The Screengrab : napoleon

When Good Directors Go Bad: Waterloo (1970, Sergei Bondarchuk)

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the great cinematic epics, none is bigger than Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace. Simply put, everything about the film is massive- its budget (upwards of $100 million in 1960s dollars), its production schedule (nearly five years), its cast (tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers were used as extras in the battle sequences), even its running time of nearly eight hours. Yet War and Peace would merely be a footnote in movie history if its largesse was its only notable quality. Reviews of the day praised it not only for its epic scope and impeccable production values but also for its emotional sensitivity and human drama. Even today, War and Peace remains a masterpiece of its kind, and the rare adaptation of a great novel that does justice to its classic source material. For this not insignificant miracle, credit should be given not only to the Soviet film industry but also to Bondarchuk's sure-footed direction.

After the international acclaim for War and Peace, Bondarchuk decided to make a film about The Battle of Waterloo. For most filmmakers, this would have seemed a hugely ambitious project, but compared to War and Peace, a seemingly modest one for Bondarchuk. In order to bring the project to the screen, Bondarchuk received financial backing from Italian super-producer Dino De Laurentiis, and together they enlisted several well-known actors, led by Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington. In addition, the film's $25 million budget afforded Bondarchuk the chance to re-create the battle on the same scale as the wartime sequences in War and Peace. But despite these factors, Waterloo was a disappointment both with critics and with audiences, garnering mostly middling reviews and making back less than one-fifth of its original budget, and sending its once-hot director back to the USSR for the rest of his career.

After Waterloo flopped big-time at the box office, De Laurentiis chalked its failure up to the lack of big-money stars in the cast. But while it's tempting to wonder what sort of Napoleon could be played by De Laurentiis' first choice Richard Burton, I'd say that Steiger did just fine with the role. This is especially true in the character's more grandiose moments- Steiger was always a magnificent ham, and Napoleon gave him a chance to cut loose in some entertaining ways that livened up the film. And for his part, Plummer did a capable job as the arrogant upper-class general Wellington.

Likewise, I'd say the battle sequences are as spectacular as advertised. As in War and Peace, the sight of thousands upon thousands of actual humans on the battlefield is still impressive, and still impossible to duplicate with CGI. In order for the sheer magnitude to achieve its intended effect, Bondarchuk films most of the battle in long shots, the better to comprehend the narrative of the battle itself. I also liked Bondarchuk's use of "God's eye" shots at several times in the battle, especially when the English Army forms itself into tight squares to fight off the advancing French cavalry. Had Bondarchuk tried to make a tactics-heavy recreation of the battle a la Cy Endfield's Zulu, Waterloo might have been a classic.

As it stands, the film is a missed opportunity, primarily because he and screenwriter H.A.L. Craig simply can't find a way to successfully integrate his principal characters into the battle. One of the triumphs of War and Peace was that Bondarchuk made us care about the people who were fighting the battle. But rather than exploring the lives of some of the soldiers in any kind of depth, Bondarchuk concentrates his narrative on Wellington and Napoleon and the differences in their approaches to war. This contrast is fairly interesting early on, but once the battle begins the tactic stops working. After all, it's hard to care about two men who essentially stand back and watch as thousands of men march to their deaths.

Today, any notoriety Waterloo may have comes mostly from the rumor that its disappointing box office performance led to production being shut down on Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon. But whether or not this is the case, the bile this idea summons up in some cinephiles is somewhat unfair. After all, hugely expensive epics were on their way out, and besides, Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead, so it's not like his career took much of a hit. Taken on its own terms, Waterloo ultimately doesn't work, but there are dazzling sequences that demonstrate what a gifted filmmaker Bondarchuk was, and it's a shame that more of his work isn't available in the U.S. I guess seeing him “go bad” on such a grand scale has made me want to see him make good again.

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 2

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

LITTLE DORRIT (1988) Running time: 360 mins.

