Anniversary of The Ascent
On April 2, 1977, the premiere of Larisa Shepitko's film "The Ascent" took place in the Soviet Union. The literary basis of the script of the picture was the story of the outstanding Belarusian writer-front-line soldier Vasil Bykov "Sotnikov (Liquidation)".
A little about the history of the creation of Vasil Bykov's story. In 1944, in Romania, Lieutenant Vasil Bykov saw his former fellow soldier in a group of captured Germans. This man told the future writer his story about how, after being wounded, he ended up in a concentration camp, where he agreed to serve the Germans in the hope that he would be able to escape and return to his own. But instead, he got more and more bogged down in his betrayal. This story was the impetus for Vasil Bykov to create the story, which he finished in July 1969. Soon the story was published in the Belarusian magazine "Polymya" under the title "Liquidation". In the meantime, the publication was being prepared, Bykov also sent it to the Novy Mir magazine. In the 5th issue of this magazine in 1970, this story was published under the title "Sotnikov".
In the early 70s, a magazine issue with the story "Sotnikov" fell into the hands of Larisa Shepitko. Moreover, it got into the most difficult period of her life. Severe stress caused by the forced "castration" of her brainchild - the film "You and I", a fracture of the spine as a result of a fall from a horse, a difficult pregnancy ... More about this period in the life of a wonderful Soviet director, whose life was tragically cut short in the 42nd year, can be read here. Literally ill with the idea of ​​making a film based on Bykov's story, Larisa Shepitko turned to her friend, screenwriter Yuri Klepikov, with a request to write a script. Written by Klepikov and carefully edited by Larisa Shepitko herself, the script was submitted in 1973 for approval to Goskino. Where it was immediately rejected as a "religious parable with a mystical tinge", which means sedition according to Soviet concepts. But Larisa Shepitko managed to win over some authoritative figures of Soviet culture and cinema, and as a result, on January 6, 1974, the shooting of the picture began.
But with the start of filming, the misadventures of the picture did not end. After filming was completed, the film had a real chance of being shelved, like so many other genuine works of art. Especially the "cultural figures" from Goskino were irritated by the leading actor in the film, Boris Plotnikov. In the invitation of this actor of the Sverdlovsk Youth Theater for the role of Sotnikov, the Goskino functionaries saw the desire to "drag Jesus on the big screen." The husband of Larisa Shepitko, the director Elem Klimov, who at that time was starting to work on the film, which later received the name "Come and See", helped. This work brought Elem Klimov together with the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus, Pyotr Masherov, who, from the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, went to the front as a volunteer, and ended the war as one of the leaders of the partisan movement in Belarus. Klimov managed to invite Masherov to watch Shepitko's film. After watching Masherov, who cried during the film, delivered a 40-minute speech filled with the highest words about the film and its director. Goskino leadership could not oppose anything to this.
Moreover, 2 months after the premiere, Larisa Shepitko's film "The Ascent" represented Soviet cinema at the Berlin International Film Festival. The jury of this festival, chaired by the Austrian actress Senta Berger, awarded the film "The Ascent" the highest award - the Golden Bear. In addition to this award, the film received three more festival awards. Among the competitors of L.Shepitko's film in the fight for the main prize was Zoltán Fábri's masterpiece "Az ötödik pecsét (The Fifth Seal)". By the way, the famous Soviet-American-Russian film director Andrey Konchalovsky was a member of the jury of that festival.
Larisa Shepitko's film "The Ascent" was nominated by the Soviet Union for the Academy Award in the nomination Best Foreign Language Film. But the American Film Academy did not consider the picture worthy of inclusion in the short list of nominees. The film reviewer of Turner Classic Movies, a TV channel owned by WarnerMedia Corporation, Greg Ferrara called this decision "one of Oscar's most glaring omissions in the history of that particular award".
In his review of the picture of Larisa Shepitko , Greg Ferrara gave this assessment to this film:
"a jarring, brutal, relentless tale and also one of the best films of the entire decade from any country...Shepitko's war has little in common with either the Hollywood or British war films of the forties, fifties, and sixties and her soldiers and refugees live in a world that really does feel like it is surrounded by a world at war. Filmed on location, in unmistakable bitter cold, with no scenes of victory or heroic fighting, The Ascent feels like one of the very few war films that truly has removed all the glamour and romance from the picture, leaving a stark and unflinching reality. ... Today, its reputation has finally caught up with it and it is internationally recognized as one of the great works of world cinema and certainly one of the greatest and starkest portrayals of war to ever reach the big screen."
The review of one of the most authoritative Russian film critics Sergey Kudryavtsev seriously disagrees with this assessment of the American film critic. In his review of the film "The Ascent" Kudryavtsev writes:
"Shepitko... made a film about the act of self-sacrifice and the passing of the baton to the future generation, to that "boy in Budenovka" (and who would let him wear it under Nazi occupation?!), who "with tears in his eyes" perceives the heroic death of Sotnikov and those who, unfortunately, ended up with him in the same farm shed. And the tragic music of Alfred Schnittke cannot but cause the audience tears - but you understand with your mind that this scene in "The Ascent" is, in fact, a dubious example of the aestheticization of death, the insulting exaltation of senseless sacrifices for the sake of one tear of a boy in Budenovka, who supposedly will live well in his "tomorrow".... Only later did I learn that Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who has now become belatedly fashionable among our intellectuals, sharply objected to the award of the main prize to Larisa Shepitko's picture at the festival in West Berlin and even threatened to resign from the jury in protest. Probably, Fassbinder was able to feel much more strongly from the outside the moral falsity of the author's message of "The Ascent", where the influence of social mythology was never overcome.
After all, most of the heroes of Soviet cinema tend to die in spite of the enemies, tearing the last shirt (vest) on the body. And the state, built on the cult of entering paradise over corpses (Andrei Platonov predicted all this with amazing accuracy back in 1929 in his brilliant "The Foundation Pit"), is initially not viable. It is dead long before it takes its last breath after a painful death. But all sorts of "boys in budenovka", which continue to appear to this day, although the communist empire has already collapsed, are used to seeing on the screen stories of unjustified heroism, negligent and criminal attitude to the life of each individual. Soviet class humanism was in fact one of the most inhumane, including in relation to its own people. And it was he who turned out to be abstract, unlike the Western one, addressed to a specific person."
Larisa Shepitko's film "The Ascent" was not included among the rental leaders. During the first year of the demonstration, it gathered 10.7 million Soviet moviegoers in cinemas. And this is quite understandable: it is difficult for many viewers to watch films that are not related to comedies or melodramas. This is not "Yesenia", which two years before "The Ascent" gathered more than 91 million people in Soviet cinemas. But the estimates of the "The Ascent" of modern moviegoers, expressed in ratings posted on the IMDB and Kinopoisk websites, are much higher than 40 years ago. 75% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated Larisa Shepitko's film "The Ascent" from 8 to 10. And 25% of users - every fourth - rated the film with the highest score - "ten".
With that said, the rating of Larisa Shepitko's film "The Ascent" according to FilmGourmand version was 8,714, which allowed it to take the 239th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
