On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television PARCELING 'WAR AND PEACE' BY MARVIN KITMAN SOME OF the scenes in the Russian movie version of Count Tolstoy's novel War and Peace?presented by ABC Television on four nights in...
...As is well known, the book is complex enough without having the viewer's train of thought derailed by philosophical conundrums like which deodorant is drier than dry...
...Unfortunately, War and Peace is a series that works best when a viewer gives it his undivided attention...
...But there are numerous complications...
...I found the battle sequences particularly newsworthy...
...This new series is a fantastic product of the famed BBC serials department, the people who brought us The Forsythe Saga...
...Anyway, this is a concern American public television should have addressed itself to...
...A cor-rolary of the law is: Who will take seriously a program that lasts only 45 minutes...
...The ID slide, known in the trade as a "super," is used on news and public affairs, even if a person is well-known, and nobody's intelligence is insulted...
...A war is going on...
...In public television these days, length is often equated with quality...
...One inside source estimated that the editing may have cost about $100,000 of the $500,000 in grants provided by Mobil and the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...Afterward, the reruns—aired at different times of the day—could be broadcast at various speeds to reach the widest spectrum of viewers...
...1 do worry, though, that TV viewers who lack the proper literary background may have had difficulty telling who was who...
...Napoleon is trying to conquer Europe...
...The longer a show runs, public television law number one states, the better...
...No, Sonya loves Andrei...
...You ought to put in immediately for a grant...
...Then an announcer would come on at the end of the show, saying: 'Today you read 50 words a minute...
...The BBC version of Tolstoy's novel, launched on public television in this country the night of November 20, has been a far more successful TV experience...
...one minor public TV official said...
...Besides looking at the tube, this group tends concurrently to sew...
...Natasha loves Andrei or Count Ilyia...
...An additional complication for Americans is that the Russians use diminutives...
...90 minutes for each of the others...
...They forgot that we are not as well schooled in the classics as the English...
...Spelling is not critical either...
...The cousins, aunts and uncles pour into Count Rostov's dacha like the crowd in the Moscow subway...
...U.S...
...We think of the poor other guy, who probably doesn't know Richard Nixon from Sally Quinn...
...There appeared to be a message in this somewhere, perhaps that war is necessary to bring peace so that there can be a better world to make commercials in...
...It has something to do with the Puritan Ethic...
...Especially if it was coordinated with a faster reading plan...
...The names of the characters are not all that helpful, since Russian names all end in "ovich," "aya," "y," or "ka...
...So we perform small but significant tasks...
...Two hours of watching Tolstoy's characters torture themselves with romantic, philosophical, religious and political speculation?without the proper literary background—can seem like a month in the country with Uncle Vanya...
...Nonetheless, I don't think the four-night presentation of Sergei Bondarchuk's six-hour-and-thirteen-minute Russian film classic worked too well the first time it was run on TV...
...Well, not exactly the book...
...viewers are trained to think of their characters simply: Indeed, many of our heroes don't use their first names—like Columbo...
...Basically, it is the tale of an upper class Russian family—the Count Rostovs—living in Moscow at the turn of the 19th century...
...I'm not quite sure why the people at Boston's WGBH-TV, the educational station in charge of the project, went to the trouble of editing the original BBC shows into nine episodes (two hours for the premiere and finale...
...Or was it Sonya who loved Natasha...
...See the alarming growth of Fred Wiseman's documentaries: He's up to two and one half hours...
...Despite all the praise it had originally received from film critics, on television it came across as the famous Russian epic War and Commercials: five minutes of narrative, and then four 30-second ads that immediately became integrated into the story...
...I had no trouble following the plot in the first episode (the most difficult), because I had read the book...
...write letters, pay bills, read the latest professional journals, and cook stews...
...When each character appeared on the screen, his or her name and relationship (sonya, countess rostova's niece) could have been superimposed...
...I suspect another motive, too...
