My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 19): An Unknown Soviet Director hits the Emote Button

The Ascension (aka The Ascent)  (1977)

Directed by Larisa Efimovna Shepitko

Starring Boris Plotnikov and Vladimir Gostyukhin

The 1970’s have featured prominently in my film reviews. It was a golden era, tapping on responses to 1960’s turmoil to make films that explored human rebellion and the very role of mankind. And I have not yet even gotten to Deliverance, Taxi Driver, and The Godfather. Amidst the Cold War and all these great US films, I was totally unaware of a thriving film industry in the Soviet Union. Many of these films were shown only in the Eastern Bloc and at film festivals.  But they are now more available on the Criterion Channel and elsewhere. The titans of Soviet film remain the great innovators Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948, The Battleship Potemkin, Boris Gudunov) and Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986, Solaris, Mirror). Interestingly, while the Soviet dictators often repressed music, opera, and theater, they often left filmmakers alone, and a whole group of Soviet films are now available for exploration.

Among the lesser-known directors was the short-lived Larisa Shepitko (1938-1979), who broke through the mostly-male bastion of Soviet film schools and made a couple of major films before her death in a car crash. Her childhood was dominated by the calamities of WWII in the Ukraine, and how her father-less family almost starved to death.  The Ascension is a very personal account of two Russian soldiers fighting against the Nazis early in the war, at a time when Russian “partisans” were being hunted down as traitors to the new Nazi world-state. It looks on the surface like a conventional war drama. Two partisans try to accomplish a mission, are captured, and one is hanged. But Shepitko takes a very up-close, personal view of this. Politics and war aims are minimalized. Instead, we see vast Russian snow banks with long lines of footsteps in them. We see shivering, starving people who still maintain a certain hardness and determination. We see every human emotion, emphasized by Shepiko’s ultra-close ups of her excellent actors, photographing their every twitch in the icy Russian light. This reminded me of Eisenstein, who also favored such extreme close-ups, achieving an effect like the expressionist painters (e.g. The Scream). By photographing the human face so microscopically, it turns movies into something more than dialogue, motivation, and plot. Humanity itself seems to be examined. A bonus of all this is that we see the two protagonists as very different men. Sotnikov, the ex-teacher becomes a martyred Christ figure, as he refuses to betray colleagues and is hanged. Shepitko falls in love with his eyes, remarkable for their passion and gentleness, with just a bit of zealotry added in. In contrast, Rybak the professional soldier, breaks under the strain, betrays his comrades, and joins the Nazi-Russian secret police. His weeping, tortured guilt (he seems to love Sotnikov) is equally captured by Shepitko’s relentless closeups. He’s also called “Judas” by scornful villagers, continuing the Passion-play subtheme.  So what starts as a war drama quickly becomes an allegorical double-psychological study.

The other remarkable thing about The Ascension is how it defies “glorious mother Russia” propaganda film stereotypes. The populace of the villages is hardly loyal to Stalin. Some passively resist the Nazis, but others collaborate, and these same people coexist in small villages, glaring at their neighbors. The Nazis are not the main villains here, but instead the leaders and villagers who fall in line with the current rulers and betray their country to invaders. This is a very candid demonstration of how opportunity and self-preservation often trump loftier ideals, and perhaps is Shepitko’s critique of how Russians tend to cavil to authority (as many still do, electing autocrats like Putin who promise stability and Russian greatness).

This film is ultimately a wolf in sheep’s clothing. As, at the end, the martyred Sotnikov, a weeping mother, and a Jewish child are all hanged in the public square, the film can be seen by some as a conservative drama of “The Great War”. But the director has other agendas, and mixes her critiques of Soviet culture, obeisance, and self-preservation into the film subversively and subtly. She echoes the public hanging with the pathetic attempts of the turncoat Rybak to hang himself with his belt in a latrine, failing to execute even this measure of redemption. In the end he marches off with his new Nazi police colleagues, tortured, remorseful, but now drawn into a new life of self-hatred. Quite an ending to a war film! Women should make more of these.