, these images incline toward the bombastic and unpersuasive -- this is particularly true with respect to Prince Andrei's extended death scene. There are many fine and memorable things in this part of the film -- Bondarchuk's instinct for imagery doesn't wholly desert him. Natasha and Andre's sister, Princess Maria are, often, filmed against luminous glowing voids -- the effect is more than a little like icon images of saints hovering in a fog of gold. A final scene showing the French staggering out of Russia in an endless beleagured column, a drizzle of frozen corpses in its wake, is horribly impressive, particularly when accompanied by a belligerent and pompous speech by Napoleon on the soundtrack. Finally, an image of freezing soldiers congregating in great ragged circle around a bonfire embodies many of Tolstoy's themes, particularly those relating to the brotherhood of man, in a memorably spectacular shot. But there's an awful lot of aerial photography of Mother Russia, lots of trees and flowers blowing in tempests, lots of enormous sky-scapes and fields through which huge rivers drain. The last part of the movie labors inevitably under the memory of the atrocities of World War II and its unpleasantly jingoistic (and, therefore, not at all like Tolstoy) with respect to its rather vengeful patriotism. And, then, the movie just comes full-stop to an end -- we don't even get to see Pierre and Natasha together in the final scenes.
Deeply flawed, Bondarchuk's War and Peace establishes the standard for the film epic. It contains things (mostly huge battle scenes) that will never be duplicated. Some of the film is a folly and it is grandiose, of course, because of the way the Soviets produced movies. But it retains (and rewards) the viewers attention richly enough for me to recommend that people devote the time necessary to watching (and arguing) with this film. It is beyond doubt one of the most impressive adaptations of a great literary work ever attempted.
The second movie is entitled Natasha Rostova. It's shorter than the first installment and follows Natasha's adventures between about 1807 and 1812. There are no battle scenes in this part of the film which is about an hour and 38 minutes. Bondarchuk pulls out all the stops, however, in the famous ballroom scene at the imperial palace and, then, stages some spectacularly melodramatic episodes involving Natasha's planned elopement with the serpentine Anatoly Kuragin (the brother of Pierre's wife, Helene). After dancing with her at the Czar's ball, Andrei becomes infatuated with Natasha and proposes to her, after first soberly discussion the matter with the young woman's mother. (His own elderly father, the fierce Prince Bolkonsky, is opposed to the union and makes himself ridiculous dramatizing this opposition.) Andrei is concerned about Natasha's age and inexperience (appropriately enough) and puts off the marriage for one year. Natasha is resentful and bored. She spends the period waiting for her marriage to Prince Andrei by engaging in weird soothsaying activities, cross-dressing for sleigh parties, and riding to the hunt in a bravura scene involving a desperate wolf and packs of handsome-looking Borzoi hounds. After the hunt, Natasha dances to the balalaika at her uncle's rustic chateau, another famous scene both in the novel and Russian cultural history -- in a voice-over Tolstoy's narrator marvels that this daughter of privilege, "raised by French governess" could be so "thoroughly and completely Russian in every fiber and vein" when she dances to the music made by peasant instruments. At the opera, a highfalutin' affair that Tolstoy compares adversely to the folk music at the hunting cabin springing, as it were, from the Russian soul, Natasha's pretty head is turned by Anatoly Kuragin and she makes plans to elope with him. These plans are thwarted by her family members who lock her in her rooms and repel the attack by Kuragin. Pierre, who loves Natasha, almost beats Kuragin to death, but, then, buys him off. Prince Andrei coldly concludes his relationship with Natasha, Pierre declares his love for her and Napoleon, standing on a river bluff, admires three enormous columns of troops crossing the river into Russian -- the invasion is an event, Tolstoy says "both contrary to human reason and human nature." A comet shines in the sky and the peasants think the end of the world is at hand. Bondarchuk applies every possible film technique to this episode -- he uses split-screen both for grandiose effects (the treaty between Napoleon and Czar Alexander) and for intimate scenes: Andrei and Natasha at their respective abodes excitedly telling others of their love. There are long spooky scenes in which action just stops -- these equate to similarly weird and surreal sequences in the novel that dramatize