Charles Dickens, who peaked at the time of the serialization craze in English fiction, got paid by the word, and it's easy to imagine that's the reason for the vast, sprawling length of his many novels. But when writer/director Christine Edzard created her ambitious movie version of his Little Dorrit, she was determined not to short-change the complex richness of the narrative simply to bring the production in at a tidy two hours. After all, if Dickens took the time to make his legions of characters and mountains of subplots all come together like clockwork, why shouldn't she extend him the same courtesy? Clocking in at around six hours, Little Dorrit isn't just long for length's sake: it's in service of a cleverly ambiguous plot, split into two often conflicting points of view. Everyone brings their best game to Little Dorrit, from the set designers to the cinematographer, but especially the actors: for those who have a low tolerance for Dickens' wicked excess, twisted excursions and talky supporting characters, it's the acting, featuring a veritable Who's Who of quality British actors of the 1980s, that keeps you in your seat. Edzard may have learned her lesson — she never directed anything as ambitious again after this — but she did what she set out to do: create the most intricate, essential, and faithful recreation of a Dickens novel ever made.

WAR AND PEACE (1967) Running time: 414 mins.

Due to the limited commercial prospects for extra-long movies, most of the films on this list are relatively low-budget. But this wasn't the case for actor/director Sergei Bondarchuk's epic adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's literary masterwork. Far from it, in fact — the film had what was referred to as an "open budget," which basically meant that the entire Soviet film industry shut down to work on it. Estimates in 1967 put the budget of War and Peace at about $100 million; forty years of inflation puts it at no less than seven times that amount. But as the saying goes, every cent is up there on the screen. If nothing else, War and Peace is the biggest, grandest epic of all, boasting tens of thousands of actual soldiers in the battle scenes, some of the most opulent sets ever committed to film, and an awe-inspiring re-creation of the siege and burning of Moscow by Napoleon's army. But Bondarchuk's epic vision didn't stop with the size of the production. Instead, every frame of War and Peace represents the director's tribute to the irrepressible spirit of the Russian people, which managed to survive even the threats posed to it by Napoleon. Each of the film's larger-than-life performers reflects this idea, none more so than the incandescent Ludmilla Savelyeva, a ballerina who turned out to be the most perfect choice imaginable for the film's pivotal role of Natasha. War and Peace is huge but not plodding, a thrilling, emotionally satisfying populist drama that just happens to be seven hours long. It is that rarest of cinematic creatures — a film that actually does credit to the literary masterpiece that inspired it while standing as a masterpiece in its own right.

HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY (1978) Running time: 442 mins.

Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour, twenty-two minute Hitler: A Film From Germany — or Our Hitler, as it was retitled for its American run — is a multi-part experimental feature consisting largely of monologues (performed by actors representing Hitler and others) meant to explore the meaning of Hitler's legacy and the sources of his appeal and fascination to the German people. Taking a page from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, one of the film's avenues of exploration is Nazism's banality, and Syberberg, a disciple of both Brecht and Richard Wagner — he followed this film up with a four-hour, fifteen-minute movie version of the opera Parsifal — has no fear of examining banality at a length and degree of detail that some might consider above and beyond the call of duty. Heralded by praise from Susan Sontag, and "presented" by Francis Ford Coppola, it arrived on these shores in 1980 as the official brainiac cinema experience of the year.

SATANTANGO (1994) Running time: 450 mins.

For years, Bela Tarr's seven-and-a-half-hour Satantango has been one of the great rites of passage for the serious cinephile. But while a long-ass black-and-white movie about a Hungarian farming commune might lead the uninitiated to expect a massive slog, the truth is that Satantango isn't nearly the frightening behemoth its reputation would suggest. To begin with, Tarr's style is gorgeous, with masterful use of long takes and silky-smooth Steadicam that gives the film a surprising amount of momentum. Tarr rarely keeps his camera still, following his characters on their journeys through life. The results can be hilarious (as in the famous barroom scene), or unbearably sad (like a scene between an ill-fated girl and her cat), or just plain hypnotic (who can forget a follow shot of three men walking down a road while discarded newspapers blow all around them?) But Satantango isn't simply an empty exercise in bravura filmmaking. Tarr's film is nothing less than a postmortem for Communism in Eastern Europe, the story of an aimless band of farmers who are inspired by a charismatic local to follow him, only to be suddenly abandoned, separated and scattered to the four winds. Satantango has been described as "not so much a movie as a place you visit," and it's a destination every true lover of film should make a journey to at least once.

