In the Fog (V Tumane)

IN THE FOG (V Tumane)                   B          
Russia  Belarus  Latvia  Germany  Netherlands  (127 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Sergei Loznitsa

Official site 

Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for those men, whose souls are of barbarian nature.

—Sergei Loznitsna, film director quoting pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus

Not sure how this film qualifies to play in the European Union Fest, as this is a decisively Russian-Belarus filmmaker, neither country members of the EU, though much of the film was shot in Latvia, the supposed country of EU origin.  Ironically the filmmaker has moved to Germany, a country with one of the best run and most efficient state-assisted cinema programs in all of Europe, allowing him to make films that would be impossible to make in Russia, also helping to produce the financing for his films.  It’s the Russians, however, that have a fondness for their own history and that of the former Soviet territories, where they never forget the terrible price paid in human lives to keep the Germans from overrunning Moscow and Stalingrad in World War II, coming within 20 miles of Moscow before the Russian lines finally held.  Over the course of the war they eventually lost anywhere from 22 to 26 million dead, 15 – 20 % of their entire population defending their nation.  Nearly every family was affected by this kind of dramatic impact, leaving behind for generations to come the terrible scars of history, where no one makes films about this era with more wretched misery than the Russians, who suffered tremendously through this unimaginable horror, perhaps best represented by The Five Best Soviet Era War Films.  Like Trial On the Road (Proverka na dorogakh) (1971), The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1976), and Come and See (Idi i smotri) (1985), all set in Belarus and all steeped in the psychological horrors of World War II when the occupying Nazi forces applied a scorched earth policy, burning Belarusian villages to the ground, slaughtering all the inhabitants, literally attempting to wipe Russians off the face of the earth, leaving whatever civilians that survived to starve or die of exposure to the cold.  Carrying the historical weight of Russian history, where more than two million were killed defending the western territory of Belarus, this is a slow moving, morally conflicted, bleak interior drama that takes place far from the front lines, where in the masterful opening shot, out of stillness heads rise out of the lower edge of a snowy forest, as we see German soldiers on horseback marching Russian prisoners into a small Belarusian village to the stare of onlookers.  After a long offscreen pronouncement, set to a slow 180 degree pan, suggesting anyone aiding or abetting those defying the prevailing German order would be shot, the order is given for the men to be publicly hanged.  

   

IN THE FOG is an existential parable much like Malick’s THE THIN RED LINE (1998), an anguished requiem for the dead where the experience of watching the film subjectively involves the viewer in a partnership with history, becoming a transforming meeting of the minds that elevates one’s understanding of events.  Told out of sequence, Loznitsa constructs a war film with no war action, a long, slow slog into the psychological descent into the madness of war, shot with cinematic depth by the same guy (Oleg Mutu) who filmed Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (După dealuri) (2012), supposedly only 72 shots in a little over two hours, where comrades turn against comrades, suspecting there is among them a collaborator for the other side, where there is slow pacing, no musical score, and an intense, interior moral dilemma about what to do.  Its release comes at an interesting time in modern Russian history, where a film about Russian “morality” is an ironic choice during the reinstatement of the dictatorial, KGB-like police state reign of Vladimir Putin.  Perhaps not as intricately constructed as Loznitsa’s earlier brutal road movie My Joy (Schastye moe) (2010), which allowed just the briefest sliver of light, in both mood is paramount to character, told in long takes with near documentary precision through mostly empty, snowy landscapes, an existential journey following two or three characters as they make their way behind enemy lines through the natural protection of the dense forests.  The story concerns Sushenya (Vladimir Svirski), whose story remains a shrouded mystery lost in the fog, revealed only near the end in flashback for the audience’s benefit, where no one in the film ever hears it.  This is the kind of history, personal, family, and national, that gets lost during wartime.  Based on a novel by Belarusian writer Vasily Bykov, Sushenya is a local railroad worker for nearly thirty years, ordered by his boss to continue working for the Germans or he’d be killed, so what real choice does he have?  

