Sergei Bondarchuk

Born September 20, 1920

When I was growing up, all the adults in my life seemed to express a mild disdain for the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Bondarchuk. Nobody said so outright, but it was clear that he simply was not taken seriously.

For example, people liked to make fun of Bondarchuk’s film adaptation of War and Peace. I remember a story about how, during the film’s planning stages, when it seemed that everyone in the Soviet Union had their own thoughts about who was worthy of playing the protagonists of Russia’s most important novel, the director received a letter that at first offered serious casting suggestions but ended with the rather sardonic punch line that the huge oak tree that holds such symbolic importance in the novel should be played by Sergei Bondarchuk.

In Russian, the word for oak – dub – can also be used to mean “blockhead” or “numbskull,” and that was how Bondarchuk was perceived: a bit dense. But, more importantly, he was also seen as a faithful servant of the regime who made “patriotic” movies that toed whatever ideological line was being mandated by the government. The 150th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino was approaching – time to make a cinematic War and Peace, especially since Soviet filmmakers couldn’t let Americans steal that show, with their 1956 version starring the captivating Audrey Hepburn as Natasha. And when the 30th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War was approaching, that, of course, was Bondarchuk’s cue to make They Fought for their Country. Both films featured colossal battle scenes, and it felt as if the whole country pitched in to help make them: the Defense Ministry sent soldiers; the Culture Ministry lent its generous support. The money poured in.

For the filming of War and Peace, an entire cinematic cavalry regiment was created; 150 train cars were used to transport this troop troupe to the filming location; 58 museums let the director borrow their historical artifacts; 40 enterprises were used to produce the furniture, weaponry, and clothing, right down to the snuff boxes. The statistics are mind-boggling: 9,000 costumes, 12,000 shakos, and of buttons alone, 200,000 had to be made! Every last early-nineteenth-century detail had to be authentically replicated.

And filming nineteenth-century battle scenes in the twentieth century isn’t easy. Fifty sets were built out on location, eight bridges were constructed, and putting a bridge across the Dnieper is no small matter. And once they were built using modern technology, every trace of twentieth-century engineering had to be hidden from view (in the seventies, you couldn’t just digitally edit out the columns, bolts and cables), so trees and shrubs were shipped in to hide them.

And how about the task of managing scenes involving 15,000 actors, giving orders to a huge cavalry regiment, and being responsible for 23 tons of explosives, 40,000 liters of kerosene, 15,000 smoke grenades, 2,000 sabers, and 1,500 shells? No wonder Bondarchuk was almost done in by heart attacks during filming.

Of course, this all reeked of Soviet officialdom, of a governmental attempt to exploit a Russian classic for its own purposes, to make a movie about the inadvisability of waging war against the Russian people (Tolstoy’s famous “cudgel of the people’s war”), to parade before the entire world the grandeur of Soviet cinematography while simultaneously showcasing the power of the Russian Army.

The very fact of the generous and empowering state support that Bondarchuk always received irritated many. He quickly became a powerful force in Soviet filmmaking, and trampled all over it, always saying what the powers that be wanted him to say and making movies that the Soviet people could understand and were allowed to watch. In addition to enjoying incredible influence, he was granted the freedom – extraordinary in those days – to be filmed and to film abroad, where he became “the face” of Soviet cinema. The “Soviet character” he portrayed in his films about the Second World War and the grandeur of Russian culture he put on display in War and Peace were considered ideally suited for export – much more so than Andrei Tarkovsky’s unconventional Mirror.

He was a faithful servant of the Soviet regime (something he paid a price for during perestroika, when all the pent-up criticism of him came bursting out), and he fathered a new generation of filmmakers who are just as faithful servants of the new regime: his daughter Natalya Bondarchuk is now totally fixated on nationalism and his son Fyodor Bondarchuk has an amazing talent for turning the flow of money his way.

All that said, over the years, the realization has sunk in that Sergei Bondarchuk was a truly wonderful actor. He had a long series of inane and insubstantial roles – what actor hasn’t? But he also delivered stellar performances in film adaptations of Chekhov and took on the meaty roles of Othello and, in his own War and Peace, Pierre Bezukhov. On his long list of acting credits, which includes plenty of trash, we find the powerful role of Andrei Sokolov in Fate of a Man, a film about war and what it does to people, and the marvelous hero of the kindhearted and touching film Seryozha, directed by the very young Igor Talankin and Georgy Daneliya. They saw something in Bondarchuk and evoked from him a beautiful portrayal of the eponymous Seryozha’s stepfather.

And his War and Peace actually turned out to be a very interesting film. The Waterloo battle scenes are stunning even by today’s standards. It now strikes me that this faithful servant of the regime was always trying to imbue his art with some sort of humanity, which may be why he kept turning to the classics – Chekhov, Tolstoy, Pushkin – as if to somehow overcome the falsity of his official position, as if he wanted to film something that truly touched people’s hearts and that spoke to his own heart, the heart of a peasant boy who, once upon a time, had found his way into a theater group at his school in Taganrog.

Someday, when all of Bondarchuk’s political views (if he actually had any) and official aggrandizement by the Soviet regime are forgotten, it will be easier to judge him impartially. At that point, we may gain more sympathy for a man caught between his own talent and the need to serve the state.

As he climbed the career ladder and became a film industry bureaucrat with a chest full of medals, did he have a clear sense of how his films would be objectively rated? Did he compare them in his own mind to those of the Soviet Union’s more cutting-edge filmmakers – Tarkovsky, Daneliya, Khutsiev – who never got to sit at the dais, never had thousands of soldiers and armies of costume makers put at their disposal, and who were squeezed by the vice of censorship? Did he ever feel ashamed at his own lack of scruples as he turned Soviet cinema into his personal fiefdom? Probably he sincerely believed that he deserved the awards and honors that rained down on him, from the Stalin Prize to the Oscar.

In assessing his legacy, we have to ask ourselves: Would Soviet cinema have been better off without him?

Almost certainly not.