More War Than Peace: Sergei Bondarchuk’s 4 War & Peace Films (1966-67)
When older generations say that they don’t make movies like they used to, they’re talking about Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace films, released between 1966 and 1967. An absolutely breathtaking series of four individual movies spread out over seven hours, they recount Tolstoy’s epic tale of Russian aristocratic and military perspective during the Napoleonic invasion of the early nineteenth century in elaborate, authentic and highly orchestrated detail.
Beanpole’s Frozen Trauma
The icy Leningrad wind blows through the soulless, gray buildings. The equally soulless, gray people recovering from the immediate aftermath of The Second World War blow through the streets like torn pieces of newsprint. These frigid streets mask the squalid desperation of those who’ve survived, and look to make the transition into what will become the post-war Soviet socialist state. It’s a moment beautifully frozen in time, but also the moment we first meet Iya (played by the incredible Viktoria Miroshnichenko), frozen in place not by the weather, but by the temporary immobility of post-concussion syndrome. Her voice in close-up crackles and she trembles as her muscles spasm. All we hear is a distant ringing, and the drowned voices of the blurred figures she works with in the infirmary. The shot uncomfortably lingers. We are forced to watch ever closer, increasingly drawn into her suffering.
"I have no conscience, only nerves”: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
Based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) carries all the cinematic hallmarks of humanity’s carelessness towards the environment, and the clinical, cold and soulless climate of life behind the Iron Curtain.