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How to watch War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova
1966 · Sergey Bondarchuk · War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera enter the ballroom and never stop moving. (camera)
It threads between dancers, rises, and circles instead of cutting between fixed angles, so the room feels like one continuous space rather than assembled shots.
Payoff: You arrive at the ball exactly as Natasha does, dazzled and slightly behind the room.
Watch for the same bare tree appearing twice. (camera)
Bondarchuk films Andrei passing the same oak once bare and later in full leaf, with no music or dissolve marking the change between the two shots.
Payoff: The months that changed the tree are handed to you as a gap, not an explanation. In the reading: chronosign. The reading calls this a chronosign: time itself shown directly in the gap between two shots, rather than measured through action.
Watch how Natasha carries herself in a crowded room. (performance)
Savelyeva, trained as a ballerina rather than an actress, uses her carriage and the way she occupies space to let the room move her rather than acting a scene.
Payoff: The room carries her rather than the other way around. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the dancer goes still and the room itself takes over the motion.
Notice people in the background pursuing their own business. (staging)
Rooms are filled to the edges of the frame with characters doing their own thing, so the camera selects from a full world rather than arranges one.
Payoff: Every space feels inhabited beyond whatever the main scene is asking you to watch.
Listen for sound arriving from off to the side. (sound)
Crowd murmur, music, and voices are placed directionally around you, so a room's noise surrounds you rather than sitting flatly in front.
Payoff: The sound design puts you physically inside the crowd instead of facing it from outside.
Once you have seen it
Watch the frame distort during Natasha's moments of crisis. (camera)
At the opera and after her collapse over Anatole, Bondarchuk suddenly switches to wide-angle distortion, canted framing, and shots straight into her own eyeline.
Payoff: The camera itself loses composure exactly when she does.
Watch for one image layered directly on top of another. (cutting)
Superimposition and dissolve are used to put memory and anticipation directly onto a face rather than to bridge two scenes.
Payoff: The film lets you see memory and anticipation sitting inside the very same shot as the present moment. In the reading: hyalosign / crystal-image. The reading calls this a crystal-image: the present and its imagined double sitting in one frame, impossible to fully separate.
Notice how deliberately fake and garish the opera looks. (staging)
Unlike the rest of the film's realism, the opera performance is staged as artificial and absurd, painted boards and people making noise rather than art.
Payoff: You are seeing the opera exactly as Natasha sees it in this scene, dislodged from the conventions that would make it beautiful.
Carry this in: Watch for images and objects that recur, the oak, the waltz, and notice how little the film explains why.
A Deleuzian reading of War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova →