The Ascent () 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.
Plot During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), two Soviet partisans, Sotnikov and Rybak 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. Realizing he is about to be captured, he points a gun to his head to kill himself, but Rybak arrives just in time and takes him away. Rybak takes him to the nearest shelter, the home of Demchikha, 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 (Anatoly 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.
Cast Boris Plotnikov as Sotnikov Vladimir Gostyukhin as Rybak Sergei Yakovlev as Village elder Lyudmila Polyakova as Demchikha Viktoriya Goldentul as Basya Meyer Anatoly Solonitsyn as Portnov, the collaborationist interrogator Maria Vinogradova as Village elder's wife Nikolai Sektimenko as Stas'
Production
Pre-production
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 Shepitko it was a difficult time. By her own admission, for a period of four months the director was in "a monstrous mental and physical exhaustion." The realization of what was subsequently necessary came to her suddenly while she was recuperating at a Sochi sanatorium, but her creative plans were undermined by a disastrous fall, which resulted in a serious concussion and a spinal injury. For a few weeks Shepitko was confined to bed. The situation was also aggravated by the fact that she was pregnant, but she felt that during her pregnancy she came to understand the complexities of life more fully. Every day she was haunted by the possibility of death; reading the novel Sotnikov by Vasil Býkaŭ during this period helped Shepitko express this state on the silver screen.
Screenplay 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.
Beginning of production 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. Throughout her directing career, Shepitko only started working on a film if she felt that "if she does not do it, then she dies."
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. Shepitko retorted that she was not religious and that a story about betrayal was antediluvian. According to her, Judas and Jesus had always existed and that if the legend connected with people then this means that it was alive in every person. Officials met Schnittke's score with resistance and they ordered that the allusions to biblical texts be removed.
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.
Casting
Shepitko decided to use unknown or little-known actors whose past roles would not cast a shadow on their characters in The Ascent. Because of this, she rejected Andrey Myagkov, who wanted to act in the picture. The same fate befell Nikolai Gubenko. Vladimir Vysotsky, who yearned to play Rybakov, also did not pass selection. At the time when the castings for The Ascent were taking place, Vysotsky was starring in the film The Negro of Peter the Great. Production of that film took place at the Mosfilm sound stage, adjacent to where the auditions were being held, and during his breaks Vysotsky often went to see what was happening at Shepitko's sound stage.
From the beginning of the search for the actor who would play Sotnikov, Larisa Shepitko instructed Emma Baskakova, her casting assistant, to keep in mind the image of Christ, although it was impossible to mention this out loud. Boris Plotnikov, a 25-year-old actor of the Sverdlovsk Theater, turned out to be the best candidate for the role according to the director, but the officials of Goskino saw in Shepitko's plan the intention to put Jesus on to the Soviet screen. Plotnikov, whose repertoire until then largely included the roles of magical animals, even had to be made up for the purpose of greater glorification of the character so that the artistic council would approve him for the role. The actor went through seven test shots altogether for which he always had to fly to Moscow from Sverdlovsk.