Sushenya could just as easily be anybody, as all fell victim to circumstances beyond their control, and he is sympathetically portrayed throughout as he makes his way through a hellish landscape that continually leaves him no choice.  Accused of being a German collaborator, two Soviet partisans arrive out of the forest to execute him, one a lifelong friend who takes no pleasure in his duty.  Instead it’s his friend that is shot and severely wounded in an unexpected ambush, where Sushenya is forced to carry him on his back in an absurdist Sisyphus reference as they attempt to make their way to safety.  Despite their partisan loyalties, each man is viewed traveling this isolated journey alone, as that is how they will be judged by history, expressed through extended minimalist sequences of long shots trekking through the wintry forest where man is nearly inconsequential, a mere solitary speck, engulfed in the immense natural landscape and of time immemorial.  Sushenya is continually judged by others, Nazi’s and partisans, even his own family, where during wartime, a full accounting of the truth never comes out until the distance of time passes and people can objectively investigate facts, circumstances and allegations.  But during the imposition of unspeakable violence and the blurry events of war, everything comes down to immediate perceptions, where Sushenya can’t believe why his wife or his lifelong friends would choose to believe the German accounts rather than his own, doubting his pleas of innocence, somehow forgetting everything that they ever knew about him because of an accusation from Nazi criminals and cutthroat murderers.  All that he knows about humanity quickly spins on its ear, where everything that matters is suddenly gone forever, leaving him in a state of abject misery and horror.  This kind of nightmarish journey takes us to the other side of darkness where the end of the world is near, very similar to the coming apocalypse expressed in Béla Tarr’s last film The Turin Horse (2011).  While Tarr visually expresses the external reality, Loznitsa explores the last gasp, the internalized personal anguish of all light going out of the world, and, if not for Loznitsa and this film, all would be forgotten.

Come and See (Idi i smotri)

Elem Klimov and his wife Larisa Shepitko









COME AND SEE (Idi i smotri)                        A-                   

Russia  (140 mi)  1985  d:  Elem Klimov

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
 
—Revelations 7-8

Both physically attractive and both filmmakers, Klimov and Larisa Shepitko were married shortly after film school where each were hailed as major new talents.  But after the post-Stalinist cultural thaw came to an end in the late 60’s, they found it increasingly difficult to find work, where there was a greater duration between films, which came under increasing scrutiny, with multiple demands for cuts and outright censorship.  When Shepitko’s film The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1976) won the Golden Bear 1st Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, she was on the verge of international recognition and acclaim, but unfortunately was killed in a car accident in 1979 while working on her next film (which Klimov completed), an exclamation point symbolizing the end of a remarkable generation of Soviet filmmakers.  Like Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov before him, Klimov was forced to leave the Soviet Union, spending more time battling the Soviet film authorities than making films, eventually driven away out of frustration, never making another film after COME AND SEE, which won the Moscow Festival Gold Prize Award in 1985.

Like The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye), this is a painful and haunting film set during the 3-year Nazi occupation of Belarus in 1943, generally regarded as the most graphically realistic war film ever, bar none, especially vivid in depicting the atrocities of war, notable for its searing poetic intensity, which opens with an old man’s mystical declaration of impending doom, followed by a brief interlude of innocence between a young 12-year old boy and a young girl, Florya and Glasha (Aleksey Kravchenko and Olga Mironova), but after a glimpse of a German bomber flying overhead, something like an angel of death, bombs drop, the earth explodes, the young boy temporarily loses his hearing and then bears witness to the horrors of war, joining the partisan resistance movement against the Nazi’s.  Adapting a screenplay by Ales Adamovich, the film plays out like a road movie taking us through the gates of Hell, given an autobiographical sense of immediacy and authenticity, where we witness the destruction of innocence by the devastation of war.

