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Son of Glasnost: Alexandr Askoldov
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13632 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
2,960 Words |
| Author
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David Howard
David Howard writes on the arts and lives in Washington, D.C. |
For a filmmaker in the United States, "making a movie" is a relatively straightforward matter of finding a script, hiring some actors and technicians, rustling up some money, and proceeding to shoot. The marketplace--and the marketplace alone--will be the judge, artistically and financially, of the success of the effort.
To a filmmaker in the Soviet Union, however, these seemingly simple activities are only the beginning, as is demonstrated by the experience of Alexandr Askoldov, whose first and only film, Commissar, is beginning to be shown in the West. Although the film was completed in 1967, twenty years and the introduction of glasnost were needed before the film was considered "safe" for release in the USSR and elsewhere. One of the great showpieces of Washington's annual Filmfest DC this year, Commissar is an eloquent exploration of the conflicts between mother love and revolutionary duty; between the destruction of war and the hope of peace; and, ultimately, between the fundamental rights of the individual and those of the state.
The film is based loosely on the first work of fiction written by Vasily Grossmann (1905-1964), The Town of Berdichev (1934), a novella. Grossmann, a controversial figure himself, was a Soviet writer and war correspondent who covered both the Battle of Stalingrad and the liberation of Treblinka. His long-suppressed epic, which approaches Tolstoyan proportions, was itself only published in the West in 1986, under the title Life and Fate (Harper and Row). Grossmann's selection of Berdichev, his birthplace in the ancient Jewish Pale, furnished Askoldov with an ideal setting for his film, even though the film is only partly about Russian Jews and the town is not specifically identified in the film. Askoldov and Grossmann never met, although Askoldov did visit Grossmann's widow to ask permission to adapt the novella for his film.
The Bolshevik Revolution
The story unfolds during the civil war that engulfed Russia during the four years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution. Two factions struggled to claim the czars' legacy: The Reds, who ultimately prevailed, sought to impose the radical form of communism we know today, while the Whites, who were led by a group of former czarist officers, represented a spectrum of ideologies to the right. The war, romanticized by some (partisans, Cossacks, and Reds) and fought by others (the czar's defeated army, freebooters, and ideological fanatics of various stripes), ranged over the length and breadth of what became the Soviet Union. At
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