chickenfeet

We've been watching the amazing 1967 Soviet film of Tolstoy's Voyni i Mir. This is the one that used 100,000 extras for the battle scenes. It is remarkably faithful in tone to the book. Although abbreviated,it isn't condensed; by which I mean bits are left out but that the bits that are left in are played at a truly Tolstoyan pace and with a kind of Tolstoyan grandeur. The cinematography is absolutely exceptional. It was shot in 70mm and the director, Sergei Bondarchuk, is utterly unafraid of holding a shot for as long as he needs. In the same vein he'll show a series of images with no sound at all for even a couple of minutes. This is almost inconceivably far away from the current Hollywood pattern of ultr-rapid cuts and noisily busy soundtracks. It's spellbinding. Budget was obviously not an issue and whether it's a battlefield or a ballroom everything is on a grand scale and gorgeous to look at. The acting is very good too. Lyudmila Savelyeva is a gorgeous Natasha Rostova and both the ironically named Vyacheslav Tikhonov as Prince Andrei and the director himself as Pierre Bezukhov really inhabit their characters.

The only downside, which may only be true of the edition we watched, is that there are some issues with dubbing and subtitles. Basically the English soundtrack keeps breaking into Russian and with the Russian sound on there are odd breaks in the sub-titles. By watching the dub with subtitles we could get it all. It's not ideal but worth it for the visuals and some amazing performances.

Here are three screencaps to give you an idea: