Director and actor Sergey Bondarchuk, born in 1920 in the Ukrainian SSR had a distinguished career in Soviet cinema and became an international celebrity with his 1965-1967 version of Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace, in which he played Pierre Bezukhov. The movie, financed by the Soviet government had a practically unlimited budget, and from its inception was expected to be a link in the chain of outstanding Soviet achievements of the time (Sputnik I and II, Gagarin in space). It was filmed in 70mm stock and featured Red Army soldiers in battle scenes that included Austerlitz and Borodino. Bondarchuk's depiction of warfare was not the Hollywood gung-ho variety and centered on the fog and confusion of war and the senseless sacrifice of soldiers by callous and/or incompetent generals. The movie earned him a reputation as a "battle director" and he was offered work abroad as the director of Waterloo (1970) and the diptych Mexico in Flames (1982) /Ten Days that Shook the World (1983) based on the works of American journalist John Reed on the Mexican and Russian revolutions.
German director Thomas Schamoni and his crew were present during the filming of War and Peace in the winter of 1965 and there is much interesting information on the movie such as length of the different versions. The first was hastily assembled for presentation in the 1965 Moscow Film Festival. The version for the Soviet public had some 20 minutes deleted and was divided in four parts. It was further trimmed to 403 minutes in 1988. Then there is the drastically cut American release, 360 minutes long dubbed in English. The last two versions were put on tape with modified aspect ratio, which did not do justice to the original (to say the least). Fortunately the Soviet version is now available in a beautifully restored version on Blu-ray, DVD and in the streaming services.
Besides watching director Bondarchuk, actors and crew at work, we gain insights on the recreation of time and place based on contemporary paintings and sketches, the way the actors tried to adapt their speech and gestures to the ways of the Russian nobility of the time, and the burden of putting on screen a tale that was (and is) familiar to every Russian school student and to most of the general public. Also, the 1812 French invasion unavoidably brought to mind the infinitely worse but equally failed German invasion in 1941, which in 1965 was a recent experience. This documentary is short and to the point; the only disappointment is the shooting in black and white which misses the studied use of color by Bondarchuk and his cinematographers.
German director Thomas Schamoni and his crew were present during the filming of War and Peace in the winter of 1965 and there is much interesting information on the movie such as length of the different versions. The first was hastily assembled for presentation in the 1965 Moscow Film Festival. The version for the Soviet public had some 20 minutes deleted and was divided in four parts. It was further trimmed to 403 minutes in 1988. Then there is the drastically cut American release, 360 minutes long dubbed in English. The last two versions were put on tape with modified aspect ratio, which did not do justice to the original (to say the least). Fortunately the Soviet version is now available in a beautifully restored version on Blu-ray, DVD and in the streaming services.
Besides watching director Bondarchuk, actors and crew at work, we gain insights on the recreation of time and place based on contemporary paintings and sketches, the way the actors tried to adapt their speech and gestures to the ways of the Russian nobility of the time, and the burden of putting on screen a tale that was (and is) familiar to every Russian school student and to most of the general public. Also, the 1812 French invasion unavoidably brought to mind the infinitely worse but equally failed German invasion in 1941, which in 1965 was a recent experience. This documentary is short and to the point; the only disappointment is the shooting in black and white which misses the studied use of color by Bondarchuk and his cinematographers.
