Jack Pulman’s War and Peace (BBC, 1972), an extraordinary experience (Episodes 1-10)

The young Sonya and Natasha as we first see them on Natasha and her mother’s name day, Sonya revealing to Natasha how much she loves Nikolai (Episode 1)

Dear friends and readers,

I just loved this mini-series, with Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezukhov (quietly marvelous); Morag Hood as Natasha Rostova and Joanna David as Sonya Alexandrovna (cousins, both perfect in the roles almost as envisaged by Tolstoy, only Pulman writes for Sonya far more depths of pain and rebellion within); my favorite actress from the 1970s BBCs series, Angela Downs as Marya Bolkonskaya, Alan Dobie slowly melting into a thoughtful conflicted Andrei Bolkonsky, her brother, and perhaps best of all, Frank Middlemas as an unforgettable scene-stealing General Kutusov against the steely-iron egoist Napoleon performed by David Swift. I could go on to name more (Sylvester Morand is a more sensitive Nikolai, brother to Natasha, but perfect as the conventional man, with Gary Watson superbly just your moral effective soldier, Denisov, understandably in love with Natasha). And must not omit the other central controlling creative presence, John Davies as director. There is still such snobbery about TV films that the recent anthology Tolstoy on Screen never discusses it.

Pierre, young, nervous, puzzled as his father (not legally. and whom he hardly knows but has been all powerful and is enormously rich) lies dying in a nearby room (Episode 1)

It was after my first watch-through of this that I proposed on Trollope19thCStudies that we read Tolstoy’s War and Peace together. Of Tolstoy’s text as translated by the Mauds, and revised by Mandelkera realized: What is so entrancing is how carefully subtly done are all the scenes, how Tolstoy’s philosophical and political thought is gotten into the film by inventing further scenes that frame what’s in the book; how each hour is a unit in its own, with its own mood and juxtapositions fitted so perfectly.

My experience was at first it is hard to get into the story as Pulman is moving naturalistically and not attempting to rivet our attention at all costs. Very like his quietly opening magnificent I, Claudius, this War and Peace series grows on you (like Tolstoy’s book). After a while, you realize you are so involved with the characters and stories and themes. As with my blog on the first two War and Peace movies (going in chronological order of making), the 1955 King Vidor and 1966 Bondarchuk W&Ps, I won’t go over the book’s story line and characters but leave the reader to find a summary or read my first blog on Tolstoy’s novel — or (as I hope) the reader has, or is about to, read Tolstoy’s masterpiece. I find the wikipedia page contains minimal cast lists and awards, and no break-down of episodes, no commentary, and there has as yet been not one essay in a published film journal (on-line or off), I’ll proceed episode by episode, 20 in all.

Episodes 1: Name-Day; and 2: Sounds of War

Uncannily (for I doubt Pulman read Tolstoy and his wife’s manuscripts as described by R.F. Christian in his book on the ms’s and sources of Tolstoy’s W&P), uncannily, Pulman reverses the scenes the novel opens with in the way they appeared in an early draft of the book.

The first episode in early drafts of W&P allow us to meet our central Rostov family: the fond weak naive count (Rupert Davies), uxorious over his calculatingly worldly wife, the Countess (Faith Brooke pitch perfect in this part); enjoying themselves by the spectacle now that they won it, all the while they are (clearly) overspending and being sluiced by everyone around them. In this the same limpet-clinger, Anna Mikhailovna (Anne Blake) greedy for money for her slowly emerging worldly son, Boris (Neil Stacy, aptly the same type in The Pallisers, Laurence Fitzgibbon, Phineas’s fair-weather friend). Episode 2 brings us to the first passages of Tolstoy’s novel, “What do you think of this man, Napoleon,” the fake patina of concern, the cant feeling of Anna Scherer (Barbara Young) in talk with the novel’s strongest site of mindless corruption for money and rank, Prince Vassily.

Anna Scherer and Prince Vassily – the first moments of the novel realized (Episode 2)

Pierre comes in and his candor, intense interest in and sympathy for the “revolution” and Napoleon immediately makes him a pariah, laughing stock, but his equally sincere (if far more polished or cagey) friend, Andrei is there, and we see how bored this intelligent man is with his wife, but also how rough and hard to her. Pierre is as yet flotsam and jetsam and after promising not to go to the debauchery party of the novel’s slimy amoral drone aristocratic male semi-rake, Anatole Kuragin (Colin Baker, fitting son for Vassily), Pierre goes and thrusts himself into the drunken feats and cruelty to a bear and police officer that ensue. And then the (for me the first time) the astonishing frank depiction of the fight between Vassily and Princess Katische (cousin to Pierre, stands to inherit a lot if he doesn’t) on the one hand to grasp the money, and Anna Mikhailovna on behalf of Pierre who she hopes will reward her well, over the dying man’s papers & will. The unscrupulous Anna is in fact responsible for Pierre becoming a rich man, a fact that empowers several sets of characters in the book. A fitting contrast to Andrei’s austere, old-fashioned patriarchal home, the rasping tyrannical father, old Prince Bolkonsky (Anthony Jacobs) making life miserable by enforcing geometry on his self-effacing deeply generous puritan of a daughter, Marya.

From the first scene of Andrei and his sister, Marya, they capture the implicit depths of bonding and communication of this pair (Episode 2)

Andrei unburdening himself of his wife by setting off for the “heroism” and honor of war duty. Andrei will be disillusioned slowly. The different worlds of the upper classes, gender faultlines, feeding off war of “le monde” that form the novel.

And then our first battle: Episode 3: Skirmish at Schongraben

This is a remarkable hour. The BBC people had to film real people, crowds of them in formations, real animals, gotten real canons and shot out from them. They tried for historical accuracy with weaponry and uniforms. They burn down a real bridge they had built. The scenes of masses of men must be there. I wondered what park they were using :). They were not able to project and show the carnage Tolstoy’s language can do so efficiently but it enough was done to be suggestive. The whole hour was given over to these hard war scenes, and an anti-war bias of the film has begun. Frank Middlemass particularly believable, effective — as when they learn of a massacre of the whole army of General Mack, and Andrei appalled to see how little seriously many people take this.

POV Kutusov hurrying out of his room to Mack to register his sense of the horror the man has known, from the back Andrei

It helps clarify the novel for someone reading this part of it. David Swift starts up the character of Napoleon quietly; Tolstoy begins with the man as nasty, as numinously strong in his manipulative letters, cunning and bold: Swift and Pulman’s Napoleon only gradually shows himself centrally egoistic. But note how we are now in a historical film. And at the close Nikolai’s first experience of battle: his shock at the real danger, at people actually wanting to kill him (though he had wanted to kill them and hadn’t thought about it); when they blow up the bridge it seems to him a game (not so to Denisov)

Episode 4: A letter and two proposals; 5: Austerlitz; 6: Reunions

Now the spillages begin as well as clear structuring: as the scene opens the Count is weeping over a letter; it’s from Nikolai telling of how he was wounded, the family’s characteristic half-comical over-responses and mode of re-assuring themselves. The unvarnished sincere emotionalism is then contrasted to the worldly cunning which despoils lives: Vassily maneuvers Pierre into marrying his daughter, Helene (Fiona Gaunt, a thankless role), shown to be utterly hollow, embarrassingly sexy, and after wealth of a man she hardly knows and despises, but Pierre unable to extract himself (not for the last time).

The pain to come of this contrasts to the pain experienced when the plain Marya finds herself courted for the first time by Vassily for his son, Anatole.

She cannot but welcome the possible escape

But the complex old man maneuvers the situation to leave Marya distraught over Anatole’s hypocrisy, and chasing of the French companion-semi-mistress, Mlle Bourienne. The old prince is saving Marya a lifetime of grief, but she is so hemmed in by him she can meet no one naturally. Contrasting close-ups of Pierre desperately pressured and allured and Marya in bed brooding

(Episode 4)

And again a full episode of war: Austerlitz pivotal in the book, for at its close Andrei seems to have been killed, and the Russians permanently defeated. Long war scenes which show incompetence, scores of people dying for nothing (the book shows this), Napoleon emerges multi-sided, powerful man with an attempt to explain (he’s not at all like the characters seeking true friends, he’d laugh), a man strongly controlled on battlefields and seeming enigmatic political performances.

Nikolai maturing (Episode 5)

One of many moments in the battle landscape (Episode 5)

By the end of Episode 5 all the characters are dispersed and then in 6, Reunion, they are brought back to where they started: grief as Andrei’s death is understood from uncertain letters; Nikolai’s home-coming to love; Pierre’s to cool indifference; Helene now having an affair with Dolokov (Donald Burton), a bright cunning amoral rakish and sadistic side-kick of Anatole’s; the death of the princess in childbirth just as Andrei does return. What’s plotted is a cyclical repetitive structuring, a return to the same character in the same situation but older, there’s been intervening experience

Far shots, odd angles, landscapes each make a different statement: this is a courtyard modeled on typical Russian country mansions of the early 19th century (Episode 5)

I am impressed by how: how brilliantly and convincingly Pulman conveys Tolstoy’s depiction of nervous distress in a nuanced way so as to show it in public situations. The explorations of the miseries of these arranged marriages by showing someone marrying badly and how he’s engineered into it: Pierre with Helene. Pierre has a rich good nature and is thus taken advantage of by Vassily who forestalls his holding off by just pretending that Pierre has asked for Ellen’s hand. Yet Vassily does not succeed with Prince Bolkonsky: Vassily having garnered Pierre’s fortune into his family, makes a move on Maria, the homely Bolkonsky daughter, and ironically the ill-natured man are much better able to fend off this than the semi-trusting instinctive one: Anatole is precisely wrong for Maria who is fooled by him: he would have had an affair with the French governess before he left the mansion. Ironically we see how the foolishly aptly-worldly Andre’s wife, the little Princess does just fine with the hypocritical shits like Anatole and Vassily. Yet she’s become poor in health; she needs society, Andrei as her husband with brains, or her pregnancy will destroy her. Anthony Hopkins’s performance: young then and calibrated just right, with no embarrassment. People individually; in “le monde,” in war.