Natasha's boredom waiting for the year to elapse before her nuptials with Andrei. The wolf hunt filmed in an autumnal palette is spectacular -- the camera gliding along the tawny hillsides behind the horsemen and packs of ravening hounds. There is much voice-over, mostly whispered asides by the characters -- Natasha, at the Ball, wondering if anyone will dance with her, Nicolai, her brother, hoping desperately to distinguish himself by taking the wolf, and, even, the wolf himself memorably speaking in a voice-over: "Forward? Backward? It's all the same." Tolstoy's art is to give everything voice and Bondarchuk follows the author's lead -- at times, the movie seems like a precursor to Terrance Malick: the whispered voice-over asides, the half-spoken prayers on which we eavesdrop -- this technique is similar to the ubiquitous voice-overs in Malick's films, particularly The Thin Red Line. Tolstoy's characteristic estrangement effects, his ability to make the familiar seen uncanny and bizarre, are hard to replicate on screen -- for instance, Tolstoy's novel describes the opera at which Natasha is seduced as if an anthropologist were patiently narrating the events to a Martian: it's his thesis that the profoundly unnatural ambience of the opera seduces and almost ruins Natasha.. But this sort of thing can't be effectively caught on film -- film is too literal a medium for many of Tolstoy's estrangement effects and, of course, a movie can't really do justice to prose that is based, in large part, on irony. Natasha, as played by the Bolshoi ballerina Ludmila Savelyeva is radiant and charming (she resembles Audrey Hepburn who played the same role in King Vidor's 1956 version) -- one can readily see why all the men in the film are in love with her. It's a bold performance, like one of Griffith's heroines, she literally flits about scenes, dashing this way and that with youthful effervescent energy -- Bondarchuk takes this to the verge of what is plausible (it's an expressionist performance) but never tilts over into absurdity.
"Movie Three" as identified in the Criterion two-disk box is entitled 1812. This installment is the shortest of the four pictures, clocking in at about 1 hour and 21 minutes. About two-thirds of this episode involves the Battle of Borodino, an awesome if, somewhat, repetitive and obvious spectacle that seems to have involved tons of pyrotechnic ordinance and about half the Red Army (apparently, some scenes employ 130,000 extras). Before the battle, we see the daunting Prince Bolkonsky who has now become senile -- he is confused and restless and dies begging forgiveness from his long- suffering daughter. (No priests are anywhere in evidence at Bald Hills where the old man dies -- he's a man of the Enlightenment and an atheist.) Pierre again expresses his love for Natasha and, then, wearing a ridiculous white top-hat and cream-colored suit departs for the Front. Bondarchuk's exhaustive presentation of the huge battle is consistent with Tolstoy's novel -- Borodino occupies about a hundred pages in most versions of the novel and Tolstoy took pains to present the battle on the basis of the best-existing historical accounts. In many ways, the battle is central to Tolstoy's conflicting theses about history: first, the chaotic fighting shows the idiocy of carefully devised military strategy (as Mike Tyson used to say: "everyone's got a plan until you get hit in the face."); second the battle contrasts Napoleon's icy and inhuman calculus with the warmth of the Russian general Kutuzov. Kutuzov is a big fat man, apparently a lecher, drunkard, and glutton -- we see him lasciviously eyeing a plump serf who is holding a big roast chicken for him. But Kutuzov is kind, cares about his men, and, ultimately, understands that battles are won by those who are willing to sacrifice themselves and are persuaded of the justice of their cause. No one has invited the French to Russia and Kutuzov, who falls asleep at councils of war, gnaws on chicken during Borodino, frequently kissing people and weeping, vows that he will make the French "eat horsemeat." Napoleon paces around giving orders while his armies of toy-like soldiers march up and down the green hills as orange explosions rivet the horizon. The difference between the two men is that Napoleon thinks that he controls the battlefield; Kutuzov has no such illusions -- as the day progresses, the battle takes on a horrific life of its own, monstrously murdering men by the tens of thousands. Bondarchuk stages the battle as a kind of pageant at first -- armies of men build trenches and embankments for artillery batteries, the icon of the Virgin of Smolensk is carried among the troops and Kutuzov himself kisses the ground beneath the ancient image, then, vast numbers of men form into groups of two or three