Soviet Ukrainian director Sergei Bondarchuk is mostly known for two movies, both from roughly the same period of his career. The first is his massive four-part adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The second is the 1970 battle epic Waterloo. The former is generally considered by cinephiles to be a masterpiece, the most faithful retelling of a notoriously unfilmable narrative brought to screen, a landmark of Soviet cinema. The latter is considered a rather mediocre and somewhat confusing story held up solely by a spectacular series of set-pieces.
Bondarchuk’s War and Peace is very good. Great, even. Great enough to make me like it despite my antipathy for the source material and its author. Waterloo is my favourite movie of all time, bar none.
Both have their similarities. They both were colossally budgeted blockbusters. They both follow a handful of characters through the course of major historical events of the early 19th century. They both were anchored by immense battlefield set-pieces representing the clashes at Borodino and Waterloo respectively, with the belligerent armies played by thousands upon thousands of Soviet conscripts costumed as Napoleonic infantry, and an entire independent cavalry regiment trained solely to act as cavalry. These battles were the kinds of things you’d need CGI for these days, since the time when vast, “cheap” conscript armies could allow the allocation of tens of thousands of soldiers for a film shoot is long, long past.
But the two great battles which are presented in these films are very portrayed very differently. Waterloo is a very conventional battle epic in a lot of ways. It follows the commanders of the two armies, delves into their decision-making, and shows the effects of those decisions through sweeping shots of a lot of extras getting shot at and the occasional close-up of a few ground-level figures. Its failure to make the movements and motivations of the Hundred Days and the Waterloo Campaign digestible to the regular film-going audience at the time of its release is, I suspect, what made it a flop on release, and what makes it so beloved by the kinds of people who already know what’s going on and how everything’s supposed to move.
War and Peace’s Borodino is not the spectacle of a battle epic. It is, I think, rather better described as “a glimpse of the fucking apocalypse”. From relatively orderly beginnings, it devolves into a chaotic hellscape which is made up mostly of rapid-fire shots of destruction and human suffering. Bodies twist and mingle and slaughter each other in a cataclysmic confusion. The loss of control over events, over movements, over even the idea of a grand driving narrative is so complete that it seems almost like a bitter parody of the kind of neat battle-maps we’re used to seeing when we think of Napoleonic battles.
All of this begs the question: why is Bondarchuk’s Waterloo considered a brilliant set-piece let down by mediocre storytelling because of its confusing movements and plotting, while Bondarchuk’s Borodino is considered a masterpiece despite the fact that it is orders of magnitude more confusing, and seems to have no real plot at all? They are both sprawling, sweeping battles directed by a man who saw real war (Bondarchuk served in the Red Army during WW2) which take up almost an hour of screentime. They have the same director, the same camera techniques, even the same extras, so what’s the difference?
The difference is in the story which each battle is meant to tell, and how sight and sound and narrative focus tell that battle. To put it plainly, Waterloo is a story about the battle itself. War and Peace is not about the battles which punctuate its narrative, but the stories and the development of the individual characters who endure them. Waterloo is about armies within the sweep of history and the men who lead them. Borodino is about the experience of war, and the human beings who are thrown into it.
In Waterloo, the primary personalities are Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington. This is not ambiguous, or an unintentional creative decision. As the commanders-in-chief of their respective armies, their decisions and personalities are shown to affect victory and defeat. They are both shown as highly competent, charismatic, and inspired commanders in their own way. In part, Waterloo can be seen as portraying Napoleon’s defeat during the eponymous battle as the result of Napoleon’s own personal lapses as a commander and as a leader of men: he is sick, he is exhausted, he can no longer control his subordinates, he loses his temper easily and allows arrogance and hubris to cloud his judgement. He clings to his memory of the Battle of Marengo, where his own failure had almost led to the annihilation of his army before Desaix (a man whose sacrifice he no longer acknowledges) arrived with enough reinforcements to turn an imminent disaster into a resounding victory. Yet even he must admit that Marengo was fifteen years ago, Desaix is long dead and buried, and when reinforcements do come, it comes in the form of Prince Blucher’s Prussians – on the side of his enemy.
Wellington too, gets the treatment of a legendary general: he is constantly in control, he is always collected, always calm – calm enough to make witty remarks even as he believes the French are about to “break every bone in [his] body”. His role is expanded beyond its historical significance, thanks to the decision to cut out the roles of the Prince of Orange and Lord Hill (Wellington’s Corps commanders on the day of battle), and the reduction of Blucher and his chief of staff Gneisenau to vaguely comic-opera buffoons at the head of an ominously black-clad army of faceless goons (an ahistorical, but understandable artistic decision by a man who’d spent his youth fighting the genocidal descendants of that same army).
It is from these two commanders-in-chief that the rest of the cast radiates outwards. Second to Napoleon on the French side are his chief of staff, Marshal Soult, his subordinate commanders Marshal Ney and Marshal Grouchy, and his chief aide, the Comte de la Bédoyère. The casting of Wellington’s army mirrors this. Below the Duke in prominence is the Earl of Uxbridge, the Anglo-Dutch cavalry commander and defacto second in command. Then there are General Picton and General Ponsonby, commanding an infantry division and the “Union Brigade” of heavy cavalry respectively. The only figure not a general in that core cast is Colonel William de Lancey, La Bédoyère’s counterpart as Wellington’s Quartermaster-General.
There are other speaking roles, of course. The French army gets a pair of Grenadiers of the Old Guard, and General Cambronne (so he can say the famous word which he may or may not have actually said). The British get a handful of common soldiers from the Inniskilling (well, the Enniskillen at that point) regiment, a young aristocratic junior officer, and Captain Cavalié Mercer, of the Royal Horse Artillery, as a nod to his importance of his chronicle of Waterloo in the historical record. These figures are not possessed of meaningful agency. They may complain, they may occasionally offer their own opinion, but within the story, their purpose is to fight and die at the direction of their commanders. When they fail to do so (when Grouchy fails to interpose his troops between the Prussians and the French right, when Ney launches a cavalry charge against British squares unprompted, when Ponsonby over-extends his own charge despite Wellington’s orders to withdraw), disaster inevitably follows.
The structure of Waterloo’s casting and storytelling therefore places Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington as the actual agents of the story, with their armies and their subordinates as extensions of their plans. Both are portrayed as sympathetic and likeable deuteragonists (Wellington more so than history would normally allow), and in many ways, their conflict is a battle of wits and will: two Great Men of History, generational military geniuses each equally capable of planning and directing their forces to victory. In the end, Wellington wins because Blucher (positioned functionally as his subordinate) is willing to adhere to his “superior” Wellington’s plan, while Grouchy and Ney fail to do the same for their own superior.
Borodino is not a battle about commanders. Both Napoleon and Prince Kutuzov (commanding the Russian army) are present, and have speaking roles, but neither are seen as in control of the situation. Despite the fearsome reputations both men enjoy in popular historical record, neither are seen as having any meaningful direction over the battle. Napoleon is framed as a cold-blooded sociopath who spends the lives of his soldiers like water without care for losses or suffering. Kutuzov is a ranting, delusional old man, insisting that victory is still imminent as the situation devolves with the frantic energy of Hitler reacting to getting banned from XBOX Live (it should be noted that Tolstoy himself pretended that Borodino was a Russian victory, as did the conventional Russian historiography of the time).
Instead, the characters we follow through War and Peace’s Borodino are two of the same ones we’ve been following since the story’s beginning: Count Pierre Bezhukov, and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky – the latter a mere regimental commander in an army composed of hundreds of regiments, the former not even a soldier, but a civilian attaching himself to an artillery battery as a volunteer. These are two ordinary men – at least, as ordinary as they can be for serf-owning members of the Imperial Russian high aristocracy. Unlike in other, more heroic modes of narrative, they do not rise to the occasion to make a difference either. Bezhukov mostly sits there and watches other people die in front of him, while Prince Bolkonsky’s regiment is effectively destroyed by French artillery fire before it can even go into battle. These are not Great Men of History directing events, these are mere human beings trying and (in Bolkonsky’s case) failing to survive those same figures which history considers Great Men, and the consequences of their actions.
This should honestly not be a surprise, given that Tolstoy’s intention in writing War and Peace was at least partially to refute the Great Man Theory of History.
Sight and sound reinforce this difference in artistic intention as well. Waterloo’s battlefield visuals split the difference between spectacle and historical authenticity. The armies are mostly seen moving and standing in ordered formations. When they die, it is often fairly neat and dignified. Soldiers get shot, they fall over, the rest of the line keeps going. In my opinion, this would be fairly close to what an actual military engagement between two trained armies would look like at the time. Very rarely (something like one in twenty times) would a bayonet charge actually make contact and lead to the messy tangle of hand-to-hand fighting on a large scale.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t concessions to storytelling for the sake of cleaning things up. While gallopers and other staff officers are shown actually delivering orders from headquarters to the various parts of the army, there is none of the delay or confusion which would have been reality. At times, an off-screen voice simply reports things to Wellington or Napoleon as they happen, without the intermediary of some junior aide to deliver the report. This serves to minimise the roles of both armies’ staffs considerably, as they no longer have to do the important work of parsing reports, relaying them to command, and turning the commander-in-chief’s orders into directions which will still be useful when delivered by courier minutes or even hours later.
Borodino’s visuals go the opposite direction, to the degree that it might be said that they are unrealistically messy and chaotic. This will probably be an arguable point. There was a lot of hand to hand fighting around the defensive positions of the Russian Army at Borodino, but it was probably less protracted, and less confused than Bondarchuk shows. While things start off fairly orderly, matters eventually devolve into a nearly incomprehensible mess of men in uniform trying to kill each other with bayonets, musket butts, and their bare hands – all against a smoke-choked backdrop of blasted wasteland and burning houses which seems more out First World War trench fighting than a battle from the War of the Sixth Coalition.
