War and Peace (film series)

• 1. Introduction

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  War and Peace, the Soviet epic film directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, began not with a script or a studio contract but with national embarrassment. In August 1959, the American-Italian version of the same story, directed by King Vidor, arrived in Soviet cinemas and drew more than 31 million viewers. The Soviet Minister of Culture, Yekaterina Furtseva, watched that success and made a decision: the USSR would answer it. An open letter signed by many of the country's filmmakers appeared in the Soviet press and declared that producing a picture surpassing the American-Italian one was "a matter of honor for the Soviet cinema industry." A German magazine summed it up bluntly, calling the planned film a "counterstrike" to Vidor. What followed was one of the most logistically staggering productions in the history of the medium. Tens of thousands of soldiers marched onto set. A plywood city was built and burned to the ground. The director died twice on a hospital table and kept working. The question is how a single film, made in a country without Hollywood's resources, came to be regarded as the grandest epic ever put on screen.

• 2. The Director Who Was Not Asked

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  Sergei Bondarchuk was forty years old when the Ministry of Culture's letter arrived. He had completed his directorial debut, Fate of a Man, in 1959, just months before Vidor's film landed in Soviet theatres. He had not lobbied for the War and Peace project. He did not even know the position was under discussion until the letter reached him. Several more established directors, among them Mikhail Romm and Sergei Gerasimov, had already proposed themselves. The frontrunner was Ivan Pyryev, whose selection appeared secure until officials with grievances against him quietly steered the offer toward Bondarchuk. Furtseva initially insisted both men direct competing pilot films for a commission to assess. Pyryev withdrew before that contest could happen. According to writer Fedor Razzakov, Pyryev recognized that his chances were slim: Bondarchuk belonged to a generation of young filmmakers that Nikita Khrushchev's Kremlin was actively promoting to replace directors from the Stalin era. In late February 1961, with Pyryev out of the running, Furtseva held a meeting and confirmed Bondarchuk as director. On the 3rd of April that year, the director-general of Mosfilm, Vladimir Surin, wrote to the Minister requesting 150,000 roubles to begin. She approved a smaller sum, 30,000 roubles, on the 5th of May. That day, work on the picture began.

• 3. Building a War

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  To recreate Napoleonic Russia at scale, the production assembled resources that had no precedent in Soviet filmmaking. More than forty museums lent historical artifacts, including chandeliers, furniture and cutlery. Thousands of costumes were sewn, the majority being military uniforms from the Napoleonic Wars period, among them 11,000 shakos. Sixty obsolete cannons were cast and 120 wagons and carts built specifically for the shoot. Three military advisers were appointed to the production: Army General Vladimir Kurasov served as chief consultant, Army General Markian Popov also contributed, and Lieutenant General Nikolai Oslikovsky was brought in as the expert on cavalry. The Soviet Army ultimately supplied thousands of soldiers as extras. Sourcing horses proved unexpectedly complicated. The cavalry formations of the Army had been disbanded long before, so the Ministry of Agriculture donated nine hundred horses and the Moscow City Police contributed a detachment from its mounted regiment. The wolf hunt sequence at the Rostov estate created a separate difficulty. The production had planned to use borzois, as the novel describes, and obtained sixteen from private owners, but the dogs had no hunting experience and proved too difficult to manage. The solution was to use scent hounds supplied by the Ministry of Defense to actually chase down wolves provided by the zoological department of the State Studio for Popular Science Films, while the borzois caught them. That gap between literary authenticity and practical reality would run through the entire production.

• 4. Casting Against Expectation

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  Oleg Strizhenov was originally cast as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, but in the spring of 1962, shortly before principal photography began, he accepted a place in the ensemble of the Moscow Art Theatre and withdrew. Bondarchuk complained to the Minister of Culture. Furtseva spoke with Strizhenov directly and failed to change his mind. The director then approached Innokenty Smoktunovsky, who was committed to Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet. After deliberations, Smoktunovsky agreed to join War and Peace, but Kozintsev used his influence in the Ministry and reclaimed his actor. Vyacheslav Tikhonov was cast as a last resort. He did not arrive on set until mid-December 1962, three months after filming had already begun. For Pierre Bezukhov, Bondarchuk had envisioned an actor of great physical strength, matching Tolstoy's description of the character. He offered the role to Olympic weightlifter Yury Vlasov and even began rehearsals with him. Vlasov eventually told the director that he had no acting ability and gave the role up. Bondarchuk cast himself. For Natasha Rostova, a number of established actresses competed for the part, but Bondarchuk chose 19-year-old ballerina Ludmila Savelyeva, who had only recently graduated from Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet. Nikita Mikhalkov was cast as Natasha's younger brother Petya Rostov but was growing too fast during the shoot's lengthy span and had to be replaced by the younger Sergei Yermilov. The scenes of Mikhalkov riding a horse during the hunt were left in the final film. Tikhonov was the highest-paid member of the cast, receiving R22,228. Savelyeva received R10,685, and most other actors less than R3,000.

