The unmistakably unique period pieces of Sergei Bondarchuk (2025)

In the long and complex halls of Soviet and Russian cinema stand a handful of figures who have left a deep and eternal impression on its history. Alongside the existentialist films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the innovation of Sergei Eisenstein and the intense terror of Elem Klimov’s Come and See, one ought to acknowledge the brilliance of Sergei Bondarchuk and his monumental period pieces.

The films of Bondarchuk are true spectacles of cinema and bring a sense of epic scale and grandeur to proceedings, as well as narratives that pay close attention to the finer details of history. The Ukraine-born actor and filmmaker had worked across several decades, and it was his film adaptations of some of the most renowned literary works of all time that established his legacy.

In the first decade and a half of Bondarchuk’s career, he starred as an actor in works based on Semyon Babayevsky, Oleksander Dovzhenko and Alexander Fadayev, plus a version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. That was all before making one of his most acclaimed pieces as a director, the truly mesmerising epic war drama film War and Peace, based, of course, on Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 novel.

A true masterpiece of cinema over seven hours in length in the original release version, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace is simply one of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of the medium of artistic film. Starring Bondarchuk himself in the lead role of Pierre Bezukhov, as well as Vyacheslav Tikhonov as Andrei Bolkonsky and Ludmila Savelyeva as Natasha Rostova, War and Peace is a truly unbelievable film.

Painstakingly creating the contrasting opulence and turmoil of Russia in the Napoleonic Wars, from luxurious mansion chambers to bloody battlegrounds, Bondarchuk’s film version glistens with a sense of care and authenticity, and the Battle of Borodino scene is of a particularly awe-inspiring nature, a truly bloody clashing spectacle of cinema.

Just a few years later, Bondarchuk would return to the era to deliver his 1970 epic historical war film Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte, Christopher Plummer and the Duke of Wellington, and even Orson Welles gave a cameo as Louis XVIII of France. 1982’s Red Bells saw Bondarchuk give American history his treatment, too, focusing on the journalist and communist activist John Reed.

Able to explore themes of faith, power, morality and politics, as well as a deep understanding of the craft of acting and the importance of accurate set details, Bondarchuk created some of the most believable period pieces ever shown on screen. In that light, the director himself is one of the most important figures in a wider cultural context, bringing some of history’s most important events and literature’s most significant works to a broader audience in a stultifying style.

Having transported countless cinephiles off to past worlds and times, delivering a jaw-dropping sense of grandeur and opulence whilst never straying from the brutality of warfare, Bondarchuk remains one of the greatest Russian filmmakers, well deserving of his place next to the likes of Tarkovsky and Klimov.

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