The OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology is
presenting a series of films about war entitled Portals for Peace, curated by Gerry Sloan. The next film will be shown at OMNI on Wednesday, December
18, 7 p.m.
The film, The Ascent, 1974,
tells a story of World War II in Soviet Russia, directed
by Larisa Shepitko in appalling winter conditions, as required by the
script. The film won the Golden Bear award at the 27th
Berlin International Film Festival in 1977.
This is not a film about combat; rather, it
examines the moral anguish people are compelled to experience during war.
In the main plot, two Soviet partisans are captured by German troops in
occupied Belarus. One refuses to answer
questions, is tortured, and executed.
The other, to avoid execution, joins the local police loyal to the
Germans. The film ends with his
realization of what he has done and his unsuccessful attempt at suicide. Other characters are faced with their own
struggle with ethical choices leading to life or death.
OMNI is located at 3274 Lee Ave.
For more information call 966-5515 or 442-4600.
More information about the film.
The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko)
Reviewed by Barbora Bartunkova in December
2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Issue 85. “Facing Death,
Confronting Human Nature: The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977).” [Shortened by Dick.]
Larisa Shepitko’s black-and-white feature film The
Ascent (1977) is based on the 1970 novella Sotnikov by the
Belarussian writer Vasil Bykov. Set in Nazi-occupied Belarus during World War
II, The Ascent follows two Soviet partisans who brave harsh
winter landscapes in search of food. [Reminder: Last month’s excellent film was
also about Belarus, partisans, and Nazis occupiers, and was created by
Shepitko’s husband Klimov. –Dick] The soldiers’ perilous journey, however,
leads to their capture, interrogation, and torture by Nazi soldiers and
collaborators. As the narrative unfolds, the young and sickly Sotnikov (Boris
Plotnikov) and the physically stronger, experienced soldier Rybak (Vladimir
Gostyukhin) are ultimately forced to choose between life and death, as survival
will only become possible by betrayal. While
Shepitko focuses on the extreme physical and psychological experiences of war,
the film raises questions that interrogate human nature more broadly.
The Ascent marks
the highpoint of the Ukrainian-born filmmaker’s career, securing her critical
acclaim both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Moreover, The Ascent won
the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin International Film Festival, after which
Shepitko showed the work at film festivals in Telluride and Toronto, and even
returned to the Berlinale in 1978 as a member of the international jury. Like many female filmmakers’, Shepitko’s
contribution to the history of cinema has often been downplayed or overlooked,
but her extraordinary talent and the significance of her work have recently
begun to receive greater recognition.
Writing in 2014, for example, David C. Gillespie,
declared The Ascent to be “perhaps the most important war film
of the 1970s and one of the key films of the entire Brezhnev period.”5
With Brezhnev’s rise to power in 1964, a long period of
cultural stagnation began, defined by a return to strict censorship and
creative limitations that had been alleviated under Nikita Khrushchev.
Khrushchev’s Thaw had allowed filmmakers, for the first time, to move away from
heroic propaganda narratives about the Great Patriotic War and to explore more
personal and unsettling aspects of the war.6 Despite the shifting political and cultural landscape
under Brezhnev, which saw for example Yuri Ozerov’s epic five-part war film
series Osvobozhdenie (Liberation, 1971), The
Ascent aligns itself with this earlier line of investigation into the
psychological dimension of personal struggle and suffering in war rather than
of its battles. Notably, the only longer combat sequence between Germans and
Soviets plays out behind the opening credits.
The
opening title sequence of The Ascent.
The Ascent is
uncompromising in its representation of the cruel realities of war. When Rybak
and Sotnikov find shelter with Demchika (Lyudmila Polyakova), a young mother
living with her three children, they are discovered by a German patrol who take
them away to their headquarters in another village, leaving the small children
behind with almost no hope of survival. Sotnikov is the first to be
interrogated by the Russian Nazi collaborator Portnov (Anatoly Solonitsyn) but
refuses to answer any questions, even when he is submitted to brutal torture,
as a star is burnt on his chest with a red-hot branding iron. Paradoxically, it
is Rybak, the stronger and more experienced soldier, who immediately answers
all questions in order to save his life, ultimately becoming a police officer
in the service of the Nazis. By choosing to depict a potential Soviet hero as a
traitor and collaborator, Shepitko ventures into dangerous territory. As a counterpoint to Rybak, The Ascent casts
Sotnikov first as an unlikely hero who turns into a Christ-like figure,
sacrificing himself for higher ideals and his motherland.
Sotnikov
interrogated by Portnov; Sotnikov in cellar prison after torture, surrounded by
fellow detainees.
Shepitko’s film interweaves religious and political elements
into its visual and narrative fabric in often unexpected ways. Throughout the
film, Christian visual symbols and religious gestures are evoked, but most
attention is paid to the transformation of Sotnikov, whose expression and
demeanour change radically, along with the increasingly dramatic lighting and
framing of his figure, lending him a nearly divine aura. This heavenly light
even illuminates the dark cellar where the detainees – Sotnikov, Rybak,
Demchika, a village elder and a young Jewish girl who refused to denounce the
person who was hiding her – await punishment. As one of the partisans has shot
and killed a German soldier, all of the prisoners are condemned to be executed.
