The Impossible Film

On Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1965–1967, Criterion Collection)

Certain films resist the vocabulary of criticism. Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace — released in four parts between 1965 and 1967, and now available in a painstaking restoration through the Criterion Collection — is one of those films. After watching all four parts, I find myself in the peculiar position of someone who has witnessed something transcendental, unique, moving, and revolutionary, and cannot quite account for it.

Bondarchuk's War and Peace follows Tolstoy's proposition in four volumes: Andrei Bolkonsky, Natasha Rostova, The Year 1812, and Pierre Bezukhov. Together, they constitute something closer to an expedition through key episodes of European history rather than a mere spectacle, a cinematographic experience. Yet it is both. One does not watch War and Peace, one crosses it — the way one crosses Europe on foot, the way a sabre cuts through the flesh and bones of the man stuck in the mud waiting to die. Bondarchuk's War and Peace is a lesson in European history, a manual that helps us understand the tensions that redefined the political landscape of Europe, leading to Napoleon's defeat. Still, it is way more than that; it is a portrayal of human miseries and ambitions.

War and Peace — all four parts — was produced between 1961 and 1967 at Mosfilm studios, with the full backing of the Soviet state and the Soviet Army, which provided horses and soldiers as extras. The numbers alone stagger the imagination — twelve thousand men in uniform, ten thousand extras to fill the ranks of peasants, villagers, and Muscovites on the run, fifteen hundred horses, two hundred firing cannons, fifty-two tons of smoke compound, one hundred and five thousand tons of kerosene — but statistics miss the point entirely. What Bondarchuk achieved was not spectacle for its own sake. It was the physical reconstruction of a world that no longer exists except in textbooks, paintings, lost and found diaries, allegorical symphonic works, songs, and in the memory of those buried in shallow ground throughout battlefields that took years to clear of putrefaction and debris. Nothing compares to the brutal scenario of Borodino and Austerlitz. Nothing.

Bondarchuk's battle sequences have no precedent and no successor. Part Three, The Year 1812, despite a brief running time of 84 minutes, contains among the most awe-inspiring depictions of war ever committed to film. Bondarchuk does not simply show the rigors of battle explicitly; he drags you into it. The camera moves through the fog of Borodino not as an observer but as a participant, and the effect is genuinely disorienting — you feel the incomprehensibility of mass violence from within, not from above. This is what distinguishes Bondarchuk from every Hollywood director who ever staged a battle: he gives you the chaos, not the choreography; raw emotion, not sentimentality.

But to speak only of the battle scenes is to fall into the trap that awaits every reviewer of this film. The other half of Tolstoy's title is Peace, and Bondarchuk honors it with equal artistry. The camera glides majestically amid waltzing couples in the ballroom sequences, retaining intimacy by filtering the spectacle largely through Natasha's perspective. The intimate moments — Pierre confessing his unworthiness to Natasha, Andrei watching the sky at Austerlitz — are rendered as carefully framed visual poetry that the novel itself could not achieve. Bondarchuk understood that Tolstoy's genius lies precisely in this oscillation, the pendulum between the historical and the personal, and he found cinematic equivalents for both.

Then there is the question of the filmmaker himself. Bondarchuk cast himself as Pierre Bezukhov, and the decision is both audacious and completely right. Pierre is the conscience of the novel — awkward, large, idealistic, perpetually out of place in the rooms he inhabits. During the production, Bondarchuk suffered two heart attacks and was clinically dead for several minutes during one of them. The white wall of light that Andrei sees before his death was drawn directly from Bondarchuk's own near-death experience. The film bears his body. It cost him, literally, his life's blood. You can feel that in every frame.

The restoration deserves its own paragraph. When Mosfilm resolved to restore War and Peace, they discovered that neither the studio nor Russia's state film archive possessed a complete 70mm negative in its original 2.20:1 aspect ratio. An extensive search of archives across the former Soviet republics also failed to yield one. The restoration was therefore assembled from parts of negatives held in various archives, with a complete positive copy held by Sovexportfilm used as reference. The result is a frame-by-frame digital restoration of image and sound using a 2K scanner, produced by Karen Shakhnazarov of Mosfilm. What you see on Criterion is the closest possible approximation of what Soviet audiences saw in 1966 — and it is, in a word, ravishing.

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could surpass Hollywood. As a statement of Soviet cinema's might, War and Peace succeeded wildly, garnering the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and setting a new standard for epic filmmaking. But what time has revealed is that the film's greatness has nothing to do with competition or ideology. It belongs to the tradition of Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, to that school of Soviet cinema that understood the frame as a moral instrument, not merely a visual one.

This is a film that should be seen by anyone who cares about what cinema can do. It is available on Criterion, and it demands the time you give it — seven hours across four evenings, if you like, the way Tolstoy himself asked for months of your reading life. The investment is proportionate to the return. There is nothing else like it.