Initially the Nazi’s are nowhere to be seen, but their presence can be felt everywhere in the frequent eruptions of gunfire and in the death and destruction left in their wake.  Much of the imagery feels dreamlike or like nightmarish hallucinations, such as the slowly evolving scene where he and the girl fight their way through a muddy swamp that nearly engulfs them, the initial horror of seeing herded, starving people, his neighbors, with nowhere to go, seen almost as corpses or ghosts in a fog, as he wanders through the countryside in search of food, finding a cow, but the animal is shot and killed in the crossfire of stray bullets that appear as laser beams across an open field.  He discovers one house with all the neighboring people huddled inside, a shockingly dreadful scene of terror made even more horrible by the arrival of the Nazi’s who round up all the people in the countryside, herd them into a church, lock them inside, and then burn them alive while they feast and get drunk, even take photographs, like it’s a fully entertaining and festive occasion, the season of the sadists.  This film was produced to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Russian triumph over the Nazi’s, but in 1943 as the Nazi’s retreated from Ukraine and Belarus, they applied a scorched earth policy, burning 628 Belarussian villages to the ground, slaughtering all the inhabitants, literally trying to wipe these Russian people off the face of the earth, where it was impossible to view this film in 2001 and not think of the recent Serbian excursion into Kosovo.  Despite all efforts to teach and remember and learn, history repeats itself.     

A film of utter horror and confusion, the last hour of the film is truly mesmerizing and is a great cinematic exhibition, but there are also excessively agonizing moments where the director over accentuates the anguish and despair, including lingering shots of corpses in death camps and large, expressionist facial close-ups, where both Florya and Glasha’s childlike faces have evolved into grimy portraits revealing the shocking aftereffects of war, becoming brutalized masks of horror.  The images are powerful enough, but the silent over-acting depicting traumatizing moments of horror and grief only exaggerates the painstaking authenticity displayed in the earlier build up of the film.  While graphically intense, it lacks the inner psychological complexity of his wife’s film The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye), which examines not just the visualized outer horrors, but Shepitko uses equally searing images to reflect the insanity within.  Compare the faces of children in the two films, where Klimov dramatically shows the exterior tears and horror, while Shepitko on the other hand goes for that haunted, ghost-like look, finding poetry in the faces of the walking dead, contrasting those about to die with those forced to bear witness, where an underlying hatred seems to be spawning in the next generation.  The ending of The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye), which doesn’t spare the lives of children, is literally unbearable, and is a beautiful companion to this film, which feels more like an apocalyptic wrath of God where the beasts of the earth are unleashed.   

The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye)

Larisa Shepitko with cinematographer Vladimir Chukhnov








THE ASCENT (Voskhozhdeniye)                    A                    

Russia  (111 mi)  1976  d:  Larisa Shepitko

Shepitko, who died in a car accident a few years after making this film, is the wife of Russian filmmaker Elem Klimov, who directed the more commercially known film Come and See (Idi i smotri) (1984), generally regarded the most graphically realistic war film ever, bar none, notable for its searing poetic intensity, but perhaps lacks the inner complexity of this even greater Russian film, arguably the best Soviet era war film ever made that examines not just the graphic outer horrors, but Shepitko finds truly inspiring images focusing on individuals or small groups of characters that reflect the absolute insanity taking place inside these human beings, the ending of which is simply awe-inspiring.  Set in Belarus, bullets are flying and bodies are dying in a gun skirmish over the opening credits, where the intensity of the film never lets up throughout the duration, focusing on grim faces, worn out soldiers with next to nothing to eat, a terrified population under occupation, starving children with petrified mothers, all cast in an immense landscape of endless white snow.  Like The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli) (1957), this features a Russian army in retreat, a traumatizing shock early in the war when they were nearly wiped out.  The Russian countryside has been overrun by German Nazi’s who are terrorizing the citizens, stealing what food they have, forcing them under duress to become their informant eyes and ears.  What Russian soldiers are left hide under cover of forests, but are forced to send food expeditions out to neighboring farms.  This film follows two soldiers that from the outset are on a near impossible mission, as there’s little food left anywhere in the dead of winter.  One is healthy and fit, Vladimir Gostyukhin as Rybak, while the other, Boris Plotnikov as Sotnikov, is slowed down by a tubercular sounding cough and eventually a bullet in his leg that nearly leaves him for dead, but his partner heroically rescues him.  As they step through knee deep snow drifts, crawling at some points with insufficient protection against the harsh elements, like so many other Russian films, nature itself becomes their toughest foe.  