hundred and march this way and that, all keeping in step, while cavalry darts back and forth over the green fields and cannons spout fire in all directions. Bolkonsky's men are held in reserve. (He has rejected Kutuzov's offer that he stay near him as a member of his staff -- Bolkonsky wants to be commanding his troops on the battlefield even though he knows the battle will likely kill him.) As the battle scene progresses, the imagery becomes more agitated and confused -- ultimately, the screen roils with clouds of black-powder smoke, impenetrable walls of cordite fumes and fire billowing up over heaps of corpses. In one long pan to the left, the camera tracks the embankment where batteries are firing, one after another, under lowering clouds of smoke and fire -- at the end of the tracking shot, one of the cannons rolls off the embankment almost hitting the camera as it explodes. The camera, then, tracks to the right, a series of shots showing cavalry attacking through walls of orange fire -- more batteries flash and dozens of horses smash to the ground pitching riders through the air. In a burning village, the camera tracks to the right for hundreds of yards, rolling through fiery stables and houses, passing by duels between frenzied men with bayonets, ending in plumes of explosion and fire that fill the entire screen. The sky darkens and still the nightmarish battle rages, chiaroscuro of fire and blue sub-aqueous shadows. Bolkonsky is badly wounded. Pierre's white hat and suit are smeared with mud and gore. At a field hospital, Bolkonsky watches as surgeons ampute the leg of the screaming Anatoly Kuragin, his nemesis. The battle is unlike anything ever shown on film and, certainly, a tremendous and horrifying assault on the audience (although it is not nearly as gory as a modern version would be) -- this was all done before any kind of CGI: the explosions and burning villages at the horizon, the towering clouds and the fog of gunsmoke, the thousands of men running desperately in one direction and, then, another, all of this is palpably real -- this chaos was staged over what appears to be locations four and five miles deep and as many miles broad. You can't tell who is killing whom and, of course, this is ultimately Bondarchuk's objective, that is, to render the whole thing as an incomprehensible chaos like a storm at sea or a volcano or earthquake. The episode ends in intellectual chaos as well -- a voice-over representing Tolstoy proclaims two completely opposite and irreconcilable concepts: Napoleon, an evil man, is the architect of all this violence, solely to blame for what is mass murder on an apocalyptic scale, and he is defeated because the Russians are good and merely defending their motherland. But Tolstoy also declares: the battle is beyond all human control and, in fact, represents the fact that history proceeds according to quasi-statistical rules: there is no causation and so-called "great" men, despite their megalomaniacal urge to control things are the victim of supra-human forces unleashed, more or less, at random.
The last film in the quartet of pictures comprising War and Peace as originally released in 1967 is called Pierre Bezukhov after the character whose story is threaded through the entire epic history and family chronicle -- Bezukhov is the homme moyen sensual whose adventures unify the novel and the film, a character who represents Tolstoy, I think, and serves as a surrogate for the audience as well. War and Peace, in large part, is Pierre's search for metaphysical meaning among the tragic and stupefying chaos of the Napoleonic Wars in Russia. Unfortunately, a sort of fatal exhaustion afflicts the film's final hour and forty-five minutes -- Bondarchuk is faced with illustrating interior states of mind, conversions, and ecstatic revelations, that don't have clear visual correlates. The attempt to portray what is essential invisible and deeply personal thwarts the mighty film's last episode and the viewer is left with a baffling series of images that seem rushed, tentative, and incompletely imagined. (I suspect that Tolstoy's Russian Orthodox piety exemplified in many passages near the end of the novel may have been suspect to the Soviet authorities and may have inhibited Bondarchuk's approach to this material.) Whereas the first four hours of the film, and, even, within the limitations of battlefield spectacle, the third installment, seem to tell a story, the fourth episode in grandiose but, also, strangely vague and uninvolving. The intense emotional connection to the characters forged in the first two films -- exemplified, I think, by Pierre's duel that is viscerally horrifying because of our fear that the hero will be killed or maimed -- now seems attenuated. By this point, as well, some of Bondarchuk's visual devices