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Walking and Talking (Episode 7)

Episodes 7: New Beginnings; 8: A Beautiful Tale

The first ironically titled; the second (unusual for any book or film) uses a surge of idealism and hope first to undermine Andrei’s bitterness and losses. Andrei is pulled by Pierre’s visits from his retirement and meditatiom, meets and is “recalled to life” (a Dickensian phrase for a man come out of prison) by the intensity of Natasha’s youthful hopefulness and joy in all the sensuality and thoughts, plans of existence found in Natasha at a ball.

Andrei asking Natasha to dance (Episode 8)

The sun on his eyes (Episode 8)

Pulman, together with stunning performances by the actors, did justice to Tolstoy’s book. After Austerlitz, after a dual, a death from pregnancy, disease, we see a turn to meaninglessness as the good characters cannot get others to act seriously, usefully, lives not realized, gifts thrown away, the absurd lack of thought and also how the man given big honors knows this (Frank Middlemas as Kutusov got that across at this table). Pierre is driven by needling and insults from Doloknov at the same dinner party to duel with him as his wife’s lover and shoots to kill — an act of naivete (I bond with this aspect of Pierre.) Luckily Doloknov does not die as he in his apparent last breath tries to kill in turn, and then grieves over how his mother will miss him.

Dolohkov, Nikolai, Denisov Laughing at Pierr, his POV (Episode 7)

Pierre fleeing the scene of the duel (Episode 7)

Then we have the scene of Pierre shouting hysterically at his awful wife (the portrait in Tolstoy is misogynistic and Pulman keeps to it) to get out. He can’t stand the sight of her. She says oh yes, she can hardly wait, but he is going to pay.
 
Very moving were too long dialogues you’d never see today. The first Pierre on his way to his estate, in retreat from the corrupt society, meets with a Mason and they talk deeply about life’s meaning: whether one should believe in God or an afterlife and what if you don’t. He becomes a Mason. Pullman shows the ceremonies to be absurd (modeled on some performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute either Pulman or Davies saw. 
 
He visits Andrei and now we have another more enlightenment type discourse where Andrea is the atheistic view and more or less wins as probable and Andrei proposes another way to get through life – -you don’t need to believe in this overarching pattern at all. It seems more or less you muddle through. Don’t even try to do good – -which is what Pierre has been trying on his estate. We do get views of the peasants where are deeply class-ridden but the film means seriously
 
A wholly invented scene for Napoleon in council conveys Tolstoy’s views on history (how it works), philosophy (what is the meaning of life even) in ways relevant to politics today. It’s a relief for em to re-watch this film over and over.

Episode 9: Leave of Absence

Natasha dancing to a folk violin played by her uncle

The title is utterly inadequate: this hour includes the beautiful renditon of the Rostovs’ Christmas embedded inside the family pathologies and tensions and misunderstandings of the Bolkonskys (the old prince’s biting cruelty to Andrey, the countess’s hysterical tirades at Nikolai, his at the stewards) and the desolation of Pierre as with over-voice he tells us of his life with whores/flunkies in his wife’s salon (the Masons have not helped). To me nothing comes near this rendition of War and Peace. From the point of view of moving the story forward, or about the character’s coming fates, the film “wasted” the whole hour. This was a splendid full scale elaboration of a Christmas interlude at the Rostovs in the country just after we are told their finances are in a wretched state – we’ve seen how Nikolai gambled away a huge sum in the previous episode. All the characters are in character: the dinner, the dancing, the hunt with another family; it was atmospheric, the idea Talleyrand’s about how sweet such lives were before the tumbrils began to roar through Paris. it is a high point in the novel too.

Episode 10: Madness

Natasha trying to explain her vulnerability to such a seduction/attack.

In this episode as Pulman presents this supposedly nadir of Natasha’s young life, she succumbs to her nervous distress at having to wait for a year for a man to return to her and then decide if he wants her, the disdain of his family, and falls for anyone who says he values her. I know outwardly this kind of incident — the young girl eloping with a cad or looking at him so idiotically happens; in the book Tolstoy finds less explanation for it than Pullman in this BBC movie. Davies (BBC, 2015, Lily James as Natasha) has the Freudian erotic enthrallment paradigm in mind more (for Tolstoy that seems to be the whole matter). Sonya saves her and Pierre comforts her. Probably because I now know of the opera playing on Broadway with the title, Pierre, Natasha and the Great Comet of 1812, for the first time I took note of Pierre’s pointing to it as an omen. I didn’t note it much when I listened or read either. Especially the 2007 mini-series made for TV of W&P focuses precisely on this particular incident: that film turns the book into a soap opera heroine-centered Victorian melodrama (idiot girl fooled by vicious young man ends up punished but is comforted by good young man). Pulman’s shows how the same literal material can make a viewer/reader soar as these beautifully natured characters begin to recognize a life’s companion.

Since the characters have been given so much time to develop, the awakening relationship because of this incident between Pierre and Natasya is believable and touching. Beatrice Lehmann is superb as the aunt who rescues Natasha from eloping with the shit Kuragin male, Antoine (married to someone else) on Sonya’s say-so then castigates Natasha for “disgusting” (read sexual) behavior. Unlike Tolstoy’s or Davies, Pulman’s Andrei is hurt but also relieved — he was about to make another mistake, marry another girl far too young for him. Pierre is the site of consolation in the book and this mini-series. No one comes near him in moral understanding. Though he hasn’t got the strength of character to withstand the society around him when he confronts evil, and he certainly hasn’t the power to change much, he is getting better at it. The episode ends with him comforting Natasha

It is not hard when experiencing this mini-series or reading the book to understand that this core is not the whole even to a limited extent what shapes the experience (which is the mistake of both the Vidor 1955 and the 2007 mini-series). The moment would not have the larger meaning it does without our exploration of the larger corrupt society, the worlds of Russia, the family lives, how so many types find different meaning and loss in their interactions, and how politics by military violence, the top pest males (Alexander I played by the quiet David Douglas is as selfish and uncomprehending of anything beyond himself as Napoleon in the film), and their imitators at all levels impinges on everything. In this scenario, Helene, Anna Mikhailovna, Anna Scherer, Countess Rostov, Katische are the female servants of this order. Those major characters resisting are Pierre, Natasha, Sonya, those upholding but with decent values Nikolai, Denisov, Count Rostov (though he’s been sluiced)

As Borodino is the pivotal moment for “the war” and larger history parts of the book, so Natasha’s enthrallment out of weakness, shame and her near-abduction incident is the pivotal climax for the “le monde” part of the novel. Pulman imitates this structure.

Tomorrow the second 10 episodes.

Ellen

2 Poldark Episodes 6-7: Mourning, Fierce Struggle to Survive; Rescued from Ambush

Ross (Aidan Turner) missing Francis (Episode 6, scripted Debbie Horsfield, directed by Charles Palmer)

Verity (Ruby Bentall) missing Francis

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson, there is a also a close-up parallel to Verity)

‘The longer I live,’ Ross said, pulling his brows together painfully, ‘the more I distrust these distinctions between strong men and weak. Events do what they like with us, and such — such temporary freedom as we have only fosters an illusion. Look at Francis. Was there ever a sorrier or more useless end or one less deserved or dictated by himself, or more unfitted to the minimum decencies and dignity of a human being? … to miss help by the space of an hour … It is always what I have resented most in life: the wantonness, the useless waste, the sudden ends that make fools of us, that make nonsense of all our striving and contriving … (Graham, Warleggan, Bk 2, Ch 1; repeated by Horsfield)

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza accepting a gift of stockings from Ross, whose debts have been paid by an unknown benefactor (end of Episode 6)

He leads her to the bed. Tentatively, as if expecting her at any moment to deny him, Ross pushes up her skirts till they’re above her knees, till her legs are bare. She shivers involuntarily. She has not felt the touch of his hands like this for so long. Now, with infinite care, he puts on one of the stockings, gently rolling it up from her ankle until it slips just above her knee. Then, with the utmost delicacy and patience, he ties it with a garter. She is trembling. She has almost forgotten to breathe. Her face is so close to his now. She waits for him to pull back, to take the other stocking and put it on, but instead his hand begins to slide further up her thigh. He looks into her eyes, as if seeking her permission. Without a word, she consents. His mouth finds hers. They kiss hungrily. Eventually, reluctantly, they pull apart.

ROSS So you are not to be rid of me, my love.
DEMELZA So I am not to be rid of you, my love.

He pulls her towards him and they devour each other.

Dear friends and readers,

In my last blog on the new Poldark I concentrated on Debbie Horsfield’s scripts. For this I am continuing of 2 Poldark 4 & 5: to recall it: Ross decided to abandon Wheal Liesure as worthless, struggled to set up a yet new business with Francis (Kyle Soller) and Henshawe (John Hollingworth) as his partners based on the hope of copper in Wheal Grace. They are harassed and hounded by George Warleggan (Jack Farthing) and his mole Tankard (Sebastian Armesto), and lose Francis to accidental death. Caroline Penvenen (Gabriella Wilde) rejected Dwight Enys (Luke Norris) as insufficiently ambitious, and returned to London. Now I study the mini-series most frequent kind of pictures, the mise-en-scene and discover it mirrors our fraught era of a hard world where individuals struggle to survive, where the world intrudes, invades, exerts surveillance. The story line and scenes feel like an elaboration of the images, but the three and the script all come together seamlessly.

Aidan Turner as Ross setting off to town

Watching a film is primarily a visual experience — moving pictures with sound. One way to understand a movie is what image is perpetually repeated in different versions. In an brilliant older film adaptation of J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (scripted Simon Grey, directed by Pat O’Connor), it was of the painter jumping on his scaffold or coming down and/or painting. Across the whole movie. In Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility from Jane Austen it was Elinor (Emma Thompson) comforting Marianne (Kate Winslet) or them arguing half-bitterly. Well an image in the new Poldark almost nowhere to be found in the old is of (Aidan Turner as) Poldark seen from the back trudging wearily into town, intent on trying to do business, or defend himself, or cope with something (on the way to his banker or lawyer or buying things). Again and again it’s him the single figure from the back, and he’s small, contra mundi in effect. But he is not so much against the world as often it is accompanied or prefaced by bad news: someone has framed him, is out to get him, his mine collapsed. This is the image of the paratext of him from the back facing the ocean, i.e., the universe. The lone man.

