“The film has undergone a real renaissance,” Youngblood said. Putin wanted, as she put it, “to restore a proper patriotic culture.” Mosfilms received state support for its restoration - a yearslong process conducted scrupulously, frame by frame, by assembling parts of negatives from different archives. The leadership of Mosfilms felt that “War and Peace” deserved to be rescued, Youngblood said, while President Vladimir V. A complete negative didn’t exist Tsui recalled watching a version with awkward disruptions in quality from one frame to the next.Īttitudes in Russia changed in the early 2000s. The audience dropped off quickly, and it languished in relative obscurity for decades.īut the movie gained mythic status among cinephiles, who most often had to settle for seeing it in a less-than-ideal form. It won the Academy Award for best foreign film, but Bondarchuk’s envious peers in the Soviet Union spurned him and, in turn, his magnum opus. Yet “War and Peace,” while an enormously popular film at first, didn’t enter the canon easily. “And they’re all deployed in a way to put you, the viewer, into the same psychological and emotional space as these characters.” “It’s almost a playbook of every type of cinematic device that could be possible,” Tsui said. (It didn’t help that he was known to be mercurial and difficult to work with.) He spent a year casting the film, and was obsessed with historical accuracy in the production. “This was going to be a very prestigious project,” said Denise Youngblood, an emeritus professor from the University of Vermont and the author of the book “ Bondarchuk’s War and Peace: Literary Classic to Soviet Cinematic Epic.”īondarchuk, a seasoned actor who had only one directing credit to his name, was chosen to direct, which confused many in the Soviet film community and led to resentment that would dog him for the rest of his life. The Soviet state bristled at the success of Vidor’s film - Tolstoy’s novel, after all, is a national treasure - so it commissioned what it hoped would be a bigger, better adaptation from Mosfilms, one of the country’s oldest and most respected studios. As part of a cultural exchange program, King Vidor’s 1956 Hollywood adaptation, starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda, was brought to the Soviet Union, where millions of people saw it. Bondarchuk’s “War and Peace” owes some of its splendor to the Cold War.
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