Adam Roberts fills us in on the screening of War and Peace at ‘A Nos Amours’, a regular event showing rarely screened classics and cult cinema, which he runs with Archipelago director Joanna Hogg
So the day came and went.
The print held out despite joins and warping and brittle dryness. The Renoir was all but full – over 200 people bought tickets! There were even some children there – their mother had seen the film as a child herself and wanted them to see the film that has so overwhelmed her then. I spotted them in the lobby at the end, hours later, looking very happy!
The introduction by Susan Larsen of Cambridge University School of Slavonic Studies was a cracker. Susan was emotional as she told how the entire Soviet Union, from the Minister of Culture and down, threw themselves into the making of the film, pinching props from the Hermitage, gathering horses from anywhere and everywhere and drilling soldiers into a reformed cavalry regiment, even training dogs that had never hunted to run in packs…
Soviet film stock of the time was not of the best quality, but the freedom to shoot liberally was preferable to stinting with very expensive imported stock. Susan related how the faults included film punched with sprockets on one side only, or identification text wrongly put into the centre of the film, which only showed up when the precious exposed film was processed.
The print stock is also why 70mm prints are now beyond use, and all the widescreen release prints of the time that A Nos Amours inspected were rotten and brittle and certainly useless. Only the 35mm print we screened is runnable and that because, we concluded, it was made in the 80s, a version made especially for TV transmission. And TV of the era was always 4×3 – hence this one being a pan and scanned version for TV, and of lowish contrast.
Those problems aside, what came across was a wonderful piece of flamboyant and hugely energetic film-making. The director was at play – the entire team, including cast and crew were at play. No CGI, just jaw-dropping spectacle, alternating with scenes of tenderness. And above all, a compassionate, reflective philosophical thread running through it all: the voice of Tolstoy, incarnated by Bondarchuk himself, ruminating and commenting, delivering a pantheistic call for love and common feeling. The camera lifted high into the air, loving the trees and endless steppe before soaring off into the clouds.
Everything about the film was on a huge scale. The applause at the end of seven and a half hours was deserved – we had all, after all, been there and been carried through it. Time flew.
Thanks are due to the many who tweeted and mentioned and liked this event. By this means we came together to watch this wonderful chunk of cinema.
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