The result is that Waterloo looks almost neat and controllable: regiments and brigades and divisions move and counter-move as if they were pieces on a wargame map. Coordinated bodies of soldiers advance, retreat, and are moved with “the lightness of a pistol”. It looks like the battle that can be comprehended, directed, and won by a single general sitting on a horse. Borodino looks like a maelstrom of death and carnage, intentionally bereft of any shots which give the viewer an idea of what’s going on over the entire field. Instead, every shot is made so confused and narrow that you’re not even sure which army is moving in which direction. It’s the kind of thing nobody could even think to understand let alone control. Bondarchuk’s Waterloo is a planned, intentional, orderly contest between two great minds. Bondarchuk’s Borodino is a senseless, purposeless slaughter set into motion by a half-senile old man’s blunder and his opponent’s overwhelming hubris, one which neither they nor anyone else have the ability to control.
The same could be said of the soundtrack. While it might be surreal to call one of the most close-run and bloody battles of the Napoleonic Wars “organised”, that’s how the soundtrack of Waterloo often sounds. Each of the two armies has their own fixed leitmotifs: “The Girl I Left Behind Me” for the Anglo-Dutch, “La Victoire est à Nous” for the French (The Prussians also get a theme, but it’s literally just the modern German national anthem in a minor key). The relevant theme plays when one army makes a big entrance or has the upper hand, and plays more or less uninterrupted and unimpeded while we get fairly coherent, long sequences of the charge of the Union Brigade or the attack of the French Imperial Guard. There are times when the music devolves into more chaotic stuff, but even then, there is a sort of sequential logic to it, and intention is to very clearly point out that something has gone horribly wrong.
Borodino’s prelude starts the same way, with bombast, with solemnity, with expectations set and then a small-scale private conversation between Bezhukov and Bolkonsky to set the personal stakes. When the battle actually begins, the music is discordant, like two or three different soundtracks playing at the same time. Much like in Bondarchuk’s Waterloo, there are different leitmotifs for each side, which take centre stage when one side commits more troops or takes the upper hand, but the undertone of discordant brass never really goes away, and the ebb and flow of battle is shot so chaotically and matched with such frequent shifts in the soundtrack that the whole thing often sounds like two bands, (one playing “Slavsya” and the other playing “La Marche de la Garde Consulaire”) trying to beat each other to death. All of this is interrupted by interjections of diegetic bugle calls and drums, which – unlike in Waterloo – the soundtrack does not fall silent for.
The result is less a soundscape and more a sound-storm, something which makes you hear the uncontrollable chaos of the fighting as it would be seen not by a commanding general in full control of the army, but by human beings on the ground, trapped like ants inside a giant rock tumbler with several thousand methed-up hornets and two hundred live hand grenades.
All of this means that Waterloo is ordered where Borodino is chaotic. Waterloo is directed while Borodino is uncontrollable. Waterloo is about individual genius and will, while Borodino is about the futility of individual agency in a battle which involves hundreds of thousands.
It’s also why I think Waterloo failed in a way that Borodino succeeded.
Borodino is an event in a larger story, an extremely consequential event which gets a full hour of screentime, but it is still more a station in the character development of an established cast than the story itself. The audience does not need to understand where each corps or division is at any given time because that’s not really important to their understanding of the parts they care about. Yes, the chaos is terrible, yes the fighting is savage, but the thing the audience is focused on is how that chaos and how that bloodshed affects Bezhukov and Bolkonsky – two characters who don’t so much interact with the course of the fighting as they do have the fighting inflicted on them as they stand almost-helpless on the field. Borodino’s destructive incomprehensibility is the point, and by playing that up, Bondarchuk makes us feel the way Tolstoy’s characters felt.
But Waterloo is an entirely different kind of battle. The plot of Waterloo is the course of the battle itself, which means the story which the audience needs to understand is not that of the individual, but of the three belligerent armies. The viewer needs not just to know what’s happening to each of the characters, but they need to understand the broad strokes of the battle itself. Only then does the course of the battle and its outcome actually make sense to someone who can’t play the whole thing out in their head.
This, I think, proves to be Bondarchuk’s weakness. The script allows for asides and short exchanges between the two commanders and their subordinates, but those can only go so far. While Bondarchuk himself had an immense army of extras ready for the purpose of showing big dramatic action scenes, he had nowhere near enough to show the whole of the battle in a single shot (he would have needed ten times as many if he wanted to do a one-for-one recreation of the historical battle of Waterloo), nor did he compromise by abstracting major parts of the fighting or by using maps. The result is a sequence of events which cannot help but be confusing, unless you can keep track of what’s happening where – something which almost demands fairly detailed background knowledge to begin with.
By now, you can hopefully see how two depictions of the same kind of historical event (a set-piece battle during the Napoleonic Wars) can tell two entirely different kinds of stories, how the context which a work puts those events in can change what storytelling beats and narrative loads that event has to shoulder. At the same time, I hope I’ve also demonstrated how the same creator can try to use different tools to tell two vastly different stories – things like sound, music, visibility, timing, and pacing which are more applicable to a visual medium, but also things like which characters to emphasise and how to frame their actions, how much agency to give them, and how effective they are in imposing that agency on the course of events.
Bondarchuk’s situation is not unique to him. As a creator, you’ll quite often have to cover the same kind of event from a new direction, or to serve a different narrative purpose. Hopefully, this analysis has given you some insight on how to do that.
Paul Wang 