EMPIRE (1964) Running time: 484 mins.

Watch the YouTube clip that accompanies this entry. Then watch it eighty more times. That's a rough approximation of the experience of watching Andy Warhol's silent-film triumph, Empire, which consists of over eight hours of a single shot of the Empire State Building, taken from late one evening until early the next morning. Even more maddening, the film is meant to be screened at a slower speed than it was filmed — the actual footage is only about six hours long. The first question that springs to everyone's mind upon hearing about Empire for the first time is: "Why would anyone want to film a skyscraper for eight hours?" To which the answer is: "Why would anyone want to paint a bunch of soup cans?" And the answer to that is: "Why would anyone want to make a bunch of soup cans?" Part of Warhol's particular genius, and the reason that he is such an important figure in modern art, is that he forced us to look at the things we had made, to see them with new eyes. In a sense, of course, like much conceptual art, Empire is something you know about, not something you actually sit down and watch: but if you give it the chance, it's a film that can almost literally hypnotize you with its simple beauty and repetitiveness. Warhol was trying to establish, as Tom Vick writes, that "the camera is a machine capable of paying attention to anything for any length of time." Warhol throws down a gauntlet with Empire, as he quietly did so often in his career, and asks us to watch our creations doing what we made them capable of doing.

SHOAH (1985) Running time: 503 mins.

Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour film about the Holocaust attempts to redefine the documentary form and the whole accepted approach to its subject, allowing its interview subjects long, long takes in which to discuss their experiences and observations. When released to theaters in this country, the movie seemed to consume all the cultural oxygen in places, inspiring tributes that spilled over from the arts sections to the op-ed pages. Since then, Lanzmann has expanded it by six minutes while tinkering with its outtakes: he's carved two subsequent interview films, A Visitor from the Living (1997) and Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M (2001) out of the mountain of footage from which Shoah was assembled. (And Lanzmann himself can be seen onscreen in Marcel Ophuls's four-and-a-half-hour documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, a film that shows his influence.)

OUT 1 (1971) Running time: 773 mins.

When you're making a list of great long films, not including at least one selection by Jacques Rivette is unthinkable. After all, here's a guy who regularly makes movies that are more than three hours long. But Out 1 is mammoth even by Rivette standards, an eight-part, nearly thirteen-hour beast of a film that's catnip for Rivette fans and damn near indecipherable for just about everyone else. Taking as his starting point Balzac's History of the Thirteen, Rivette begins the film with two rival theatrical troupes (one of which is staging Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes despite the fact that it only has six members), plus a con-artist and layabout played by Juliet Berto, and Jean-Pierre Leaud as a deaf-mute who plays an off-key harmonica for people in the street until they get annoyed enough to give him money. The narrative, such as it is, involves a shadowy organization called "The Thirteen," with various characters that are either part of The Thirteen, wish to join The Thirteen, or want to probe the mysteries of The Thirteen. Given Out 1's running time, you might think Rivette would provide some closure, but you'd be sorely mistaken. In Out 1, the narrative digressions and dead-ends ARE the story, and there are some real corkers — a theatre rehearsal that degenerates into animalistic grunts, an interview with a pompous Balzac expert played by Rivette's fellow critic-turned-filmmaker Eric Rohmer, an extended search and fruitless search for a larcenous troupe member — leading up to a final shot that's a cross between a winking grace note and an extended middle finger. Frankly, Rivette's fans (masochists that we are) wouldn't have it any other way. And if that's not good enough for you, there's the ever-lovely Berto, who spends much of the film running around in a pair of super-foxy striped jeans.

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980) Running time: 939 mins.

It's a bit unfair to call Ranier Werner Fassbinder's masterful adaptation of the Alfred Döblin novel the longest narrative film ever made, as some critics do. Berlin Alexanderplatz was conceived of and executed as a television mini-series (making tremendously long, ponderous TV movies was apparently all the rage in Germany around this time; Edgar Reitz's eleven-hour Heimat was made only four years later), and it's unlikely that even a provocateur like Fassbinder intended for anyone to sit through the whole thing at one go. Still, it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking regardless of your method of intake: marked by tremendous acting and incredibly inventive direction, Berlin Alexanderplatz is both a step away from Fassbinder's twisted takes on melodrama and a refinement of methods used in his previous films, most especially clever camera movements and long, discursive conversations. Following in the footsteps of Erich von Stroheim, Fassbinder attempted to make an absolutely faithful filmed version of his source novel, using a number of the book's interesting narrative techniques to create a digressive yet highly focused sense of place and time. This isn't the best place to start with Fassbinder, but it may be the best place to end: it was, in many ways, the movie he'd waited his whole life to make.

HONORABLE MENTION:

GREED (1924) Semi-Restored Running time: 239 mins; Original Running time: Long As Fuck

Anyone wondering why Erich von Stroheim became the model for the modern stereotype of the film director as demanding, egomaniacal slave-driver (complete with puffy pants, monocle, and thick Teutonic accent) need look no further than Greed. The first feature-length film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was meant to be of standard length — then, as now, around two hours — but von Stroheim would have none of it. So impressed was he by Frank Norris' novel of a love triangle destroyed after the sudden windfall of a lottery win, that he set out to recreate it, scene by scene and word for word: not as an adaptation, but literally as a visualization on screen of the entire novel. This necessitated, among other things, hiring a huge cast, defying the studio by shooting on location whenever possible, and spending a then-unheard-of half million dollars before turning in the completed product. And even then, MGM's troubles were just beginning: von Stroheim's initial cut of Greed was an astonishing ten hours long, likely the longest movie ever submitted to a major studio. The enraged executives demanded a new cut, and von Stroheim submitted an edit (which he considered a huge compromise) that was still over four hours long. The studio essentially banished him from the project after that, eventually releasing a two-hour cut that eliminated so many characters and subplots that it was nearly incomprehensible, and widely panned by the critics. Turner Entertainment released a 'restored' version of the second, four-hour cut of Greed a few years ago, using surviving footage, script, and still photographs, that suggests how good the original might have been. But we'll never really know — the vast majority of the reels from the ten-hour version were accidentally destroyed over fifty years ago by an MGM maintenance worker.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 1

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

There are long movies, and there are really long movies. But there's also that notorious third category: The Long-Ass Movie. You know them. Usually they have to be split into two or three parts. Sometimes they have to be released as mini-series, with abbreviated versions put out in theaters. Occasionally they're hacked to pieces by studios and distributors, and become founts of controversy. More often that not, they're made by Germans. (We're not kidding. Check the list.) And most of the time, though sadly not always, they're great — ambitious, sprawling, uncompromising, and riveting. There's something really special about a long-ass movie, which, for our purposes, we're classifying as a film over four hours long. You never forget the experience of sitting through it. We certainly didn't. Here's our list of the Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time.

HAMLET (1996) Running time: 242 mins.

It's highly unlikely that anyone in Shakespeare's time actually saw Hamlet in full. As many critics and biographers have noted, the full text of The Bard's masterpiece would run over four hours if performed — a prohibitive length even today, despite such modern conveniences as lighting, electricity, and weekends. Clocking in at a limber four hours and two minutes, Kenneth Branagh's full-text version of the play struck a remarkable balance: an uncompromised performance that was also relentlessly cinematic. Some called Branagh's camera tricks show-offy, but he was simply following in the footsteps of one of the great linguistic show-offs of all time. The film's baroque visual style complemented the verbal gymnastics of Shakespeare's sweet tongue, and the result is not only the most faithful adaptation of Shakespeare ever filmed, but also, for our money, one of the absolute best.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991) Running time: 280 mins.

