The Ascent

Larisa Shepitko's 1977 Soviet war film, The Ascent, is so preposterously grim that it is faintly risible.  In the movie, someone says:  "If you crawl through shit, you can't ever wash it off."  And this questionable proverb pretty much describes the film -- it's an excursion through an icy hell that the director intends to indelibly mark the viewer.  But, in order to endure a picture of this sort, you have to shrug it off.  You find yourselves speculating on how the movie was made:  "Okay, it's a big close-up.  Stare into the camera and wail with as much suffering as you can muster.  After all, you're only thirty seconds from being hanged by the neck until dead."  This is the paradox of big prestigious films about the holocaust (or various holocausts) -- watching Schindler's List or The Killing Fields, your response is always to ask:  What was it like on the set?  How was the buffet for the extras starring in the concentration camp sequences?  What did they serve? Who had custody of the mutilated dying baby mock-ups?

In The Ascent, a group of Soviet partisans is trudging through waist-deep snow when they are attacked by Germans.  The partisans include women, babies and children, and wounded people being dragged on jury-rigged toboggans.  The partisans are freezing to death and have almost no ammunition and, when they stop for meal, each person is given exactly one tea-spoon of something that looks like toasted barley.  Schepitko films on location in deep snow and she keeps the camera close to the action, showing people's faces as they munch on their ludicrously minuscule rations.  Two of the partisans are sent to a nearby village to get food.  One of the men, Sotnikov, is very ill -- he seems to have pneumonia and is constantly coughing.  He can barely walk.  The other man, Kolya, is in better shape.  The village seems to have been burned down, but there is another town where a few people are still clinging to life notwithstanding the fact that the Germans have taken their cow and pig.  (Apparently, the town had only one cow and one pig).  The people in that town are collaborators with the Germans and led by a bearded patriarch who is first seen reading his Bible -- this is, after all, a Soviet picture and religious people are generally depicted as either weak or villainous.  The two partisans appropriate the carcass of a lamb and are fleeing over the icy steppe when they encounter Germans.  In a firefight, Sotnikov, the man with pneumonia, is shot in the leg.  He decides to fight off the Germans, saving the final bullet for himself.  He is in the process of trying to blow off his own head when Kolya comes to his rescue, having abandoned his dead lamb.  Kolya grabs the wounded man and drags him for hundreds of feet through a bramble patch -- this agonizing crawl, played like something out of a Beckett novel, is filmed in brutal close-up and goes on for a long time.  The two men escape to a nearby farmhouse where Sotnikov's coughing causes them to be captured together with the peasant woman who gave them shelter.   With their capture, the relatively fun, light, and carefree part of the picture concludes.  In the last hour of the picture, the two partisans are tortured, people get branded with red hot irons, and everyone is punched and kicked and gouged repeatedly.  Finally, a bunch of people are executed after being marched for some distance up a steep hill.  The entire town is forced to watch the execution, a hanging that includes the peasant mother and a little girl who is so little that the murderers have to give a crate to stand on so that the noose will reach her neck.  There is a philosophical debate between Kolya and Sotnikov in a rat-infested dungeon. Sotnikov is saintly and has huge liquid eyes and his stare unmans the various German and Russian torturers.  Furthermore, the damn guy won't die.  They brand him with a foot-wide star, beat him unconscious, but, like Everlast battery bunny, he takes a lickin' but keeps on tickin'.  In fact, during the execution scene, a protracted Goyaesque nightmare, he even manages to stand on a stump, balancing there for a long-time, notwithstanding the fact that one of his legs has been, more or less, shot off.  Shepitkov can't bring herself to show the Germans and their Russian collaborators killing Sotnikov, who has announced that he is good Bolshevik and supporter of the Soviet regime -- he seems to auto-execute himself by jumping off the stump so that he can be hanged with the little girl, the peasant, and the old man (the collaborator with the Bible who has now become a good  Russian once more.)  Kolya, who is willing to compromise, ends the film as a policeman working for the Germans -- but not before attempting to hang himself in an outhouse.  He howls with grief and weeps and the camera draws away from him across a snowy landscape where an old church is half-buried in the ice.  This kind of extreme imagery cries out for Christian allusions and Shepitko would like to stage the execution as a kind of Passion but she can't do this explicitly for fear of censorship.  So the end of the film has a muted, faintly disassociated aspect -- it is replete with Christian symbolism, but that symbolism has to be veiled to the point of seeming botched.

In Herodotus, the great Greek historian is quick to point out that in the great Patriotic War, more Greeks were allied with the Persians than with the Athenians and Spartans.  Shepitko makes the same point in this film.  The chief interrogator in the German concentration camp is played by Anatoly Sonitsyn, Tarkovsky's favorite actor -- he is in Andrei  Rublev and, also, Solaris.  In the great Patriotic War that saved the Soviet Union, it seems that there were as many Russians fighting for the Germans as fighting against them.  This is also the theme of Alexey German's Trial on the Road and casts an interesting light on these pictures -- there is an implicit critique of the Soviet regime merely in the fact that so many people seem to have joined the Germans to fight against it.