Восхождение (Voskhozhdeniye)

1977 film by Larisa Shepitko

The Ascent (Восхождение, tr. Voskhozhdeniye) is a 1977 Soviet drama film directed by Larisa Shepitko and made at Mosfilm. Shepitko and Yuri Klepikov's screenplay was adapted from the 1970 novel Sotnikov by Vasil Bykaŭ. The film was shot in black and white in January 1974 near Murom, Russia, in appalling winter conditions. The Ascent won the Golden Bear at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival in 1977. It was also selected as the Soviet entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 50th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. It was Shepitko's last film before her death in a car accident in 1979.

During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), two Soviet partisans, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) go to a Belarusian village in search of food. After taking a farm animal from the collaborationist headman (Sergei Yakovlev), they head back to their unit, but are spotted by a German patrol. After a protracted gunfight in the snow in which one of the Germans is killed, the two men get away, but Sotnikov is shot in the leg. Rybak has to take him to the nearest shelter, the home of Demchikha (Lyudmila Polyakova), the mother of three young children. However, they are discovered and captured. The two men and a sobbing Demchikha are taken to the German headquarters. Sotnikov is interrogated first by local collaborator Portnov (Anatoli Solonitsyn), a former Soviet club house director and children's choirmaster who became the local head of the Belarusian Auxiliary Police, loyal to the Germans. When Sotnikov refuses to answer Portnov's questions, he is brutally tortured by members of the collaborationist police, but gives up no information. However, Rybak tells as much as he thinks the police already know, hoping to live so he can escape later. Portnov offers him the job of policeman. Afterwards, they are imprisoned in the same cellar for the night with the headman, now suspected of supporting the partisans, Basya Meyer, a young Jewish girl hidden by one of the village members, and Demchikha. Sotnikov agrees to speak with Portnov the next day and shoulder all responsibility, hopefully absolving the others. The next morning, all are led out of the cellar, with Sotnikov demanding to speak to Portnov, who brushes him off after an impassioned plea. Desperate, Rybak begs with Portnov to let him join the police, who allows it. Seeing this, Demchikha attempts to reveal who was hiding Basya but to no avail. Sotnikov and the others are led away and hanged. As he heads back to the camp with his new comrades, Rybak is vilified by the villagers. With his guilt and lack of courage to escape, he tries to hang himself in the outhouse with his belt, but fails. A fellow policeman calls for Rybak until Rybak opens the door. The policeman tells him that their commander wants him and leaves him alone in the courtyard. Rybak stares out the open door and begins to laugh and weep.

Before The Ascent, the director Larisa Shepitko shot the film You and Me. Production of You and Me took place under an atmosphere of severe stress. Technical and organizational difficulties led to the necessity of calling an ambulance for the director's health. The release of the film was not any easier; the censors deleted critical scenes and Shepitko had to fight for every single one of them. This struggle was not always successful. Despite the fact that the film has gone to the Venice Film Festival, the removed scenes were a terrible blow to Shepitko, who believed that changing an important moment leads to the loss of main ideas.

For the most part the screenplay written by Yuri Klepikov follows the novel. Shepitko turned to Klepikov on the recommendation of her classmate Natalya Ryazantseva but he was already busy working on another script. Klepikov did not refuse the commission, but he asked to postpone working on The Ascent for a week. Shepitko urged him to start work immediately and a single telephone conversation with her convinced him to drop everything he was doing. Klepikov, by his own admission, "could not withstand the energy of the typhoon whose name was Larisa," and started the task of revising the literary foundation which he later described as "a piping philosophical parable which combined the high spirit of man with his obvious desire to keep the body as a receptacle of the spirit." The result of the work became a 70 page script that Shepitko then meticulously edited. Shepitko practised the "engineer's" approach: she did not tolerate uncertainty or haziness in work and did not rely on director's improvisation or creative inspiration. Every frame, every remark, every scene was carefully checked and planned in advance. According to Yuri Klepikov even "the fruitful spontaneity was due to the very environment of the shoot," which was ensured by the carefully crafted script. When adapting the script from Sotnikov the main concern of the director was not to lose the deeper philosophical content of the story. While the literary work by Býkaŭ was full of sensual details like "icy cold", "famine", "danger", Shepitko strongly discouraged attempts to be satisfied with external action and demanded an "internal justification" of each movement, gesture and glance of the heroes. In order to express the spiritual states she often had to deviate from the literary basis. For example, in the finale of the original story Rybak decides to hang himself in the latrine but discovers that he forgot to ask for the belt back which had been taken by the policemen an evening before. Theoretically, the film could portray the absence of the belt, but then according to the writers the scene would be limited to the designation of the circumstances: informative but unimpressive denial in terms of the artistic sense. The authors "returned" the belt to Rybak but he was deprived of the ability to hang himself; implying that even death refuses a traitor. Their idea was to leave Rybak alone with the knowledge of his fall. The following long close up of majestic nature signified the freedom which Rybak desperately desires and was intended to emphasize the utmost despair "of a person who lost himself." Shepitko's husband Elem Klimov suggested the film's title. Long before, in 1963, a tradition was established between the future spouses that for a good idea they would receive ten roubles. When they just started dating, Klimov came up with the name for Shepitko's thesis film – Heat. Shepitko and Klimov decided to continue this playful approach of rewarding each other but after all the years of their union Klimov alone received the ten rouble reward and only twice: for Heat and for The Ascent.

The next step was the need for the script's approval from the State Committee for Cinematography. By that time Shepitko had already gained a reputation of an inconvenient director. In 1973, when she raised the topic of making the film, the answer from an official of the State Committee for Cinematography was a firm negative. The director did not spark a confrontation but she also did not offer any other projects. For help in overcoming the resistance of the authorities and the State Political Directorate, Shepitko turned to Gemma Firsova with whom she had studied at VGIK. Firsova was an administrator of an association of military patriotic films. She was affected much more by the script than by the novel and the day she met Shepitko, she went to meet the Minister of Cinematography Philippe Ermash. In a conversation with Ermash's replacement (in her memoirs Firsova did not call Boris Pavlenok by his name), Firsova said that she took the script under her responsibility, with a lie that "everything will be fine with the State Political Directorate." Ermash's replacement reacted skeptically to the pleas, and the subsequent process from script approval to acceptance of the film's actors was accompanied by considerable difficulties. The main accusation was that Shepitko allegedly made a religious parable with a mystical tone from the partisan story; this was considered an insurrection in the atheistic Soviet cinema. From the moment she read the story Sotnikov, it took Larisa Shepitko four years to prepare and to obtain permits from the authorities to begin shooting the picture. The actor for the role of Portnov was selected based on the image of Sotnikov. Larisa Shepitko wanted to find someone similar in external characteristics to Plotnikov, saying, "They are similar, but Portnov is an antipode to Sotnikov based on internal beliefs. This should be a very good actor. Their duel, yes, yes, the fight with Sotnikov the eternal conflict, the everlasting battle between spirit and lack of spirituality Dying, suffering Sotnikov wins because he is strong in spirit. He dies and rises above his tormentor." Anatoly Solonitsyn at first did not see anything interesting in what he thought of as a "supporting role", and which he considered a "rehash" of what had been filmed earlier. Initially, the actor did not even understand what was wanted of him despite the fact that he diligently played the "enemy," a "man with a bruised heart," or a "man without a future" as was required. But he felt that the character would turn out to be little but a caricature, as in cheap popular literature. Only a long conversation with the director allowed him to understand her vision of Portnov: the personification of the negative side in the eternal history of man's struggle with the animal inside himself in the name of the supreme value – namely, the value of the spirit. The director insisted that the Great Patriotic War was won by the Soviet people because of their high level of awareness, so Portnov's "anti hero" role was especially important because the character was supposed to emphasize the superiority of the human spirit's power over matter. In order to achieve the desired performance from the actors, Shepitko sometimes talked for a long time with them out in the cold. For example, despite the crew's full readiness, the director would talk for a long time with Boris Plotnikov, whose character she carefully directed during the filming. Shepitko's habit of clearly stating her thoughts contributed to a successful transmission of information; she did not use abstruse terms that might mask the lack of clarity. She waited for the necessary expression of emotion, for the right facial expression and gestures and then suddenly would give the order to start filming. Boris Plotnikov later said that he would have liked to repeat this experience in other films, but never did. On working with Shepitko, Plotnikov spoke of "a meeting with a living genius." Vasil Býkaŭ also shared a similar opinion about the film's director, he called her "Dostoevsky in a skirt." Býkaŭ valued Larisa Shepitko very highly and once admitted that had he met her before, he would have written Sotnikov differently. Gostyukhin recalled that he transformed into Rybak to such a degree that even the made up bruise only fell from his face after three weeks. After the film was shot the actor tried for such a long time to leave his role behind and to become himself again that he refused to star in Shepitko's next planned film, entitled Farewell, despite her persistent requests. When Klimov, bypassing Mosfilm, invited Masherov to a special preview of The Ascent, Masherov initially was skeptical and was expecting to see "effeminate directorial work." The still somewhat wet film was brought to Minsk directly from the lab, and Larisa Shepitko herself sat at the mixing console Twenty or thirty minutes after Masherov had started watching, he found he could not tear himself away from the screen, and by the middle of the movie he was crying, without hiding away from the republic's leaders who were present in the hall. At the end of the film, Masherov contrary to tradition (usually at such premieres opinions were heard first from the lower ranks and then from the highest) came on stage and spoke for about forty minutes. His words were not recorded by anyone but Elem Klimov testified to his wife that his excited speech was one of the best he ever heard addressed. The Belarusian writer and veteran of the Great Patriotic War Ales Adamovich, who was present at the screening, described Masherov as someone who questioned, "Where did this girl come from, who of course experienced nothing of the sort, but knows all about it, how could she express it like this?" After a few days, The Ascent was formally accepted without any amendments. The film was first released on North American home video in a boxed DVD set by The Criterion Collection in 2008 through its Eclipse series, where it was paired with Wings. Criterion later released it on Blu ray in 2021. While browsing the Criterion Collection as part of the promotion for Tár, Cate Blanchet described The Ascent DVD as something "to be owned by every single human in the world".