• 5. Film That Failed and Fire That Burned

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  Principal photography began on the 7th of September 1962, the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino. The first scene shot depicted the execution of suspected arsonists by the French army, filmed at the Novodevichy Convent. From the start, the production was undermined by its own film stock. Rather than purchasing from Kodak or ORWO in East Germany, the producers chose Soviet-made stock from the Shostka Chemical Plant, for reasons of both cost and national pride. Director of photography Anatoly Petritsky, who was 31 years old and had made only one previous film when he inherited the role after the original cinematographers quit in a dispute with Bondarchuk, later recalled the Shostka film was "of horrible quality." He would photograph a sequence only to discover the stock was defective. Some of the more elaborate battle sequences were reshot more than forty times. According to journalist Yevgeni Zhirnov, Bondarchuk had to redo more than 10% of all footage because of these problems, adding an estimated 10 to 15 percent to the total cost. The Battle of Borodino sequence, shot near Dorogobuzh rather than at the actual site because of the memorials located there, required 13,500 soldiers and 1,500 horsemen. Bondarchuk told National Geographic in a 1986 interview that Western press claims of 120,000 participating soldiers were exaggerations; his actual number was 12,000. The pyrotechnics involved 23 tons of gunpowder handled by 120 sappers, 40,000 liters of kerosene, and 10,000 smoke grenades. For the Fire of Moscow, a plywood set was built over four months in the village of Teryayevo, next to the Joseph-Volokolamsk Monastery, then doused with diesel fuel and burned to the ground with five fire engines standing by. Principal photography ended on the 28th of October 1966.

• 6. The Director Who Died Twice

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  In July 1964, while racing to prepare the first two parts for the 1965 Moscow Film Festival, Bondarchuk suffered a major cardiac arrest and was clinically dead for a short period. His first words after regaining consciousness were: "If I die, let Gerasimov finish it." The directive to rush the parts to the festival had come from his superiors only that month, contrary to all previous planning and while the films were far from complete. The two parts were submitted to Mosfilm's directorate on the 30th of June 1965, less than a week before the festival. Their world premiere was held on the 19th of July 1965, in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. During that same July, Bondarchuk suffered a second cardiac arrest and was clinically dead for four minutes. That near-death experience entered the film itself. The white wall of light that Andrei Bolkonsky sees in the moment before his death was drawn directly from what the director experienced on that table. Work on the remaining parts resumed on the 9th of August. Photography of the final plot line, the Fire of Moscow, began on the 17th of October 1966. The fourth and final part was not completed until early August 1967. When the last accounting entries were written that August, the total came to 8,291,712 roubles, equal to US$9,213,013 at the 1967 exchange rate, making it the most expensive film ever produced in the Soviet Union.

• 7. Audiences, Awards, and Arguments

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  The first installment, Andrei Bolkonsky, was released in March 1966 in 2,805 copies and sold 58.3 million tickets in its first fifteen months in the USSR, with 58 million viewers staying through the intermission. It became the most successful film of that year domestically. The later installments drew progressively smaller crowds: Natasha Rostova attracted 36.2 million viewers, while 1812 and Pierre Bezukhov drew 21 million and 19.8 million respectively. Across all four parts, approximately 135 million tickets were sold in the USSR. The series screened in 117 countries. In Poland, it sold over 5 million tickets in 1967. Continental Distributors paid $1.5 million for the American rights. The shortened English-language version premiered at the DeMille Theater in New York on the 28th of April 1968. Tickets were priced at $5.50 to $7.50, which broke the previous American record of $6 set by Funny Girl. The film won the Grand Prix at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1965, the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 41st Academy Awards on the 14th of April 1969. It was the first Soviet film to win that Oscar, and held the record as the longest film to win an Academy Award until O.J.: Made in America took the Best Documentary Feature prize in 2017. Critical opinion in the West was divided. Roger Ebert called it "a magnificently unique film." Judith Crist placed it above Gone with the Wind. Renata Adler of the New York Times judged Bondarchuk "too old to play Pierre" and called the film "vulgar in the sense that it takes something great and makes it both pretentious and devoid of life." The English dubbing attracted particular hostility; The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt called the decision to add alien voices "madness." On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of 19 reviewed notices were positive, with an average rating of 8.97 out of 10.

• 8. Preservation and Legacy

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  The original 70-mm reels were eventually damaged beyond repair. In 1986, Bondarchuk was asked to prepare the film for television broadcast. A 35-mm copy filmed in parallel to the main production, with a 4:3 aspect ratio, was submitted for that purpose. In 1999, Mosfilm launched an initiative to restore its classic films, and War and Peace was included. Because the original 70-mm elements were unusable, the studio worked from the 1988 4:3 version and the original soundtrack to produce a DVD edition, at a cost of $80,000. In 2006, Mosfilm director Karen Shakhnazarov announced that a new frame-by-frame restoration was underway, with a projected completion date of 2016. That completed restoration was first shown at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City, then in Los Angeles and other cities. The Criterion Collection released it on a 3-disc DVD set and a 2-disc Blu-ray on the 25th of June 2019. Scholars have since read the film against the political moment of its making. Ian Aitken placed it within the 1964-68 transition from the Khrushchev Thaw to the Brezhnev Stagnation, noting that it employed modernist techniques including hand-held camera, rapid editing, and symbolic use of color, even as it was celebrated by the Brezhnev government as a state achievement. The film was sent to the 1967 Cannes Film Festival out of competition in place of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, which the Soviet government deemed inappropriate to submit; that displacement has given War and Peace a second layer of meaning for anyone interested in how Soviet culture managed the line between permitted grandeur and suppressed dissent.