Don't laugh. The two-hour, thirty-eight-minute U.S. theatrical release version of Wim Wenders's insanely ambitious sci-fi epic romance was a messy, albeit fascinating, journey through an ultra-globalized millennial world, with William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin bouncing around the planet recording with a revolutionary camera designed to help blind people see, accompanied to snippets of songs from the director's favorite rock acts (Nick Cave, R.E.M., U2, etc. — the soundtrack CD for this thing was a mainstay in many a contemporaneous college dorm room). The full, nearly-five-hour version, it turns out, wasn't nearly so messy. Rather, it was a sober, compelling, and visionary lament for the ways in which the oncoming technological transformation of society would transform human contact; Wenders's portrait of a hyper-connected world predated the Internet revolution. More importantly, it had even more of that awesome music.

1900 (1976) Running time: 315 mins.

Unjustly tarred on its initial release as a disaster, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic, a highly personal film despite its five-hour running time, has withstood the test of time far better than anyone would have expected. Its big-name cast, surprisingly, doesn't hold up particularly well — thanks to a sometimes shaky script and a not insignificant language barrier. But as an epic of great scope and a continuation of Bertolucci's tremendous visual-storytelling techniques, it's a raging success. Five hours fly by in the presence of such gorgeous filmmaking, thanks to the sensual, earthy tone of the film, the solid pacing, and the director's extreme care. Bertolucci apparently envisioned 1900 as his own response to the success of The Godfather — he would tell the modern history of Italy, just as Francis Ford Coppola had told the modern history of Italian-Americans, with a similar sense of range and scope and sweep. At the time of its release, no one would have credited Bertolucci's film as successful on that level, but if he'd had the foresight to do as Coppola did and release it as two separate films telling a single story, it's easy to imagine that 1900 would have enjoyed a much better critical reception.

NAPOLEON (1927) Running time: 330 mins.

Abel Gance was one of the towering French directors of the silent era, one of those pop-eyed geniuses whose only reservation about the movie medium was that it would be a shame if it turned out to have any boundaries at all. The massive epic that is now Gance's best-known work was originally intended to be only the first chapter in a multi-part historical epic consisting of six enormous features. You get a taste of what Gance hoped to achieve at the end of this picture, when three different projectors are used to show contrasting images on three screens, achieving something like a split screen image to the nth degree. Unfortunately, this silent landmark was completed the same year as The Jazz Singer, and Napoleon was released in America in a savagely truncated version that didn't even attempt to preserve the triple-projection imagery. Gance would continue to work, but most of his wildest ambitions would go unfunded and unfulfilled. He didn't become fully appreciated until the film historian Kevin Brownlow assembled a restored version that, with live musical accompaniment, played to ecstatic responses in packed theaters in 1980 and 1981. (Thankfully, Gance lived to see it — he died late in 1981.) That initial restoration ran five minutes short of four hours, but Brownlow kept going back, and by 2000 he had extended the film by another thirty-five minutes. It remains a thrilling mixture of audacious filmmaking, charming corn, and some very strange politics: Napoleon is so thrilled by the French Revolution that he sets out to bring democracy to other countries by invading them — evidence that the French, of all people, created the Bush Doctrine.

LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871) (2000) Running time: 345 mins.

As huge fans of Peter Watkins, we found that the number of Watkins-related items on Screengrab has been shockingly low of late, so we'll take any opportunity we can to plug his work. La Commune, his epic film about the Paris Commune of 1871, which in its full form runs five hours and forty-five minutes, is in many ways a summing-up of Watkins's career that tests the methods and techniques he'd developed over the course of more than thirty years. The Commune was a group of intellectuals, students and workers who took over a section of Paris in 1871 and formed an experimental government. True to form, Watkins took over an abandoned factory and staged the rise and fall of the "Commune" as covered and reported on by modern TV crews, who take turns interviewing the non-actors who represent the political leaders, the common people, the military forces working to smash the Commune, et al. He even tosses in a dandyish news anchor who spreads anti-Commune sentiment on a competing network, "Versailles TV." Ever the iconoclast, Watkins refuses to consign the fervor of Communards to the distant past, and by doing so he celebrates the revolutionary spirit both past and present, as when a discussion between the characters gives way to a contemporary debate about globalization. It may be the crowning achievement of one of the strangest film artists of his time — a man who sees himself as trying to bring history alive in order to educate the masses, but who has no apparent ability to make films in a way that might entice the masses to want to see them.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce