"Commissar" Comes Out of the Can
KENEZ, PETER
Culture Watching 'COMMISSAR' COMES OUT OF THE CAN BY PETER KENEZ It is fascinating to watch the enormous treasure box of the Soviet film censors gradually open. Not every suppressed movie,...
...Ultimately, as the Red Army retreats, she chooses to rejoin the Reds and leave her baby in the care of the Jewish family...
...But this past March Askoldov was permitted to attend the San Francisco Film Festival, where I saw his work...
...At times the film touches on the surreal: When the Commissar sentences the young soldier to be shot, an entire Army fires and he collapses—seemingly without being hit...
...a battle unit reaping empty air in the desert...
...Very likely that is how the scenario was sold to the relevant Soviet officials in the Gorky Studio, where the movie was made...
...She sees the Jews of the to wn, including Efim, wearing yellow stars and marching into Auschwitz...
...Through this method of presentation, Askoldov takes the guilt of the pogromist from a particular political party in a particular situation and places it on the shoulders of the Russian people...
...They are willing to give no concessions to anyone in this unannounced competition for martyrdom...
...She is also pregnant...
...It was only as a result of a confrontation at the Moscow Film Festival last July that Commissar was reluctantly given a few unpublicized screenings there before small audiences of foreigners and Soviet elite...
...It is scheduled to open June 10 in New York, and nationwide during the summer...
...First of all, the film contrasts Klavdia, a Russian and a Christian, with Efim and his family...
...Inhabitants of the sh tetls often followed the retreating Red Army not because they were attracted to Bolshevism, or won over by Bolshevik economic policies, but because the Red Army was the lesser of two evils...
...The last scene is poster-like and devoid of life: We see Klavdia marching with her comrades and carrying banners to the sound of the Internationale...
...Here Askoldov apologizes for his nation...
...Indeed, in Commissar the Jew becomes the quintessential victim...
...Nevertheless, in view of the masterpieces we are being allowed to see now, we probably have to revise our perceptions of Soviet filmmaking...
...There are rather excessive sequences, too, that the heroine hallucinates in the agony of birth: horses pulling a cannon, while she and soldiers push...
...Commissar was his first venture and he never had another chance...
...Abuladze, Klimov, Konchalovsky and Gherman, after all, remained among the best known and respected directors of the land...
...In addition, the Russians tend to jealously guard their claim of being the most abused people...
...Afterall,theBolsheviks,with rare exceptions, did not carry out pogroms...
...The characters are types more than individuals...
...Klavdia, while awaiting the arrival of the Whites, has a precognition of Nazi times...
...Aleksei Gherman's extraordinary My Friend, Ivan Lapshin was unacceptable because it gave a too faithful rendering of the dreadful material circumstances and mood in a little town in the 1930s...
...This is, as we shall show in a moment, a historically inaccurate proposition...
...Nonetheless Askoldov, a philo-Semitic Christian, made his task more difficult than it needed to be...
...Askoldov was then clearly a promising artist in search of his style...
...For them it was too experimental, too reminiscent of the often condemned "formalist" heresy...
...Nodoubt Rolan Bykov, who 20 years after playing the role of Efim directed the wonderful Scarecrow, consciously or unconsciously got the idea for a crucial scene in his film from Askoldov...
...it was more importantly a polemic against the survival of Stalinism today...
...None of those films was buried as deeply as Commissar, however, and no director has suffered as much for his daring as Aleksandr Askoldov...
...Askoldov is not explicit, yet it is clear that the director, who also wrote the screenplay, sides with the Jews...
...We meet her as she unceremoniously condemns to death a young soldier who had deserted in order to be with his wife...
...ElemKlimov's rather vulgar Agony, which tells the story of Rasputin, is hardly worthy of attention...
...His film is strangely ahistorical...
...We are confronted with the essence of the pogromist rather than with the real historical figure, who remains faceless...
...Remarkably for a commissar, she searches in vain for a priest to baptize the baby...
...A grandmother, uttering not a word in Russian, prays in Yiddish...
...Even during the Civil War, when the pogroms were occurring under White occupation, the Bolsheviks never attempted to exploit those atrocities for propaganda purposes...
...He presents the Jews as the only victims, and the Christians as the abusers...
...As we watch Klavdia giving birth, at least for a moment she becomes absorbed in motherhood: her features soften and she is almost beautiful...
...Only at the end, as Efim desperately runs after her, does he call her by the Russian diminutive, "Klavka...
...Hecallsfor an international of kind-hearted people...
...We know where the children learned the game and the awful words—which are all the more appalling for coming from the mouths of youngsters...
...Klavdia, on the other hand, is ready to abandon her child in the name of an idea...
...Klavdia and Efim are given an opportunity to develop their world views, and it is Efim who is more eloquent...
...Although she would like to have an abortion, it is too late...