This image of grim, stalwart determination of Ross confronting the world is a response to our time. It is a deeply sympathetic one since he is trying so hard and means so well. In the one instance I remember Robin Ellis as Ross filmed as coming into town — for the assizes where he was accused of inciting a riot, we see him from the side among people.

The images of Demelza and Ross making love are far and few between even in the first season; in the second they are even rarer; the one which ends episode 6 is found in Graham and both are there to signal an interlude of hope and the strength and joy it brings when Ross finds his bill strangely met (and he gives £600 to Elizabeth to try to make her both independent of Warleggan and tied by gratitude to him). The repeating images of Demelza in the new Poldark are of her doing housework, working in the fields, in her garden, over her wash, caring for her baby, aiding Turner, cooking for him, and only sometimes sitting down with him to eat and drink, bringing food and drink to the miners — far far more of them than anything sexual. This was not at all true of Angharad Rees as Demelza. In the earlier episode Prudie (Mary Wimbush) did much of the cooking, there were few baby or housework scenes. The 1970s Demelza went out to visit others more, flirted more with the predatory Lord Brodugan, with Captain MacNeil (Douglas David) had if brief or just preludes, there were far more frequent indications of, and love-making scenes (in the light).

I so loved Graham’s and the 1970s’ Ross and Demelza because they never bickered, no tension for real between them, she is presented as increasingly hurt at Ross’s reluctant slow moves towards Elizabeth: Ellis speaks an inward speech about how Demelza is deeply part of the rhythms of his existence (not in the book). I feel and bond with Rees as Demelza as she presents herself as finding her identity in Ross and giving in to him while he doesn’t consult her — that is Graham’s book’s view. The stocking scene in the book and 1970s is part of an erotic thread, more deeply touching (for me), but as interlude of freedom in 2016 it fits the new series’ conception.

The new Demelza is as hard working and earnest as her Ross, she is there listening at home, involving and asserting herself far more in Ross’s business decisions (or trying to); when in town, she looks disheveled at times, weary, intent on her business, seeing Elizabeth so gussied up, she winces. I admire her, bond with her, understand she is tough and surviving but there is much less pleasure in her existence.

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Ross discussing the mine with Elizabeth (Heida Reed), the boy Geoffrey Charles on his lap

I found Episode 6 (which more or less corresponds to Episode 14 in the older Poldark series) very strong, and like another strong episode from the first season, 4 (early scenes of the marriage of Ross and Demelza, his confronting others, her avoiding others, the friendship with Verity, and that first family Christmas), very close to the book. In the Ross-Demelza-Elizabeth triangular story, the difference is the insertion George continually; in 4 to 5, he was buying out the company stock; in 6 and 7 he is either half-seducing, half-threatening Elizabeth (if she will become his mistress he hints, now Francis is gone, all debts will be forgotten, he will do all he can to help her), or he is undermining her will and confidence. In these scenes the outer world intrudes on, invades the house, no one is safe from a predatory hard society.

George filling up the door space, the POV has him looming over the household women: when no one is there, he needles and insults Aunt Agather (Caroline Blakely) urging her to die, and manipulatively flatters Elizabeth’s foolish mother (Sally Dexter)

The images of Ross and Elizabeth at first distant (as in the visit to the mine above), show them physically grow closer each time he visits, until there is a seeming reversal when he becomes so engaged with smuggling he has little time for her (though when he shows up it’s all close-ups as they begin to acknowledge their continuing love). Again the world is difficult: yes, it’s illegal (and Demelza is angry at this turn of events to support the mining, at Trencrom’s gradual insertion of his goods into their house, Ross going out himself with the men), but if he doesn’t do this, how is he to get the money the world requires?

Trencom (Richard McCabe) insinuating himself

A woman can’t sweep her house in peace …

The older episode presented Caroline (Judy Geeson) and Enys (Richard Morant) as independent of all relatives (the uncle not seen much), all outside pressures except his own conscience leading him to care for patients (the 1970s Rosina is beaten by her father, her doll set on fire out of spite), but our modern pair have to contend with an aggressive uncle who (as in the book) invites Enys over to (very like Lady Catherine de Bourgh over Elizabeth Bennet) to try to intimidate and bully him out of marrying someone “so above him.”

The angry uncle Ray Penvenen (John Nettles)

Dwight dignified, holding his own, but hurt

No scene like the one above occurs in the 1970s — it is in the book, but unlike the book, this new pair seem never to forget obligations which continually get in the way; in the 1970s the main problem was Enys’s idealism; but here it’s also (as in the book) Caroline Penvenen’s ambition, sense of what is due her. The earlier pair are powerful over those they aid; here they are subjects themselves.

The older Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) was cool, ambitious, attracted to Ross sexually but not as soft and loving as Horsfield’s Elizabeth, not as vulnerable. Our new Elizabeth (Heida Reed) wants to be with Ross at Christmas, and it is Verity who tells her this would be intruding. The new Elizabeth goes to Cardew, Warleggan’s house, because she’s lonely after she has so virtuously kept herself apart; the 1970s characters are not afflicted with loneliness for society which gives them a hard time.

Final invasive presence — though very well-meaning, what can he do as a mere banker, subject to George as creditor, as owning a bill — is Richard Hope as Pascoe, reminding, warning, telling Ross he is working against himself in this way and that. But Ross insists on integrity insofar as he can. The elimination of the genial rascal father, Nathaniel Warleggan and turningthe uncle Cary (Pip Torrens) as a sheer bad guy is one of the episode’s flaws (it’s not realistic): in Graham Cary sneers at George for wanting this older widow when George could have younger prettier, richer, higher ranking, more fertile girls. In this series (not the 1970s and not the book), we are shown our debtors come to the creditors to pay the bill

As to the interweaving art, this (like 4 in season 1) does not have the rapid juxtapositions of several stories; it allows scenes to develop more slowly: the briefer ones where we are reminded how the characters miss Francis are at least true to the book. Warleggan is about the effect of the deaths of individuals on lives left. Graham’s idea is each individual life matters: we should not throw away poor individuals, indebted people, lame people, and Francis with all his flaws was an important part of everyone’s life. I thought that was beautiful in the book and it’s in the 1970s and in Horsfield. What is added is a mirror of our times: the Trump era, in the UK years of left centrist capitalist and now hard Tory rule.

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A shot of swans might be Horsfield anticipating a book to come (Poldark 6: The Four Swans)

Episode 7 shows the same emphasis of a hard intrusive society which the characters must have courage to deal with as they can’t seem to do without it. The story and scenes correspond to some of the older Episode 15 (I will hold off on the summary until we get to the new episode 8 so the reader may compare the rape scenes), but since Horsfield has so many more episodes for the two books (in the 1970s it was strictly 4 episodes of 45 minutes a book; Horsfield has 5 episodes of 60 minutes a book) she expands the material significantly. As good as Episode 15 is, in comparison it is necessarily an outline and suggestive of the treacherous ambush, discovery of the informer (Charlie Kempthorne), Dwight’s failure to meet Caroline for their elopement at midnight because he must warn Ross and the men by lighting bonfires high on the mountain, so as to enable him (and Demelza come down from the roof) to return to the house with the soldiers in it and hide in the cache.

The main sweep of the episode — or overarching threat — is the collusion of the policing prevention men, embodied in Vercoe, and his alliance with Captain MacNeil (Henry Garrett). So we have state law, larger entities coming in, the courts again. The first scene of POV Vercoe and MacNeil on the top of a hill looking down with a spyglasses at Trencom talking quietly with Jud (Phil Davis).

The motif of surveillance seems very 2016.

Ross with Henshawe and Paul Daniel (Ed Browning)

This new Episode 7 has far more development in detail of the story than the earlier, including more on the finding of Mark Daniel (Matthew Wilson, now bearded, half-mad with his isolation, near beggary), the disappointment of Ross and Henshawe using maps to discover the supposed copper that Francis saw was what Mark Daniel thought copper:

Again the motif of Ross coming into town, this time with papers and maps of the mine. Papers are presented throughout the episode, Dwight at Vercoe’s sees the connection between Kempthorne and Vercoe later in the episode because Vercoe’s son has a drawing that reappears in Kempthorne’s house. When Ross has returned without a hope of copper (but now they are thinking perhaps there is tin there and now need money to blast) and goes for another round of smuggling, MacNeil is at the ready, and sends his men to keep Demelza and Prudie in the house: they are the surveillance group. She has to claim she needs to go to her child vehemently to escape this watch. This corresponds to scenes of Caroline with her uncle at night: he loves her, but he has his eye on her and is trying to keep her from Dwight (he does not know of the afternoon trysts)

Far shot

We have Dwight’s cure and palliation for Rosina’s lameness so we see the good he does (he does not bleed her which Choake would):

The inward secondary stories are more elaborated: especially the scenes of Caroline come back from London, and now willing to compromise with — their story is moving, with his conflict, his wanting to practice his profession with people who need him, his dislike of sneaking away, of living on Caroline’s money.

Warleggan continues his pressure on Elizabeth through Tankard, making her nervous about money, and now physically frightened: sending Tankard with stories to scare her, sending men to dig tin on her land and having Tankard tell her that’s legal. She now feels forsaken by Ross; sends letters but Prudie (Beatie Edney, almost a companion to Demelza by this point) does not send them on, pockets them. As in the book and the 1970s Warleggan wants to marry Elizabeth as much to spite and to triumph over Ross (we do not feel any love, only cold pressure), but in this one Elizabeth is responding to a personal need, a fear of what’s out there beyond the house, while in the 1970s she grows angry and (feminist motif) wants herself to have fulfillment with pretty clothes, interesting society (she has only Aunt Agatha with her ominous tarot cards).

