As their mission is stymied in episode after episode, they face the kind of desperate decisions a humane world would never require but that war demands as a constant.
We think we know these men, can predict their fates, one in a warm shearling hat and high leather boots, the other in army-issue infantry cap and woolen shoes. Exhausted, wounded, starving, frost-covered and out of ammunition, they send out roughened soldier Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) and pale former teacher Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) to secure supplies from the nearest farm.
1 When human beings finally appear in the black-and-white winterscape, it jolts the eye and quickens the heart.Īn urgent handheld camera takes over as partisans and villagers fleeing from Nazis emerge from folds in the snow banks to take cover in a nearby wood. The Ascent’s world, however, is not bounty but desolation, “a minimalist study in white on white,” as Jane Costlow aptly describes the film’s cinematography. Shot almost entirely outdoors at the height of the Russian winter, The Ascent opens with long shots of a blizzard-battered world, broken only by sketchbook outlines of village roofs and tilted telegraph poles – a direct quotation from Zemlya ( Earth, 1930), directed by Shepitko’s mentor and fellow Ukrainian filmmaker Aleksandr Dovzhenko, who punctuated undulating wheatfields with a similar row of off-kilter poles. The breathless immediacy of Voskhozhdeniye ( The Ascent, Larisa Shepitko, 1977), adapted from a novella by Vasily Bykov about two Belarusian partisans during World War II, combines with a profound understanding of human vulnerability to make the film, Shepitko’s last, a masterpiece of war cinema.
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