...But it was not the esthetics, it was the subject matter and the message that made Commissar unacceptable in the era of Leonid I. Brezhnev...
...In retrospect the censors' decisions are not hard to understand...
...During World War II, the Soviet leadership devoted great effort to winning American Jewish support, and therefore publicized Nazi wrongdoings...
...It was not released for a number of years because it inadvertently created mild sympathy for the last tsar, Nicholas II...
...In real life, the greatest enemies of the Jews in the Ukraine were the Cossacks of General Anton I. Denikin, who killed perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews...
...Maria (Raisa Nedaskorskaya), the extraordinarily pretty mother, washes, irons, cooks, and takes care of the children...
...One wants to turn away...
...others are tiresome and hard to fathom...
...From his standpoint, who wins the Civil War is not of much consequence...
...The rest of the film records her increasingly close relations with her hosts...
...Someof these images are powerful and recall Aleksandr Dovzhenko...
...Klavdia is hard as nails...
...Efim (Rolan Bykov), the handyman who heads the household, speaks with a Jewish accent, makes Jewish self-deprecating jokes and expresses his joy and sadness in dance...
...See "Odyssey of a Soviet Filmmaker," p. 10.—Ed...
...But they did so exclusively for foreign audiences...
...the Commissar is cold and usually only the object of the attention of others...
...We, of course, know that the Jewish dead are remembered...
...The scenes of the children abusing oneof their own playmates are so powerful that they are almost unwatchable...
...She has to accept being furloughed and billeted with a local family...
...Not every suppressed movie, of course, is a memorable work of art...
...In their mind, somehow, there is an unquestioned and thus unexplained equation between suffering and virtue...
...Apparently the nerve is still raw...
...The atmosphere must have been somewhat freer than it appeared from the outside, for otherwise how could these films have been made in the first place...
...directors employing various styles produced much of permanent value...
...riderless horses charging, or fleeingtheenemy...
...Askoldov must have been familiar with Jan Kadar's Shop on Main Street (made in 1965), one of the few films from Eastern Europe that dealt with a Jewish topic, and that bordered on the surreal as well...
...Tengiz Abuladze's case is the most obvious...
...Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky's fine Asya's Happiness was kept "in the can" because it depicted the primitiveness of the Soviet countryside in the 1960s...
...The recent decades actually were extremely fruitful...
...They took the anti-Semitism of Russians and Ukrainians for granted...
...When she hesitates, exhibiting the feelings of a mother, singing to her baby, Efim says: "She is like a Jewish mother.' In this film to be human is to be Jewish...
...To their own people the authorities never made it clear that the Nazis had a particular policy against Jews...
...The film's scenario, based on a Vastly Grossman story, is simple and poignant...
...Occasionally the director lets us know he is not attempting a realistic depiction: During a brief respite from any military presence, the town is the scene of a marriage ceremony and the marketplace, considering that the Civil War is raging, is ridiculously full of goods...
...The film makes little attempt to establish verisimilitude...
...Throughout she addresses her hosts by their first names, while they call her "Madame Vavilova...
...by contrast, the Soviet Film Encyclopedia printed in 1987 does not even contain Askoldov's name...
...Commissar is, not surprisingly, very much in the spirit of the 1960s...
...It would be possible to interpret the story as the victory of revolutionary duty over all other attachments and obligations...
...Klavdia Vavilova (Nonna Mordukova) is the Commissar of a Red Army unit fighting in the Ukraine in 1919...
...He had touched a raw nerve...
...In an extraordinary soliloquy, Efim says that people will remember the Armenian victims of the Turks, but no one will remember the Jewish dead...
...They naturally resent the intrusion, yet their instinctive kindness takes over once they learn she is to have a baby...
...Commissar is the first and last Soviet film to date to show the suffering of the Jews as Jews...
...Peter Kenez, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz...
...His Repentance was not merely an attack on the USSR's dead tyrant...
...But only the most obtuse could come away from this film with such an impression...
...In Commissar we do not witness an actual pogrom: instead, the horror is conveyed with uncommon power in a game played by the children...
...Since the town is Berdichev, she is placed with Jews...
...Even if the authorities had no complaints about the content, they would have objected to the technique...
...He wants to be with his family, and he loves his wife and children...
...Remembered, that is, everywhere except in the Soviet Union...
...The Jews are depicted as warm, spontaneous and giving...
...Askoldov thereby ties the Ukrainian pogroms to the Holocaust...
...One is left to presume that the Soviet propagandists did not consider reporting the plight of the Jews good policy...
...After making his diploma film in 1 967, he was purged from the Party and for years could not get any job...
...When Soviet newsreels showed the liberation of death camps by the Red Army, they did not mention that the inmates were Jewish...
...It is the Jews who stand for a liveand-let-live attitude against Christian fanatics...
Vol. 71 • May 1988 • No. 8