Landing beneath the fire — not yet seen

The new episode is very effective in the same places the old one was — Dwight’s firing the hill, but this time there is a re-launch of the boat. The realization of Zacky Martin and Jud that it’s Kempthorne and their going out to find him. (We do miss the ancient justice ritual of the older episode 15 with the fierce punishment of throwing Kempthorne off a cliff. Here, as i the book and more realistically, Kempthorne is just found dead on the beach and we never know who killed him. Suicide (given his fierce struggle to kill Dwight) is improbable. Finally the shooting scenes on the beach, Demelza in time to reach Ross so he comes into the back part of the house into a cache in the library is (like some Zorro episode — but it is in the book)

I’m not sure the quicker pace of the older episode was not better than the new one because in this new one the actors strained to emote as well but the new one is more realistic, fuller, has depths of different struggles going on at once the first lacks, all allowed by a greater amount of time, but also out of a different stance towards reality across the new Poldark films. We do have moments of Ross and Demelza talking, embracing, coming together, even a glimpse of Demelza on the piano, for a moment quiet which is not death or surveillance.

But 2016 is a much harder time and the new Poldarks address themselves to that, mirror that, show us characters coping with that. The kind of ambition the 1970s Elizabeth displayed (found to some extent in Graham) has no place in this new humane show: I love the new Poldarks for dismissing what seems shallow, self-indulgent, utterly materialist today even if also in or all the more because in 2016 this selfish set of values reigns strongly out in the real world and other dramas in cinema and TV. The only major character who displays it in 2016 is George Warleggan. He seemed to justify himself in the first season as coming up in the world, but his underhanded manipulative bullying methods, his continual sword-playing and boxing with a paid opponent (the repeating image for him) shows us he is one of the world’s pest leaders — it is fitting he is a banker.

Time out for instructions to buy a bill so he can squeeze Ross out of life some more …

Ellen

The Rump versus wall-to-wall people: the day after, a brief description and a few thoughts

A photo I took standing in the Metro waiting to get out

Dear friends and readers,

I interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for something so important that even that the 6th and 7th episodes of the second season of the new Poldark, and the 1972 BBC film adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, scripted by Jack Pulman, featuring Anthony Hopkins as Pierre, must give way to another day.

Like a couple of million people — if you counted all the cities and towns inside and outside the US — I went to the Woman’s March against Trump and his truly scary domestic (do not think he means just to take away some unimportant or secondary rights and social programs) and foreign agenda. On the latter I urge you to read Jessica Matthews of the New York Review of Books on “What Trump is Throwing Out the Window” (64:2, February 9, 2017). We are at much greater risk of war, which it would be naive to assume could not go nuclear.

Your intrepid reporter went with a friend and was not able to see very much. To get out of the Metro took I and a friend forty minutes, so crowded were the inadequate escalators and few turnstiles. (The city did not see fit to allow people just to flow through as happened in 1976 in NYC when a happy occasion of an enormous crowd celebrated 200 years of a Republic now under dire threat). So you will learn more generally if you want DemocracyNow.Org, Amy Goodman:

https://www.democracynow.org/live/watch_inauguration_2017_womens_march_live

See also: the Los Angelos demonstration was 500,000, larger than the one in DC:

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/24/nobody_speak_new_documentary_probes_billionaire

But I do want to say a few words. I found myself in wall-to-wall people four times. My friend and I were near where some major speakers of the Women’s March were talking and listened to five. I had pushed our way to a grate which was next to a wall and was able myself to sit on the wall and eat my sandwich and drink my water. My friend sat on the grate and ate her snack. But after an hour, she and I and all most of the rest of the crowd had had enough. Chants of March!, We want to march now!, were (I regret to say), were at first ignored. Then the leaders at the place we were in thought the better of that, and said they had a program to present. They cared more about pleasing their speakers and getting their points made. But my friend had had it, and we pushed out and became part of a chain of people slowing making our way to 14th Street. My friend by then exhausted and cold, nervous from the intensity of the crowds, people so close, so packed in, went home.

I trudged on. I discovered that to march in the way originally envisaged was not possible. There were too many people. I saw different groups rallying. Nurses behind a wide banner talking to one another and others outside the nurses. Unions holding rallies with speeches. I got to Independence Avenue and witnessed a swell of people filling the avenue, moving glacially slowly towards the White house. I spoke to a few people on the street as I had in the Metro and did again. They came from all over the US. Everywhere all were friendly; everyone in such a mass crowd astonishingly cooperative and polite. The only exception was a cavalcade of police on motorbikes who behaved discourteously to those they pushed out of their way as they appeared to survey the crowd. At this point I saw a Metro stop and went home. At home I discovered my neighbor-friend had gone. Everyone I have spoken to went.

Trump’s first act in office in the first hour after taking his vow was to forbid the National Park Service from tweeting or reporting daily on their website news. It was a spiteful act because they had reported the low number of people who came to his Inauguration. 10,000. To even put the weather up, one brave employee has put up a personal FB page. Remember Congress has said it can fire at will any federal employee at any point, or put their salary down to a $1.

Then he signed into his administration suspended indefinitely a scheduled cut in mortgage insurance premiums—effectively raising costs for middle-class borrowers by about $500 a year. The drop in rate, which was announced January 9 and supposed to go into effect on January 27, had been lauded as an opportunity to make homeownership more accessible to an estimated one million first-time and low-to-middle-income borrowers. Not content with that, he signed an order that allows all states to use waivers to refuse to enact any of the ACA act. (The hard truth is Obama passed a health care bill which wasso easy to de-fund and destroy it has taken Trump one act to do it already. You can’t do that to social security. To destroy medicare they must de-fund as part of a trillion dollar destruction of all social help for everyone and everything — they’ll do it unless we act effectively to stop them).

You may say that the rump or minority party in power can and will ignore all demonstrations. The demonstrators are like the Occupy Movement. They have no focus. The problem with the march was millions came as individuals and there was no preparation to get them to sign onto anything effective. It was not a global day of action. Alas one of Trump’s uncannily effective insults comes to mind: it was a day of talk, talk, talk, talk.

But the Republicans are a rump, a minority party who has gotten into power by ruthless gerrmandering and huge amounts of money spent on their campaigns since Citizens United permitted this without any controls. They represent a minority of hugely wealthy powerful people who harnassed enough white working class jobless, houseless people without hope or given any concrete solution to supporting themselves and gaining a good life, who felt desperate; and who were fed fake news, but also who (we must say this) are white male supremacists who want to blame all black and minority and immigrant people for their woes and punish them as as compensatory exultation. He has been pleasing all of them (united by systemic racism) with his appointments because the working people do not think social programs help them. These people are ignorant; the education in this country has been bad but not because it’s publicly funded out of general taxes (or has been until recently). They think there is still public housing (none from the federal gov’t since Reagan put an end to all federal public housing) and it goes to blacks, they believe all welfare helped black women. They do not understand that medicare is a federal program, a single payer system — which if they had been given by Obama they would have loved. They read only fake news and watch a propaganda outlet for the wealthy, Fox News. So it is very hard to debate with them since they dismiss all you say as lies.

The simple formula of utter de-funding will now put an end to the extraordinary growth of PBS channels across the US— there goes Frontline, PBS news, wonderful and good drama, good children’s programming. Who will fight for them when so much else is at stake?

So if the democratic party can re-invent itself and from the ground up start winning elections by following a genuinely progressive agenda, this rump can be put out of business. But it must be genuinely progressive: see The Future is Bleak without Radical Reforms. The only people to question Pruitt over health care was Bernie Sanders — only he nailed the man with a question, did he believe everyone had the right to health care. They must break from their millionaire donors, from the lobbyists who grease their lives, resists pressure and threats. And endless ridicule from Trump. And threats.

The second is that this huge demonstration needs to bring home to people that much of the good of their livee has come from the New deal. My father’s good and stable job for many years, my husband’s, the rent control they could rely on for decades (so they could save money), the university I went to (24$ a term), NYC health care, and now my pension, Izzy’s job — I can’t begin to name all the things I have had from the New Deal. I expect everyone else. Their plan is to defund everything. One trillion dollars to be cut from all social programs. That means destroy medicare without admitting it. They even want to end 30 mortgages backed by banks. In Chile two years after their social security system was privatized, most people lost all thei life savings and are now bankrupt.

We need also to understand the tactics here are similar to the Nazi party in Germany. Read the new website that replaced Obama’s. Instead of information about the climate and long reports on realities, there is a short page declaring that no politicized science will go on and the government will support all fracking and “clean” coal and nuclear power plants as well as fossil fuel pipelines and whatever they want. The page outlining civil rights (assembly, the bill of rights) there for decades is gone. Instead there is a page saying the new gov’t is determined to stop all anti-police agendas and its atmosphere. They will support our police absolutely. I would not be surprised if there is an attempt to outlaw videos of police beating and killing people from the Internet.

Five decades — since just before Reagan with the forming of organizations like ALEC: they took hold of courts, aimed at them, got passage of Citizens United — huge amounts of money at the heart of the take over of the states: then they added the suppression of the vote through various techniques: from gerrymandering, to laws which prevent people from voting (voter IDs, mass incarceration robs huge numbers of people of the right to vote ever after — and it’s no coincidence they are mainly black), to simply ignoring the law (Congress is not supposed to prevent the nomination of a person to the supreme court, but advise and consent). The Republicans have discovered they can even get away with nullification: in North Caroline they stripped a man elected to governor who is a democrat of most of his powers to do any good. They are no longer afraid of the “many” (militarized police, egregious injustice it the courts, horrific prison conditions – large percentages of people in solitary confinement, proven a form of torture). Read about Richard Nelson’s family in The Gabriels, how they’ve been ground down.

So yesterday what we saw was a major step in the destruction of the republic that we had — it had evolved into something better than its original during the later 19th century and again during the FDR years (LJB added further helps). All this is about to be cancelled; but not just back to pre-FDR, the very foundations of the republic: voting, obedience to law, observance of the original bill of rights (much of it now gutted).

If people can realize the threat of nuclear war, the threat to their own basic prosperity now and for generations to come, and the deep threat to democracy, that there is only a rump between a good life, peace and what Obama was trying for, then something worth while was achieved today. We still have the vote. It’s not yet been taken from us. VOTE next time for someone who will act in the interest of the 47% (remember Romney who said he thought privately 47% of Americans were free-loaders: he meant all Americans whose lives partly depend on social programs) or if you like 80, or 99.