Although he had previously withheld all information, Sotnikov decides to take
on all responsibility to save the others. When Portnov dismisses his plea,
addressing him by the false name the partisan used during the interrogation,
Sotnikov retorts:
No. Not Ivanov. My name’s Sotnikov. Commander, Red Army.
Born in 1917. Bolshevik. A Party member since 1935. Teacher by profession. At
the start of the war, I commanded a battery.It’s a shame I didn’t kill more of
you bastards. My name is Sotnikov – Boris Andreevich. I have a father, a mother
and a motherland.
On the other hand, Rybak breaks under the pressure and joins
the side of the occupiers, accompanying his former companion in the punitive
procession ascending a Golgotha-like hill, on top of which are improvised
gallows. As Rybak kneels, holding onto the log on which Sotnikov stands before
being hanged, the camera cuts between close-ups of the face of Sotnikov and of
a small boy wearing an old budenovka, a Communist army hat.8 As a tear falls down the boy’s face, their powerful
exchange of gazes is emphasised by Alfred Schnittke’s dramatic musical score.
They both smile faintly before Sotnikov’s death, suggesting a deeper meaning of
this act of martyrdom for the new generation.
The
hanging of the detainees; the boy moved by Sotnikov’s death.
Yet the film does not end with this climactic scene, since
it is interested in conveying the moral implications and suffering Rybak
endures as he realises the unbearable burden of his treason and complicity in
murder. After a village woman hisses “Judas” at him, he fails to commit
suicide, only to fall on his knees in agony in the courtyard of the police headquarters.
The critic Elena Stishova has remarked that “the film ‘states’ Sotnikov, but
‘investigates’ Rybak,” arguing for a nuanced understanding of his position and
the complexity of a character who could otherwise simply be dismissed as a
traitor.9
Shepitko offered an explanation for her Christ and Judas
parable of betrayal, saying that “there have always been Sotnikovs and Rybaks,
just as there were Jesus and Judas. I am not religious, but since this legend
is so prevalent in the world it means that it’s alive, that it lives on inside
each of us.”10
In an article
exploring the relationship between photography and war, Susan Sontag asks whether an image or a series of images can have
the power to mobilise opposition to war. 12 She argues that “a narrative seems likely to be more
effective than an image,” partly due to the “length of time one is obliged to
look, and to feel.”13 Sontag continues: “No photograph, or portfolio of
photographs, can unfold, go further, and further still, as does The
Ascent […], the most affecting
film about the horror of war I know.”14 Indeed, each shot in Shepitko’s film forces the viewer
to continue looking and experiencing the suffering of the protagonists.
Vladimir Chukhnov’s camera follows the characters intimately, frequently using
close-ups and unusual framing, focusing “on the human face as a terrain to be
explored.”
Partisans
about to be discovered by a German soldier in their hiding place.
Furthermore, The Ascent emphasises a
visceral engagement with the natural world, with close-ups of figures covered
in snow and ice and shots of brittle tree branches coated in crystalline frost.
These elements heighten the physicality of experience in moments of heightened
emotional tension. For example, after Sotnikov has been shot in the leg by a
Nazi patrol and attempts to commit suicide in order to avoid capture, Rybak
courageously drags his body into hiding through the heavy snow. During this
long sequence, one can feel the heaviness of the wounded, snow-covered body,
the difficulty of the bare struggle for survival.
Rybak
saving Sotnikov; Sotnikov abandoned in contemplation.
The hostile natural setting is not a mere backdrop to the
film’s action. From its opening images, the viewer is immersed in the blinding
whiteness of vast snowfields. In a series of establishing shots depicting the
winter landscape, a dense snow haze saturates the air, reducing the visibility
of the terrain, electricity poles, and a village church. Howling winds, interspersed
with machine gun fire and distant shouts establish an atmosphere of hostility
and fear, which foreshadows the desperate attempts of the occupied people to
escape Nazi persecution. The film’s final images take the viewer back to the
opening sequence, to the same long shots of electricity poles, of a church, of
the almost unbearable whiteness of the snow. As snowfall and strong winds
continually efface human traces in the snow, what are the marks of human
existence that can not be erased?
The Ascent would
unfortunately become Shepitko’s last completed film. She was tragically killed
in a car accident in 1979 at age 41, along with cinematographer Chukhnov,
production designer Yuri Fomenko, and three other film crew members.17 Shepitko’s husband Klimov created Larisa (1980),
a short film in her memory, combining visual archival material – photographs,
fragments of Shepitko’s films. In this cinematic tribute to Shepitko, Klimov
praises The Ascent as her ultimate achievement.
In his arguably best-known and widely praised
film Idi i smotri (Come and See, 1985, [our November
film]), Klimov returns to the subject and site of Shepitko’s The Ascent,
addressing the Nazi occupation of Belarus. Yet their cinematic visions are
strikingly different. Klimov’s haunting color film, conveyed from the
perspective of a teenage boy who joins Soviet partisans and becomes a witness
to Nazi atrocities, is characterised by an emphasis on the raw brutality of the
horrors of war, whereas Shepitko’s psychological and spiritual exploration
offers a more transcendent vision of suffering and death. As such, The
Ascent leaves an important trace on Soviet cinema and marks a significant
contribution to the history of film.
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