...Ironically, serious programming is especially frightening to the more intellectual slice of the audience, those who say they don't watch television in the first place...
...These activities are made necessary because a lot of us feel guilty just sitting in front of the TV...
...But it is understandable, too...
...Congratulations.' Public television is always looking for cheap ideas...
...Maniacs" is the same thing to us as "Mannix...
...What a brilliant educational program idea...
...Just about the only distraction in public television's presentation is the announcement of the Mobil Oil Corporation's involvement in the worthwhile project...
...I had read the Classics Comics version...
...It made our Chicago Fire of 1876 look like a weenie roast...
...It would have been one-half as slow if BBC's judgment (judgement) had been deferred to...
...This proposal has already been greeted with some enthusiasm...
...Seeing the enormous number of French troops in Russia, one realized how insignificant our involvement in Vietnam was at that time...
...Nor the second time, either (August 1973...
...Still, the series never had the snap of Hawaii Five-0, and...
...The original BBC version succeeds so well because it is produced as a serial, or a television soap opera with class, a kind of Forsytheski Saga...
...In any case, WGBH has made a tactical error in doubling the attention span required of the viewer...
...It would have been useful if the creative geniuses in Boston had stolen a page from the discussion and talk shows of the Sunday intellectual ghetto...
...If only one could leaf back through a TV show, the way War and Peace is usually read...
...To begin with, the number of interruptions is sharply reduced...
...MUCH OF the criticism about the new War and Peace in the press so far centers on its being "slow-going...
...The effort did create jobs in the public television editing establishment, surely a humane gesture, yet frankly, when it comes to presenting serials that work, I prefer BBC's judgment (that is, judgement...
...The burning of Moscow was a colossal TV attraction, too...
...The novel on the crawl could be speeded up every day unbeknownst to the reader...
...Was that a brother or lover in the Rostov household...
...Every time their name is mentioned on the air, I find myself wondering why they are piddling around with public television when they should be out there striking oil, or at least giving it a glancing blow...
...Was that Sonya or Natasha pining away for the love of what'shisnameaya...
...Project his words verbatim on the screen for several hours a night until the book is concluded some four or five months later...
...It gives Tolstoy a little more time to develop than did Sergei Bondarchuk, running in its entirety 900 minutes, or the length of seven feature films...
...The BBC serial, after all, is television's version of the Classics Comics...
...An interesting experiment for the coming summer lull in public television programming might be to actually present Tolstoy's novel, uncut...
...in fact, the word "slow-going" is a euphemism for "too-demanding...
...The BBC made the typical British snooty assumption that everybody in the world has read the novel, and thus no special handling was necessary...
...Statistics indicate that "nonwatchers" often watch more television (including Hawaii Five-0) than confessed watchers...
...Nixon's 50,000 amounted to a mere patrol compared to Napoleon's legions...
...The nonwatchers usually like to do several things at once...
...The BBC did such a magnificent job converting the novel into a purely television vehicle, it is regrettable they ignored these American problems...
...Tolstoy's masterpiece, however, is also a love story, a war story, a library of intimate biographies, a family Bible, a major work of history, and an immense philosophy treatise...
...Even Boris Spassky would find it difficult to cope with such problems of American culture and technology and Tolstoy...
...War and Peace, as the noted literary critic Woody Allen once said in his unabridged review of the novel, "is a story about Russia...
...But David Conroy's War and Peace was made specifically for television: 20 installments, each 45 minutes long...
...And by February, when the serial ends, the public's appetite may have been whetted for the real thing...
...How about it, Mobil...
...Yet, who knows, if we stayed with the Watergate Hearings all last summer—what a novel Tolstoy could have written about that cast of characters!—we may also make it through War and Peace...
...On Television PARCELING 'WAR AND PEACE' BY MARVIN KITMAN SOME OF the scenes in the Russian movie version of Count Tolstoy's novel War and Peace?presented by ABC Television on four nights in August 1972—were great...
Vol. 56 • December 1973 • No. 24
