KOMISSAR - Film (Movie) Plot and Review

Source: Film Reference

Cast: Nonna Mordyukova; Rolan Bykov; Lyudmila Volynskaya; Vasily Shukshin; Raisa Nedashkovskaya

When director Aleksandr Askoldov completed his first and only feature, The Commissar, in 1967, it was immediately banned and he was blacklisted as a film director. In December of 1987, in an atmosphere of glasnost, The Commissar was permitted a showing in Moscow and soon received international attention and critical praise. The film, based on the story "In the Town of Berdichev" by Vasily Grossman, is about love, war, maternity and betrayal, and presents a frightening foreshadowing of the Holocaust.

The pregnant commissar of a Red Army unit, Klavdia Vavilova, enters the town of Berdichev at the head of her battalion and shoots a deserter who had escaped home to his wife. While occupying the town, this hard-edged, dedicated Bolshevik must tell her second-in-command that she must leave the Army because she is pregnant. The home of a Jewish tinsmith and his wife, mother-in-law and six children is commandeered for her confinement, and the commissar and her baby become assimilated into this family. A friendship develops between Klavdia and Raisa, the tinsmith's wife, and both begin to adopt characteristics of the other. After her baby is born, the commissar becomes nurturing, gentle, and protective of her child, while, Raisa, the tinsmith's wife, begins to assert her individuality. Realizing the fragility of new life and responsibilities of motherhood, Klavdia questions whether the consequences of war are too costly for her to return to battle. She finally decides to resume her duties as commissar and leaves her infant with the Jewish family.

The film has elements of warmth and humor as the tough commissar clashes with the gentle tinker, and as they eventually develop a strong bond. The large loving family represents a nurturing Jewish ethic, which Askoldov contrasts with the uncompromising Russian will to conquer in the name of universal justice. The Jewish family is treated sympathetically, but as William Wolf asserts in Film Comment, "Paying special attention to the persecution of Jews has long conflicted with the Soviet policy of downplaying Jewish identity."

The film was banned due to tension derived from the Soviet Union's troubled history with Jews and Askoldov's refusal to change or remove any part of the film which exposes anti-Semitism and portrays the military unfavorably. Anne Williamson stated in Film Comment (May/June 1988): "In 1967, just as Israel had triumphed in the Six Day War, Askoldov was finishing the edit on The Commissar, which sympathetically portrays a Jewish family. Soviet censors realized that scenes like the commissar's vision of the future Holocaust and of the Magazanik family being led to the gas chambers hinted darkly at a connection between Nazism and Russian anti-Semitism and could possibly remind audiences of Stalin's appeasement of Hitler." In addition to the powerful flash forward of the family members trudging along to their impending terrifying demise, the film includes a disturbing child's fantasy of a pogrom. As Louis Menashe suggests in Cineaste, 1989, "What appears to be Askoldov's preference for humanism over Bolshevism probably contributed to official wrath toward the film."

The Commissar was produced at the Gorky Studio, which rejected the finished product as its "greatest political and esthetic failure." Askoldov was fired for incompetence and the film was destroyed. But Gorbachev's policy of glasnost led to a revolution in Russia's film industry and many blacklisted films reemerged. In May, 1986, conservatives were ousted from the leadership of the Soviet Filmmakers Union and control over the movie industry shifted from the state bureaucracy to the union's new leaders—directors whose films had been shelved in the past. Askoldov was given permission to search for his film in the state archives, and he found a print in a damp cellar. The black-and-white film had been partially destroyed, but Askoldov restored it by piecing together various copies.

The Commissar is visually striking and incorporates features of Askoldov's great predecessors. Williamson identifies a brilliant metaphor in the cross-cutting of soldiers and sees Vsevolod Pudovkin's sense of realism as Klavdia struggles to push a cannon up a hill of sand and in the birth sequence. The rhythm and energy of Sergei Eisenstein are evoked in the scene of the caravan in which the commissar's revolutionary lover dies a gallant death. Brian Johnson notes in his article in Maclean's (26 September 1988): "Askoldov broke the fetters of the socialist realism that prevailed at the time of the film's release with fluid camerawork and dreamlike scenes of cavalry horses galloping riderless across a battlefield." The clarity of the images and varying pace of editing offers moments enhanced by an excited tempo as well as those reserved for reflection and contemplation.

—Kelly Otter

Soviet film director Aleksandr Askoldov

"Komissar" – 1967, Aleksandr Askoldov

Source: February 28, 2012 by wondersinthedark

by Allan Fish (USSR 1967 108m)

The film won the Silver Bear-Special Jury Prize at the 38^th Berlin International Film Festival in 1988 and several other international awards as well.

Aka "The Commissar"

The trams will never be running

He was only a boy of five when he became an effective orphan. Hard to imagine, having to stand back and watch your mother taken away by officials (and your father, veteran of the eastern front and the Civil War having 'gone ahead' [as victims of the Stalinist purges in 1939]), and to hear the words "come back for the boy later." Credit to the boy for having the gumption to realise that he needed to get out of there, even though it's not yet dawn and dark outside, and make his way to the house of friends of his parents, where he was hidden—[with a Jewish] family [who] years later [would] themselves disappear in the Holocaust. 

Thirty years later that little boy Aleksandr was making his first film, so it's more than understandable what events in his life would influence him. He took a propagandist story by Vasily Grossman and transformed it into a film which would prove the most incendiary Soviet work of its generation. It was dismissed, booed, banned and derided upon its first showing, Askoldov himself not only losing his director's license but being thrown out of the party. He could so easily have been made to 'disappear' himself, but he hung in there, amidst the derision. 

Then in the late eighties came Glasnost and so many films shelved by the Soviet authorities during the Cold War were given the light of day and a projector . . . and all were enthusiastically received. Yet it wasn't until a Moscow Film Festival, when Askoldov himself had to witness the lie that all banned films were now liberated, that he spoke up and told the masses of western press and filmmakers that there was one film that wasn't seen. Finally, it would begrudgingly get its day in the sunlight. The day became weeks, months, awards from film festivals and august bodies alike, but still he was never allowed to make another film. 

In itself it's a simple tale, of a Red Army cavalry officer who just happens to be a woman, and a pregnant woman, too. How she came to be pregnant and who is left to her own delirious dreams in the throes of labor, what's important is how she comes to stay with a Jewish family and question the very nature of the superiority of an ideology. 

There hadn't been many pictures of real note about the Russian Civil War . . . so the subject itself is arresting from the start. And what an opening; a boy wandering around a desert town with its Russian Orthodox church in a way to make it look like a Borsch western. Those visuals give way to a style, if not rhythm, that owed more to [Hungarian surrealistic film director Miklós] Jancsó, such as an extended sequence of cavalry horses running past abandoned ploughs to the incessant accompaniment of machine gun fire. In another scene, siblings play at re-enacted pogroms in a way to make the blood turn cold. Yet even that pales beside the sequence when the screen turns red in hue, tinting like in the old silent [films]. The symbolism of blood becomes crystal clear. In what may be a premonition or merely a nightmare, the woman imagines hordes of Jews being shepherded into a narrow gateway. Men in painfully familiar striped pajamas look down on them. Back to monochrome outside the Jewish family's house, windows and doors boarded up with crossed planks, images of an earlier culling, of the red crosses of the great plagues of centuries earlier, while [the Commissar's] emergence from a shelter underground had undoubted resonance in the Cold War; a nuclear winter for a time when it wasn't even in the vocabulary. It's a deeply humanistic film from a society which repudiated it. "There's so few kind people left in the world", Yefim says. . . .