Commissar (Kommissar)

Twenty years ago, Aleksandr Askoldov was preparing to take his film Commissar to the San Francisco Film Festival when his work was banned and he was dismissed from Gorky Studio in Moscow for "professional inadequacies." Though this was Askoldov's first and last film, he had, according to Sight and Sound's William Fisher, "mastered a poetic, civic-minded style that reanimated the tradition of Dovzhenko and Eisenstein." The story is set in the 1920s, when the Red Army was still busy with skirmishes in the far reaches of the Soviet Union. The hardcore leader of one of these fighting units is a woman commissar, Klavdia, totally dedicated to the cause. Oddly, she gets pregnant, finally telling her second-in-command (played by a young Vasily Shukshin) of her plight. Klavdia finds lodging in the bedraggled house of a large Jewish family and gives birth in a feverish scene where she imagines horses dragging a cannon through the desert. Once the baby is born, Klavdia is a new woman-gentle, feminine, protective of her neonate. Commissar is filled with dazzling expressionistic scenes that are rendered in astonishing widescreen images by cinematographer Valeri Ginzberg. Aesthetic innovation aside, it has been said that Askoldov's foregrounding of a Jewish protagonist and his clear indictment of Soviet anti-Semitism brought his promising career to an abrupt halt. Commissar recently screened at the '88 S.F. Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival where it won the Silver Bear Award.