gordonovitch wrote: ↑Thu Feb 07, 2019 12:06 pm
Was the press book always linked on the Janus' War and Peace page? In any event, I took a look at it this AM and found it a very good and informative read. It confirmed what I've been assuming, that the new restoration made use of the same elements, mostly or all 35mm, rounded up for the 2000 restoration, and that the 70mm negs have been lost. There is a good amount of detailed info, much of it new to me, on the film's rocky production, Bondarchuk's dictatorial directing style and so on. The press book certainly doesn't clear up the restoration's running time: it states the total as 421 min., yet when one adds up the times of each of the four parts, also listed, it comes to 422 min. Within the text on the same page it mentions the original cut shown in the USSR as being 401 min. (Ruscico's box listing of the parts' running times adds up to 403 min., close enough) Still, no mention is made of newly found footage, so I'm thinking what we'll have is the same film as Ruscico released. There are even more screen caps in the press book and they all look wonderful with tight resolution...
The pressbook didn't say the 70mm negs are lost, only that the negatives for the uncut version were incomplete, likely having been trimmed or conformed to the shorter version. They were able to cobble together the extant negatives available, and a positive print for reference.
It seems that because of the nature of the restoration, a new 70mm exhibition print was not struck, instead opting for 35mm, which is why the aspect ratio is different.
But this film has been mastered from 70mm materials, which is good news!
Below is the original press statement:
Two versions of War and Peace circulated
in the 1960s: the original 403-minute
cut shown in the USSR and around the
world, and the 360-minute cut ordered
by Continental Distributing’s Walter
Reade for American audiences, the editing
of which director Sergei Bondarchuk
personally supervised. However, in 2000,
when Mosfilm decided to restore War and
Peace, executives there discovered that
neither the studio nor Gosfilmofond, the
Russian Federation’s state film archive,
possessed a complete 70 mm negative of
the film in its original 2.20:1 aspect ratio.
An extensive search in the archives of
the former Soviet republics also failed
to yield a complete 70 mm negative.
The restoration was therefore achieved
by assembling parts of negatives from
various archives, with the complete
positive copy held by Sovexportfilm,
which had distributed War and Peace
abroad, used for reference. Hence, this
35 mm restoration with a 2.35:1 aspect
ratio is the closest possible approximation
of the original film’s visual quality.