How to act effectively: you must take what is happening as threatening you, you mus realize it does, and then phone your senators and congressmen, join in wherever you can, give money to organizations like the Citizens United, today’s demonstration will be like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic as it goes down. This final sentence is the reason I wrote this blog here.

Don’t let this quilt of signs become a symbol of pathos from 80% of people victimized exploited immiserated by the 1% and their 19% of hangers-on.

Ellen

Sergei Bondarchuk’s visionary War and Peace (1966)

Bald Hills, one of many landscape scenes, where the Bolkonskii family lives

Marya (Antonina Shuranova) submits to her father, Prince Bolskonsky’s (Anatoli Ktorov)’s instructions in geometry

Dear friends,

During the few months a group of us on Trollope19thCStudies were reading Tolstoy’s novel, and those before when I was listening to the novel read aloud (Books-on-Tape now on CDs), I watched four War and Peace films: three “mini”-series (I put mini in quotations since Bondarchuk’s Russian epic is 507 minutes; Jack Pulman’s exquisite BBC mini-series in 1972, 900 minutes, with the “short” version by Andrew Davies in 2016 clocking in at 6 hours and 19 minutes) and one cinema feature (Vidor’s 1955 Hollywoodized W&P a mere 3 hours and 20 minutes). These are not the only War and Peace films to have been made, but they represent what is available today (plus a 2007 mini-series that turns the film into a romance about Natasha Rostov), what is seriously watchable.

I begin with the one most written about: Sergei Bondarchuk’s truly epic War and Peace, filmed as a profound reaction against the Hollywoodized and Italianate War and Peace, directed by King Vidor, script by Mario Soldati, as a trivializing debasement of a book Russians are deeply proud of, a part of their national heritage. The interaction between these two has been taken as an episode in the cold war. I found the American-Italian film tedious but those interested might like to know you can read the script on-line, and read a brief conversation I had with people who were just reaching adulthood in the 1950s and were entranced by Audrey Hepburn (Natasha) and Vittorio Gasmann (as transgressive rake-male seduces elusive archetype). I’m glad the first film was made, as it led to the Russian gov’t and many individual groups, to say nothing of some spectacular artists in Russia at the time give their all to bring Tolstoy’s novel to cinematic life.

Bondarchuk’s War and Peace is still the most written about of all these and I am aware I shall probably fail to convey the experience, but perhaps a concrete description of its four parts can function to encourage others to attempt this film and (standing warned, knowing what you need to do or be prepared for as you start) overcome obstacles to enjoyment. More than the other two mini-series, you must read the book first. The 1972 BBC Pulman War and Peace almost succeeds in doing without a pre-read (but if you have read the book then you appreciate how extraordinarily the film gets in so many kinds of discourse from the novel). A synopsis will not do. But if you read and then watch and then re-read, the film will enrichen and add much to the book (especially the voice-over which picks up on Tolstoy’s darkest utterances).

Each time I would start a new disk, I admit, I felt un-eager because in the new digitalized version (2003, which is the one you must buy or rent) the faults of the original are on display too (which you need to know about): keep clicking “English” on the first paratexts and you will experience three languages: first, a voice-over narrator (very well done, dubbed in English, keeping you alert to or understanding what part of Tolstoy’s story we are in, and explaining what is the situation you are watching). Then there are the characters “inside” the frame who speak in French (no subtitles but it’s simple short French) or Russian (with English subtitles, not dubbed). The actors at the time respect decorums and are not wildly virtuoso in performances, they are not close-up to one another and the percentage of close-ups is small. Film affects us most deeply through faces — so that is often lacking. But then I would find myself engulfed all over again. The visual and aural create meanings the book can’t get near; it functions as a shooting script.

But then within a few minutes I’d be engulfed again.

The problem all the essays on Bondarchuk I’ve read have is no single or sequence of stills/shots or clips or montages can come near to conveying what it feels like to experience this vast assemblage of seemingly superabundant ever-changed, controlled and appropriate camera work from moment to moment. Scenes of vast and minute maneuvers in battle and horrific carnage (with literary hundreds of people involved for each sequence, thousands over-all) predominate, and for which it is probably most famous:

But Bondarchuk and Vasili Solovev’s script dramatizes just as surely the intimate and varied story-scenes of Tolstoy’s book, in society and at war, indoors and outdoors, between two or a few people, at a table and in crowds and ritual ballrooms and battle line-ups. I love the many atmospheric moments where dissolving clouds over a forest or some landscape or time of day or season are captured — all Woolf-like luminous envelope as life. Here’s a snow-filled shot of the sky and wood in Russian winter:

And by contrast, where a character stands frozen, prompted to remember his past as a bomb near-by spins and spins about to go off and we get revolving montages of flashbacks of memory; or we are at a savage hunt and experience the terror of the wolf (the POV) before he is (I hope not for real) hacked to death; or characters weep as one lies dying:

Andrei (Viacheslav Tikhonov) dying and Natasha (Liudmila Saveleva) crying over him

or walk and talk about their philosophical differences, or chase after one another enclosed and amid beautiful plants. There are scenes of social life in vast drawing- and ball-rooms, war councils, the world of the Russian country house and its grounds and smaller houses around it are shown us; wild madness on a battlefield or besieged city:

Sergei Bondarchuk plays Pierre: here towards the end of the film he’s registering the irrationality and inhumanity of the world’s doings

On top of this, highly varied music from symphonies and classical compositions, original mid-20th century music, to folk music, to effective modern sound track accompanies many scenes. So I won’t try but instead tell how the film re-organizes the book into four coherent parts and makes the book’s themes and plot-designs more accessible (or simpler) than Tolstoy. Bondarchuk clarifies Tolstoy, like some neo-classical rewrite of Shakespeare. Bondarchuk has reconceived Tolstoy’s vast book sufficiently so the film carries a condensation and restructuring into four parts and yet seems to leave little out that counts.

*****************************

Part 1: Andrei Bolkonskii (140 minutes)

Anatole Kuragin (Vasilii Lanovoi) and Andrei Bolkonskii (Viascheslave Tikhonov) —

In his study of the drafts of W&P R.F. Christian says Tolstoy began with a low-life vicious aristocratic male, i.e., Anatole, for his hero, and gradually substitutes the intelligent ethical Pierre; in the book as we have it, Anatole seduces Natasha and ruins the secondary hero, Andreii’s life and dies next to him in a war hospital, so it’s fitting the first shot of both should be together as they enter the hollow party of Anna Pavlovna Scherer (Angelina Stepanova)

The story line takes us from when we meet Andrei who is weary of his wife, finds no meaning in the landowning and socializing roles he is given, leaves his wife with his family, and goes off to war only to discover its meaningless cruelties and hierarchical corruption. Within that story we meet Pierre Bezukhov at Anna Pavlovna’s drawing room, and take him past his father’s death, inheritance of vast property, and succumbing to Prince Vassily’s manipulations to the point he marries Vassily’s daughter, Helene, a woman whose amorality and promiscuous sexuality he cannot stand. This is punctuated (so to speak) by the Rostov world: the innocent Natasha, the repressed hurt Sonya, her dependent cousin, the two naive young men, Nikolai (not so naive he doesn’t go after Sonya) and Petya, the corrupt Boris and his sycophant mother, wild dancing on the part of the count, coarse worldliness in the countess. POV is Andrei’s much more often than Pierre’s; and is impersonal in the Rostov and Bolskonskii worlds.

Andreii’s father, old Prince Bolkonskii (Anatoli Ktorov) first seen walking through golden autumn woods, and to his side an unexplained string quartet plays music

It seemed to me after a while a deeply poetic part. The emphasis towards the end are these horrific visionary battles but before that, the countryside, the mansions, the sky, water, landscapes of stunning beauty — be it in the snow or in spring, or just aspects of color on the screen. They are there to express a vision of Bondarchuk’s own about Russian which he thinks undergirds Tolstoy’s own more socially-driven matter (and is reinforced by the conversations of Andreii and Pierre). There is some realistic psychology, though the playing is expressive rather than subtle. It’s intensely serious: it seems to trace Andrei’s disillusion and does end on a close-up of his face on the battlefield of Austerlitz where he is left for dead.

Part 2: Natasha (93 minutes)

Natasha Rostov (Liudmila Saveleva, not a star, but new presence) —

Most people pick the stills of her at her first ball, or enthralled either with Andrei or Anatole; here she is walking in a wood, the bright face of hope for which Andreii falls in love with her

The second part is like an inset novella, a domestic fiction, it is quiet. As Part One focused on Andrei’s story so Part Two centers on Natasha, taking her story from her child-like sexuality with the live-in Boris Smirnov in the garden,and her ecstacy for Sonia (Irina Gubanova) in love with Nikolai, Natasha’s brother (Oleg Tabakov, his role much shrunk). We see her with the Countess her mother (Kira Golovko) in the bed, preparing for her ball, how she fears no one will ask her to dance. We also have the story of Pierre carried on as substory once again: his despair with his wife, her adultery, Dolokhov’s mockery of him, the duel, his returning to his land and finally going to Andreii on his. How Andrei (returned to life, now a widower), is so taken with her that he loves her at first sight and asks her to marry him. Her mother has already brushed off Boris not from reasons of character, but his lack of rank and money.

Unlike the book and unlike the two BBC films or Vidor’s, Bondarchuk’s Andreii quickly realizes he was under a delusion, she is a symbol to him, and not a mature woman (as his wife was not mature and bored him), so his decision to wait in this film for a year is a holding tactic. This helps justify her turning to Anatole in this film. Bondarchuk is stepping back from this male patriarchal vision of the nubile, readily erotically enthralled, yet holding to it. We have her joining in intensely at the hunt, dancing wildly to folk music at Christmas (the uncle playing the violin), and then as the year passes, restless, feeling deserted, wasted, and riveted by a spell the libertine, Anatole, can perform on young women (so Bondarchuk seems to assume). Natasha comes near eloping; stopped with the help of Sonia and Pierre, this second part ends on her humiliation, remorse, begging pardon from everyone, including Pierre (showing up as the ever present kind brother) to ask him to ask Andrei to forgive her and he cannot — he is too rigid a man. Her face dissolves into the sky, and then a vast landscape with “1812” in large letters, and the voice-over narrator comes on to tell us of the irrational stupid waste of what is to come, and the huge armies cross into Russia (if you didn’t watch it, go back to the first YouTube).

Natasha having bad dreams

The second part contrasts to the other three: it is mostly very quiet, the acting is stylized. A young girl’s life and (temporary) downfall. The narrator functions more centrally here than the other three parts: he repeats his phrases, explicates, provides a depth of feeling; the English dubbed voice is very good; the subtitles too. This is accompanied by beautiful shots; it’s like being in a painting of Moscow, the countryside, especially the long Christmas sequence is appealing. A celebration of Russia, which for me is undermined by the misogyny of making women into sex objects, easily roused unthinking subject creatures.

Part 3: 1812 (78 minutes)

Pierre and Tushin (Nikolai Trofimov) brave soldier in the book

Our focuses slowly become Andrei and Pierre, one as conventional but disillusioned bitter military officer, the other increasingly shocked civilian. Andreii delivers sonorous meditative despair soliloquies; there are some quiet scenes of him now and again, first framing the phases and then inside them. Pierre is on the battle field like some deer in a headlights,continually more traumatized. The part begins quietly at the Bokonskii home — the scene of the old man refusing to believe Maria and the governess that the French are about to entry their territory, then forced to, and finally dying.

He does ask Maria to forgive him as he does not in the other two films. These are interwoven with a vast scene of a ball at which the emperor Alexander I appears, and the coming battle is announced. We are at the Rostov home too where the young boy, Petya insists on going out to fight and the countess, his mother is devastated. During the battle we move back and forth from the famous General Kutusov (Boris Zakhava) on one hill and Napoleon (Vladisla Strzhelchik) on another.

Napoleon is presented as a grim fate (how he sees himself) without conscience or feeling. (Pulman’s 1972 is much more nuanced while blaming him; Davies’s 2016 has him as originally a revolutionary and refuses to forget that; Bondarchuk is closest to Tolstoy). Kutusov cannot at first accept that the Russians have been defeated; he did not want to do this battle and he is crushed to realize they have lost. but then draws victory out of this defeat by realizing in front of us that winning a war is not the same as winning a battle. His business is to save lives and his heroism is to refuse another battle.

At the close of this third part as in the close of the first, Andrei has been badly wounded — worse we eventually realize, and this time he will die, slowly. Nearby a man is moaning fearfully in his death agon as his leg is amputated; this turns out to be Anatole. And across the way Andrei sees Dolohov who seduced Natasha near death. Perhaps this second pairing is too neat parallel — Bondarchuk offers us patterned visuals like this throughout his film (like Shakespeare in his Henry VI plays).

This is a more stunning depiction of war than I’ve never seen before quite. I have seen effective anti-war films, and late last October Kilo Two Bravo — but it was implicit, focused on incidents, much more narrow. What is terrific about this is the size and scope of the scenes, and the relentless ruthless condemnation of war as horrific, senseless, cruel, utterly irrational at the same time as vast, wildly heroic, chosen. All these people (as Tolstoy says) are not forced. They choose to do this. The final focus scene is the battle of Borodino not far from Smolensk, which led to the scorched earth policy, the fleeing of all middle and upper class people from Moscow, and Napoleon’s defeat because there is no one for him to negotiate with as his army falls apart into marauding. I knew exactly where everything was, what was happening. This is due to the over-voice impersonal narration — invaluable. We meet the great famous Kutusov in his councils, falling asleep at the same time as ever vigilant; he contrasts to Napoleon on the other, at first all square-faced steely-firmness, stoutly glad, but when in Moscow shown up for the petty egoist (this is Tolstoy’s interpretation) he is.

Vast scenes of carnage of all types, sometimes close up, sometimes aerial, sometimes from the side, sometimes full face. Close up of men suffering in so many ways while at the same time they fight on determined like some crazed machines started who can’t stop (the narrator says something like this). The suffering horses, the animals. Canons, bombs, grapeshot, lines of men shooting, the guerillas, bombs blow up everywhere: this is not fakery, they are doing controlled versions; real live generals were consulted, all the Russian hierarchies involved it seems.

The part has to be watched. It outdoes the battle scenes in Part 1 — so vast and thorough and believable they manage to make it. It is a deep contrast to Part 2 an inset domestic novel.

Part 4: Pierre Bezukov (92 minutes)

Kutusov quietly grieving after he has had the courage to tell the council they will not try to stop the French from entering Moscow (nor will he try to cut them off as they leave) …

Pierre during the trek starving frozen from Moscow

So now finally Bondarchuk (he gave himself the hero’s part though he’s not handsome) comes forth as primary story; as in Pulman’s 1972 BBC W&P there is a parallel between him and Kutusov at times. It’s about the horrors of war (yet more), another phase. We see panicked people, fleeing, and go through the scenes of the Rostov’s reluctant and utterly disorganized withdrawal from Moscow, with Pierre’s mad choice to stay in order to find and kill Napoleon. The place catches on fire, he becomes distraught, saves a baby, is captured as a dangerous incendiary, and imprisoned, then almost killed by a firing squad with our viewing the others murdered in pairs so senselessly.

Moscow on fire — we should remember how this would resonate in 1966 for a Russian audience

From the execution scenes

The over-voice is frequent: the words come from the beginning chapers where Tolstoy’s words in effect damn these apparently helpless people. Why are they doing this? Why are they slaughtering one another? slaughtering horses? senselessly killing killing killing. Why do they obey the Napoleons of the world? Napoleon admits he must return, is humiliated, and we experience that long trek with Pierre and his new found guru, Platon (the idealistic peasan, Mikhail Khrabov) gradually distancing from one another as Platon begins to die, and ends up shot because he can’t keep up, the pathetic dog howling. The words of the overvoice are grateful that Platon is out of this (Bondarchuk does not use Platon as a mouthpiece for optimism or God’s presence as Tolstoy does). Kutusov seen carrying a weight of immense concern and pity.

Platon falling behind, the soldiers go to shoot him

The episode concludes towards the end by juxtaposing the long drawn out death of Andreii who the Rostovs unknowingly took with them from Moscow in a wagon, but not naturalistic (as in Davies’ 2016 where we see this), the experience is visionary, intendedly religious. The camera moves up to Andrey’s face and he dreams: he remember his scenes with his father, the land, terrible killing, and we see Natasha there telling him he’s not dying. But he tells her he loves her, he forgives her (the sense of there is nothing to forgive). Visionary sequences of land and sky signalling some powerful God-like presence. It does end quickly after that. After the rescue of Pierre, quickly done, Petya even quickly gotten out of the way in his senseless death (the point here is the mother’s grief and father’s loss, which is too quick, like a caricature). We see Pierre riding through a Moscow being rebuilt and arrives at a house where we find sitting Natasha and Marya (both in black) with little Nikolai (Andreii’s son by his first now long dead wife) by their side. Marya shows Pierre the new boy, and Natasha is there at last grown up in black and we hear the lines how if he were free and a better man, he’d marry her. (Nikolai and Sonia have long been lost from view.) Then Bondarchuk concentrates on visions of the sky and universe as places of oblivion and peace at the close.

What jarred me at the close is the over-voice suddenly insists life is good, the world is beautiful.

***************************

Still an extraordinary film. Like many others who have seen it, I think it is a filmic realization by one genius accompanied by thousands of willing people of a great book.

A solid ethical perspective, beautifully filmic art, an important masterpiece of film.

This new DVD has a fifth part, features with interviews of some of the original film-makers and actors. You can see the extraordinary seriousness with which the film-makers, production designers, actors, everyone set about their task together.

“One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.” –William Hazlitt

Ellen

NB. Blogs on War and Peace to come: the 1972 BBC War and Peace, scripted by Jack Pulman, starring Anthony Hopkins as Pierre, a masterpiece, follows and is inspired by Bondarchuk; then Andrew Davies’ 2016 W&P follows and is inspired by Pulman and Bondarchuk. Pulman chose some of the same central scenes, Davies some of the same visionary moments.

The new Poldark (2015): the first season — looking at the scripts

Kyle Soller as Francis with his son, shaking hands with Ross (Episodes 3 & 5, second season)

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been over three months since I last wrote about the second season of the new Poldark: on the two episodes which dramatize Francis Poldark’s (Kyle Soller) having finally found and accepted himself, becoming the man, husband, father, cousin (brother really) he’d always wanted to be, and then his tragic (accidental, ironic, useless) death by drowning: 2 Poldark 4-5: exemplary and tragic heroism. I’d been having enormous technical difficulties watching the second season on my BBC iplayer, and when I saw that Amazon.uk was making available the complete scripts for the second season when they would begin to sell the DVDs for the second season, I decided to wait for both before writing any more blogs. I did finish watching the second season using the BBC iplayer but knew I had missed so much.

For example, I had no idea that the episodes were opened with Eleanor Tomlinson singing the folk song she first performs the first Christmas after she and Ross wed and go to Trenwith (see Series 1, Episode 4, p 245), no idea the soft acqua-colored waters were the palette for the second year’s opening. It matters what song a series opens and closes with, what pictures (this time more of Demelza) we see; these set the mood, the realm we enter into and then provide closure.

From the paratexts and opening and closing music of the 2nd season

It’s feminocentric to use a word now fallen out.

Well the DVDs and second season scripts arrived early in December, and it has taken me all this time to first re-see the first season or year (all 8 episodes), read the complete scripts for the first season (and read/skin, look at Graham’s Ross Poldark and Demelza once again), and watch the second season or year (all 10 episodes) and read the scripts up to Episode 5 once again (reading Jeremy Poldark and beginning Warleggan). (I do other things.) Before I resume with Episode 6 (the equivalent of one third into Warleggan), I’d like to look at the first new season as a whole for a second time. The first time when I had come to the conclusion Horsfield and her film-making team and actors were consciously creating a new mythic matter, I hadn’t been able to read the scripts. I first found the scripts for the first year this August while I was in Cornwall in a Cornish bookshop. Before that, who knew?

Scripts are of enormous importance in understanding and enjoying a film. It is after all not the novel the actors are realizing, but the scripts. And the words go by so quickly, much is missed and in my experience we get a distorted memory view of what we saw and heard.

Aidan Turner as Ross (Episode 1, first season)

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza (Episode 8, first season)

I see some of the same flaws (or problems) in the new series (e.g., too much and quick juxtapositions) and some of the same differences from the 1970s older Poldark (e.g., the older series was more comic, more subversive in outlook), and also some of the improvements (the new series is actually literally closer to the novels at key points), but want to do justice to mainly to the dialogue which is much much better than I gave credit for. Also in the scripts you have Horsfield’s descriptions of the settings, her comments on how the actors should be behaving, looking, their actions. There is close continuity and give-and-take between the characters as they speak and act; the psychology comes from all these things. While reading I sometimes found that the realized scene was less subtle than it felt while reading, sometimes too hurried, too declamatory, too melodramatic for what the words were implying. By reading the short juxtaposed scenes on the page you can see the continuity more, feel it.

In addition, there is much lyricism in the language, as well as the acting and movement or rhythms of the music and action. It’s this latter I most want to call attention to: how there is an overall pattern-like effect across season 1 in the best episodes. Horsfield wanted less complicated language, because she was fitting everything together as a kind of projected world view of another time and different kind of people (almost). Think about the repetition of Aunt Agatha (Caroline Blakiston) and her tarot cards; how these recur and are pointed with the dialogues between her and Elizabeth (Heida Reed), the scene of wreath-making with Demelza, Prudie (Beatti Edney), and Jinny (Gracee O’Brien) picking up refrains of the song, Jud a low-voiced (Phil Davis) grunting

Aunt Agatha laying an ominous card down

The relationship of Demelza and Ross is a slow developing romance and the many short dialogues where they seem not to be saying any new or much are part of a patterning. Francis’s in effect deterioration and self-punishment and destruction of others works this way: short patterned scenes with George (Jack Farthing). Then there are the rituals, which include the auctions I now feel. Elizabeth and her baby, Geoffrey Charles, with a butterfly.

And there is much more inward than I had realized. Much is brief pointed still and swift dialogue but the two together and repetition does it: these two are characteristic of the first season:

She desolate

He at work

A couple of examples and I’ll have done. I’ve picked two sequences for their typicality. The first is a piece of the long scene where Ross first sees Demelza beaten by young men when she tried to rescue her dog from serving as torture for entertainment and everyone else looks on and laughs. Notice the class commentary, the nuances of immediate motives intertwining

Early still: the boy grabs and ties the dog’s tail

Demelza held back for a bit as she desperately tries to rescue her dog

65. EXT. TRURO, MARKETPLACE …. ROSS’S POV: George, Cary and other gentry, all braying with laughter.
Something hardens in his expression. Calmly he moves forward, pushing through the crowd. Then he sees something which makes him hesitate:
ROSS’S POV: Elizabeth pushing forward to see what’s going on, followed by Francis. As they get nearer, Elizabeth turns away in distress.
This kind of baiting disgusts her.
ON ROSS: Knowing that if he steps forward he must eventually encounter Elizabeth. But how can he not step forward? Calmly he takes his riding crop from his boot and walks towards the young gentlemen. They are young, all them fully convinced of their absolute right to do as they please.
POV THE CROWD: Some cheering, some curious, most expecting the newcomer (Ross) to join in with the tormenting.
ON THE YOUNG GENTLEMEN: Some of them notice Ross approaching. They see his expression and start to run.
ROSS: Enough!
One — a young man with an arrogant face — stands his ground and sneers defiantly.
ROSS: If you’ll take my advice, you’ll run.
YOUNG MAN: Or else, sir?
Impassive, Ross hits him across the face with his whip. The man shrieks and flees, clutching his face.

Henry Garrett as Captain MacNeil

Now a sequence of quick scenes: we have just seen Captain MacNeil questioning Ross and Demelza (with Ross telling Demelza not to “underestimate Captain MacNeil”), Ross getting Elizabeth’s letter about Verity’s elopement whose tone to him worries him, the brief focus on Blamey and Verity’s “first meal together,” Demelza’s fearful POV with Garrick near,

Ruby Bentall as Verity, Richard Harrington as Captain Blamey

Demelza after Ross and MacNeil gone, before it darkens

Ross on the beach hiding the oars, then first dialogue of Dwight coming to Demelza’s house, move to darkened Trenwith:

59. INT TRENWITH HOUSE. Elizabeth is doing her household accounts when Ross is shown in .
ROSS: I came as soon I could. How’s Francis?
ELIZABETH: He’s half a mind to go after her .
ROSS: Persuade him against. He’s no match for Blamey.
ELIZABETH: Or Verity. For I think she’s now the bolder of the two.
ROSS Certainly the most reckless.
ELIZABETH She has the courage of her convictions. Which I applaud even if I seem to disapprove.
A brief moment between them. The merest hint that Elizabeth wishes she too had the courage of her convictions. Then Francis barges in.
FRANCIS Well, Ross, are you pleased with your handiwork? Clearly it was you who helped her.
Ross is looking at Francis in utter bewilderment.
ROSS: I? Arrange Verity’s elopement? Have you taken leave of your senses?
CUT TO:
60: INT. NAMPARA HOUSE, KITCHEN – NIGHT 58
Demelza’s anxiety mounts (as she realizes what Ross is planning tonight – Mark s escape – and how it might be compromised by Dwight’s arrival).
DEMELZA: I – I don’t think Ross would want you here —
DWIGHT: Have I forfeited his good opinion? Or his trust?
DEMELZA: Oh no, not that, but — he has business tonight — and mebbe visitors-
There is the sound of someone tapping on the window. Demelza almost leaps out of her skin.

Matthew Wilson as Mark Daniel’s fierce face to Dwight (Luke Norris)

This is Ross and Francis talking, wrestling, POV Elizabeth

Followed by Paul and Mark Daniel rushing into Demelza’s house, “soldiers everywhere,” and then paired scenes of different kinds of anger: the long-time smoldering and nuanced digs and anger of Francis and Ross, Elizabeth failing to moderate, with the blazing hatred of Mark and guilt of Dwight, Demelza panicking. The language refers us back and forward to next sequence, with action and nuanced descriptions of what is happening. One sequence seems to have closure with Ross succeeding in seeing Mark off, and outrunning the soldiers, back into the house, the other Elizabeth’s indignation. Demelza’s walk to Francis, confession; there is a separate sequence of the Carnemore Copper Company members now bankrupt because Francis has told George the names; and finally much longer (appropriately) Demelza telling Ross what she has done, said to Francis, and (as in the book) Ross’s adament anger at her betrayal and refusal to soothe her. A telling aspect of this is in the book the narrator (Graham) makes the point the woman is to be sacrificed to her family and leaves us feeling how both Demelza and Verity were to make their lives dispensable, and emphasizes Demelza’s fault is that she lied to Ross and has lost his trust; while Horsfield comes down hard on the demand everyone consider the group first:

98. INT. NAMPARA HOUSE. DEMELZA: Can you forgive me?
ROSS: I will try.
DEMELZA: But Francis will not.
ROSS: No.
DEMELZA: And you will not forgive him. And I’ve caused a
rift between the two sides of our family.
ROSS: Yes.
DEMELZA: I will never be happy until it’s healed.
ROSS: Then I’m afraid you’ll be unhappy for a very long time.

The 1970s (as it does several times) elided over this discomfort, Ross scarcely scolds Demelza (Francis’s cursing it was felt perhaps was enough) but the conflict and meaning is lost while here if another side is taken, you do see what’s at stake. Essentially it is a fight between the men over women and if you look at the stills matched, you see men angry at one another over women, women trying to stop this, or mourning — a rare moment of more light is on Verity and Blamey at a late supper.

The epitomizing stills are things like flour kneeded into bread, location is one of the characters, and the use of light and darkness and angles at which characters are shot:

Ross and George on the beach (Episode 7 of first season)

Demelza by the cliffs (episode 8)

People remember the visuals best, but the words, sounds, dialogue are what gives the experience the meaning in our minds too. I did wish there were more of camera angles and shots in the scripts; they are rather written to resemble novels. But there is enough.

Next Poldark blog will be brief recap of Episode 5 and move into Episode 6 of the second season.

Ellen

Nearly a year of reading War and Peace; more than a year of watching

Dear friends and readers,

Not quite the familiar kind of title. I’d been reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace as translated by Louise and Aylmer Maud, revised, edited by Amy Mandelker, with Elisabeth Guertik’s superb La Guerre at la Paix just beneath for comparison since July;

and began to listen to David Case reading an unabridged text by Constance Garnett last May.

Frederick Davidson (David Case) reading aloud Constance Garnet’s translation unabridged

An appealing small photo of Garnett

I finished book and mini-series about a week before Christmas. So 9 months. Translated texts by four women. Mini-series by men.

But if you count that I began to watch (and fell in love with) Jack Pulman’s 20 part 1972 BBC War and Peace (Anthony Hopkins as Pierre), last January and have gone through it at least 3 times; and then went on to watch Bondarchuk’s Russian 1966 War and Peace (it’s 5 disks lasting something like 9 hours, Bondarchuk himself is Pierre; and I’ve gone through the whole thing nearly twice); Andrew Davies’s 6 part 2016 BBC War and Peace (Paul Dano, Pierre; watching at least twice, the last time weeping throughout the whole of the sixth episode) with one time for the Vidor 1955 War and Peace (once, Henry Fonda, Pierre, John Mills as Platon, Audrey Hepburn Natasha) — this experience might count for two years perpetual engagement.

Fonda as Pierre and Hepburn as Natasha

I probably proposed to the listserv at Trollope19thCStudies @ Yahoo to read Tolstoy together because I so loved the Pulman mini-series and wanted to understand it much better, see what depths it was drawing on, attempting faithfully to dramatize. Now I’d like to know so much more about Sophia as it was she was who copied out Tolstoy’s endless drafts and she who put together a final version of the book different from the one Tolstoy first published and the one translated and read today (except for those like Christian who read all the drafts). We have agreed that sometime next summer the group of us (whoever is there) will read and discuss Anna Karenina together.

You could say I immersed myself as I also read over the 9 months about 2/3s of A.N. Wilson’s biography, two old fashioned interpretive books (F. R. Christian and Rimvydas Silbajoris, close readers and real source students of the 1960s and 70s types), three of the chapters of John Bayley’s Tolstoy and the Novel, about one half of Alexandra Popoff’s book on the man who may be said to have preyed on Tolstoy in the last part of his life, his “false” disciple, Vladmir Chertkov, watched The Last Station and read Michael Hoffman’s shooting script (though not the book by Jay Parini), and now am one third into Alexandra Popoff’s life of Sophia Tolstoy.

A superb shooting script gives a reading on the very old Tolstoy and his wife: Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy, Helen Mirren as Sophia

I posted about all this too (to a small Yahoo listserv called Trollope19thCStudies), at least twice a week, sometimes more.

Has Tolstoy changed my life? or view of the world? No. Did the texts and films out of his book affect my existence? Well if you look at time taken yes. I agree it’s one of the world’s great novels, though Tolstoy would not like to hear it called a novel, and its reach is even severely limited by Tolstoy’s aristocratic and masculinist outlook. It absorbed me; often the text felt packed vivid with life, provided such compelling reading — the exception is after a while his repetitive chapters on what real history is, how events in history come about, how to write about these, and attacks on historians for great writing as if history were the result of a handful of powerful individual’s choices at any given time. But because Tolstoy is alert to genre and other books, this book speaks to what is in others, and contextualizes these others with itself.

Probably for me what this book most taught me was about other books because of its conscious relationship to them, especially historical fiction, the more typical 19th century realistic novels. Since reading his book I’ve become aware how much his double-structure, of one half richly individual stories, and the other larger political (war is politics by other means) contexts, taught other historical novelists since him. They imitate him, from say (to cite two recent books I’ve read in the past) Adhaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun (individual Egyptian and British characters contextualized with the larger Arab-Israel conflicts since 1948) to Virginia Woolf’s The Years.

If this seems dry, it isn’t to me for whom books have meant so much.

A significant book — it includes historical films and adaptations

I read books as deeply reflective of the author and his or her life so that the book may be read as a disguised family history gives it another sort of meaning as a site of memory.

I hope to read this when we get to Anna Karenina

It’s easiest to fall back on the characters to grasp the book’s meaning in itself. Most of the characters are so convincing in terms of 19th century novels (the women less so than the men’ Tolstoy said early on he was imitating the English novel); what was happening in the “war” part of the novel and its politics so relevant. When I thought I would be bored say after a week’s hiatus (sometimes more), I’d fall back into the text and find myself engaged all over again. I felt that the characters could carry on almost without Tolstoy, and he ended where he did because one must end somewhere. 1317 pages (the Maud text) is enough. But this is absurd: the characters are given life by him, reflect and are shaped by his inner life, and the story comes to an end because what he wanted to say about them, where bring them to, has been accomplished. Silbajoris is particularly lucid on why the worlds of perceptions in War and Peace feel possessed by some real person (Chapter 5).

Hopkins as Pierre in the Moscow burning episode

Since the male characters are those given most depth and reality, the females kept much more to stereotypes that males (Tolstoy specifically) see and understand, to enjoy War and Peace you must enter into a male-centered approach. At first this feels less gender- and class-driven (most of those we travel any time with are a tiny highly privileged group within larger Russia) because of the way Tolstoy shapes their conflicts as innate and generic to any private self. I bonded strongly with the central male character, Pierre Bezhukhov: the book is his journey from early adulthood as he gradually and with much emotional pain, and many divagations, decisions which hurt him, adjusts to living in and alongside his society in a way worthy of him, yet never gives scope to what his high intelligence and noble nature could do, were he given real room. I loved him for his kindness to others too.

James Norton as Andrei dancing with Lily James as Natasha at her first ball (2016 W&P)

By contrast, the more secondary, normative, and higher ranking male, Andrei Bolkonsky, behaved in alienating ways, but I grieved for his self-deprivation and early death, brought on by his efforts to please conventional powerful authority figures whose corruption, blindness and narrow egoism he never fully comprehends. Nikolai Rostov, not quite tertiary, incapable of any self-examination or criticism of his society chance, yet so well-meaning, ends doing well from luck (though Tolstoy discounts chance repeatedly and his tenacious instinct for self-preservation.

Thomas Arnold as Denisov entranced with Natasha at a home party (the same 2016 W&P)

A whole continuum of male characters contextualizes them, from their peers in years, the evil-committing pair, smart, effective and spiteful (he enjoys inflicting violence) Dolokhov and his mate (until he is killed) the utterly selfish, grasping, male animal Anatole Kuragin (apparently his rake-gambler type was in an original draft intended to be the central character) to the good-natured characters, the slightly obtuse (all the more survivable), Denisov (who I loved), the selfless conscientious yielder-soldier Tushin (who saves lives risking his own), and the half-mad uneducated pesant Platon Karataev (who his society throws away with his blessing). Then there are the older corrupted, the hollow-courtier of a man, Prince Vasily, the deeply humane (paradoxically) wise in experience general Kutusov. I could go on to add so many who come alive for one scene, one moment, one or a set of chapters, giving us this or that experience of life through their story-event.

Frank Middlemass as General Kutusov (1972 BBC W&P)

For the men a group of issues emerges from the “le monde” chapters. The same public versus private, ethical (which has to do with doing right to others and to one’s gifts) versus amoral behavior (anti-social, inhumane). These feed into profoundly anti-killing, anti-war paradigms as senseless in the “war” chapters. Tolstoy’s answers are not satisfactory (sometimes perverse because of his religiosity), but he asks the candid questions without cant for his era and these questions and some of his answers are transferable. He says repeatedly that a war takes the willingness of thousands of men to spend huge amounts of time killing one another. The commanders care about their place in the organization first and their theories about how to plan for war show few consider its realities. People do not respond sensibly to crises, rarely acknowledge a coming disaster before it’s upon them.

Bondarchuk’s War and Peace: Part 3: 1812

With the women he does not ask the crucial questions but he shows them suffering from powerlessness, so circumscribed and hemmed in, and with an added strong sexual standard (they are judged according to their sexual chastity and obedience to norms of marriage), lack of agency (under the thumb of a parent or authority figure): the saving element is their relationships with one another are detailed so believably and movingly, that what lies outside this seems almost unimportant.

Morag Hood as Natasha trying to explain to draw sympathy from Sonya (Joanna David) why she finds Anatole’s offer to flee so irresistible (1972 W&P, “Madness” episode)

Sonya bitter at what has been demanded of her, tells Natasha (against the countess’ orders not to) that Andrei lies very sick in the convoy (1972 W&P, “Life and Death”)

The central women characters are the ingenue heroine, Natasha Rostov, said to be modeled in part by Tolstoy’s (mis-)perception of his wife (who wrote an autobiographical story under this name, which she burned). Bondarchuk believed in the existence of this type and took her story and made it the center of the second part of his family so it becomes a sentimental heroine’s text within a heroic yet damning story of war. There’s the family dependent, semi-servant, Sonya (whose last name we never learn) and Marya, the cruelly abused sister (by her father) of Andrei. Most important throughout is the Countess Rostov who (like Pierre’s cousin, Katische) whatever it has taken from her, whatever she may have to demand of others, stands tenaciously and resolutely for obeying hegemonic hierarchical norms so as to stay wealthy — while her husband, the hopelessly non-competitive lazy amiable Count Rostov cannot hold onto even a wagon during a siege.

Angela Downs as Marya crushed by her father’s jeering cruelty over a proposal of marriage for her money — Anatole cannot even be faithful or interested in her for two days (1972 W&P, “Two Proposals”)

Equally central to the story (though not gone into psychologically very much) are Pierre’s (to Tolstoy and in the book), vicious and corrupt wife, Helene Kuragin; the semi-mistress (or sexually used) dependent of the Bolkonskys and companion-maid to Marya, Mlle Bourienne, and the female equivalents of Prince Vassily, Anna Pavlovna Scherer, the hollow saloniere, the parrot of what it is socially acceptable to say and do, with whom the novel begins, and the mother of the trained-to-be heartless Boris Durbetskoy (ever rising in rank and wealth), Anna Mikhilaovna, sycophant extraordinaire.

I found the readings of Natasha found in Pulman and Davies of great help in coming to terms with Tolstoy’s central anticipatory Freudian account of the “enthrallment” of Natasha to the sadistic Anatole: after her engagement to Andrei, she is in considerable distress from how Andrei’s family has rejected, mortified her, her self-esteem badly wounded by Andrei’s leaving her, the very sheltered nature of her life a risk. About four of us felt similarly that we were not given anywhere near the insight into Sonya’s feelings her plight as lover (physcial too) of Nikolai and pillow-like confidante of Natasha when she is harassed into allowing herself to lose chance of personal fulfillment because she lacks sufficient money to make up for the Rostovs’ coming bankruptcy. Helene is a monster in the novel because she’s sexually promiscuous, has no understanding of what integrity or virtues might mean, in Tolstoy’s ms incestuous with her brother; as with Dolokhov Davies tries to humanize her as wanting pleasure, adulation, and independence at any price (many human beings are cool towards one another, use one another).

I particularly admired how Tolstoy could move from such large perspectives, vast battles made sense of so that they are de-mystified, seiges, how human beings behave so barbarically in mobs, and as particular individuals (the mayor of Moscow scapegoating a miserably abused once idealistic middle class young man so that he is torn to bits after weeks of mental and physical torture and abuse in the czar’s prisons) to paying attention and bringing to life the smallest details in a scene (Platon’s dog howling at his death but then trotting after someone else), the most seemingly unimportant creatures (down to insects), and how beautiful with acutely felt life he could make a landscape. This is compensation: the joy some human beings feel at a hunt (competition in killing, the thrill of this some feel) and how sometimes he seemed to break taboos over what one can show about human beings even today. The death scenes are startling: from the fights over who gets what once the agonized or nearly unconscious presence vanishes, to the process of death itself going on all that while.

Rebecca Front as Anna Mikhailovna holding fiercely onto the will; Fenella Woolgar as Katische, Pierre’s cousin, has tried to steal in order to destroy it, Stephen Rea as Count Vassily looking on (2016 War and Peace)

Ellen