I'd like to try to place Commissar in some kind of context. Aleksandr Askoldov directed only this one film -- for which he was banned from making any other -- but his cinematographer, Valeri Ginzburg, had already worked on movie productions since the 1950s; he continued to do so into the 1990s.
The look and feel of Commissar (remembering that it's in black and white) reminds me in a very good way of works by a number of other great filmmakers and their production teams. For example, Fernando de Fuentes' Mexican Revolution tales; Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini (intense, sometimes surreally-tinged studies of families and people in various tense situations interacting with each other); and Sergio Leone via integration of music, sound effects and action. The story itself has a similar framework as Philippe de Broca's Le Roi de Cœur (1966) with protaganist hiding inside a town or city in between lines, leading the audience to question the sanity of mass humanity. King of Hearts is set in World War One, immediately preceding the Russian Civil War period in which Commissar is set. Whether it influenced Askoldov directly is hard to say: such feelings and worldviews among artists seem to have been part of the convulsive 1960s Zeitgeist, time ghost or spirit of the times -- even before the era's 1968 global crescendo and regardless of country or dialect.
Today's Rune: Harvest.
1 comment:
Maybe this summer I'll have to try to have a look at this.
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