have grown stale -- one of his trademark camera motions is to begin with the lens hovering high over the scene, usually a battle or pictorially spectacular landscape (for instance, the wolf hunt): Bondarchuk launches the camera on what seems a zip-line soaring over the spectacle but also inexorably diving down into the chaos. (In some instances, at least, twice by my count, these shots simulate cannon balls falling in a deadly trajectory to the earth and end in big explosions.) He uses this showy camera device several times in this episode as well and, by this time, we've seen the dizzying zip-line descent from high overhead to the earth enough to be slightly jaded. The shot is so showy and spectacular that repeating it a couple of times in each episode tends to defeat the point. The destruction of Moscow by fire is a massive spectacle, shot with frenzied handheld camera that repeats the pattern of editing and imagery in the Borodino sequence -- what begins as a relatively comprehensible sequence of images ends in a roaring conflagration that fills the screen with pillars and clouds of fire. This part of the film also feels a bit derivative -- Bondarchuk uses Goya as his model for some horrific execution by firing squad scenes -- the man are being massacred in a cabbage field. He repeats Goyaesque compositions a little too readily and the images are too showy and "artistic" to have the terrible force that is intended. (I compare to their detriment these scenes with the images of the partisans being murdered in Rossellini's Paisan -- there's nothing "artistic" about these pictures; they are strictly documentary and, therefore, all the more terrible because of their plainness.) Pierre's death march as a French prisoner is not sufficiently horrific. His interactions with the peasant Platon, from whom he learns something of the meaning of life, are reduced to a few allusions -- this makes Pierre's later ecstatic discovery that "man is made for happiness" ring a bit hollow. This simple truth is something that Platon has established with his endless peasant proverbs -- this is another aspect of Tolstoy's novel that probably couldn't be filmed without a modern audience wanting to strangle the peasant sage. Tolstoy was obsessed and terrified by death and he returns repeatedly to scenes involving dying characters -- people dream about their deaths and we see their visions. Unfortunately, these images incline toward the bombastic and unpersuasive -- this is particularly true with respect to Prince Andrei's extended death scene. There are many fine and memorable things in this part of the film -- Bondarchuk's instinct for imagery doesn't wholly desert him. Natasha and Andre's sister, Princess Maria are, often, filmed against luminous glowing voids -- the effect is more than a little like icon images of saints hovering in a fog of gold. A final scene showing the French staggering out of Russia in an endless beleagured column, a drizzle of frozen corpses in its wake, is horribly impressive, particularly when accompanied by a belligerent and pompous speech by Napoleon on the soundtrack. Finally, an image of freezing soldiers congregating in great ragged circle around a bonfire embodies many of Tolstoy's themes, particularly those relating to the brotherhood of man, in a memorably spectacular shot. But there's an awful lot of aerial photography of Mother Russia, lots of trees and flowers blowing in tempests, lots of enormous sky-scapes and fields through which huge rivers drain. The last part of the movie labors inevitably under the memory of the atrocities of World War II and its unpleasantly jingoistic (and, therefore, not at all like Tolstoy) with respect to its rather vengeful patriotism. And, then, the movie just comes full-stop to an end -- we don't even get to see Pierre and Natasha together in the final scenes.
Deeply flawed, Bondarchuk's War and Peace establishes the standard for the film epic. It contains things (mostly huge battle scenes) that will never be duplicated. Some of the film is a folly and it is grandiose, of course, because of the way the Soviets produced movies. But it retains (and rewards) the viewers attention richly enough for me to recommend that people devote the time necessary to watching (and arguing) with this film. It is beyond doubt one of the most impressive adaptations of a great literary work ever attempted.
The jingoistic quality was offset at times by the great romanticism. At other times it was the other way around. I enjoyed this film basically as best I could.
ReplyDeleteI haven’t read the novel. I watched an old interview with Tolstoy’s last surviving daughter, Alexandra. It seems from this and the movie that he was at times very fun, despite what one might think.
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