Everything is reduced to a matter of survival.  When they reach their destination, the farm has been demolished and left in a state of rubble, pushing forward into German occupied territory where the next farm is manned by an elderly Soviet collaborator who fears Nazi retribution.  The partisan soldiers think him a coward but move on, where they are eventually captured and brought to a Nazi camp in a nearby town and held as prisoners, along with a proud and protective mother (Lyudmila Polyakova) who helped hide them.  Tarkovsky stalwart Anatoliy Solonitsyn appears as Portnov the interrogator, a Russian teacher from a nearby academy turned Nazi sympathizer.  Russians torturing and executing fellow Russians is the depth of war depravity and Solonitsyn is brilliant in a despicable role he’s perfectly suited for.  From what we can see, as Nazi officers chat jovially in close proximity to one another, he is an outsider even among this group, seen instead as a kind of gruesome black-cloaked undertaker who routinely sends men to their graves.  The audience is not spared from witnessing acts of torture to Sotnikov, who offers nothing but contempt, while Rybak speaks freely, hoping to save his life, but both are condemned to die, though Rybak is offered a chance to serve the German Reich as a police agent.  The mother, the elderly collaborator, and a child are added to this group, spending one last night together alive where together they discuss the merits of a soldier’s mission, of being a patriot, a mother, a coward, or a collaborator.  Each seems individually driven by a desperate need to survive, but Sotnikov offers himself as a selfless example, attempting to confess his guilt to spare the others, where the aptly chosen title reflects his (and his nation’s) spiritual redemption.

By the next morning, Portnov seems mildly amused, mocking them at their sudden willingness to talk, but spares no one except Rybak, who changes sides to keep his life, rationalizing in his thoughts that if he’s alive, at least he has a chance to escape.  But there is no escape—not from this torment.  What happens is shown with exquisite delicacy and poetic grace, an elegy, a remembrance of the dead, as we witness the treachery of war without a single shot being fired, as the execution by hanging is turned into a public spectacle, where the villagers at the point of a gun are forced to witness.  The pace and harrowing interior intensity of this film is relentless, as there is never a moment without impending menace, gorgeously shot by Vladimir Chukhnov (who died in the same tragic car accident as Shepitko), featuring perfectly composed landscapes and plenty of camera movement, much of it at close range showing the visceral physicality of exhaustive effort, such as the single extended take of Rybak’s rescue of Sotnikov, breath by breath, foot by foot, literally dragging him through the snow, but also using portraitures, especially that of a fierce young boy at the end who eyes the condemned men, the next generation making a surreal sympathetic connection without any words being spoken, accentuated by the psychologically horrific music of Alfred Shnittke which resembles the transcendent yet furiously disturbing monolith music from Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968).  The sound design of this film is highly advanced and uniquely modern, where the use of offscreen sound continually exposes the raw nerves of each moment, dogs barking, wind blowing, bullets firing, nearby Nazi’s chattering in untranslated German or laughing sadistically at their helplessness, which only ratchets up the hideous tension to insane heights.  In many ways resembling Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928), utter insanity is exposed here, the relentless realization that you have no choice, yet you are forced to make one anyway.  The nightmarish inner thoughts at the end are expressed wordlessly, where the nobility of the dead speaks volumes, where voices continue to reverberate inside the heads of the living like an explosion of neverending echoes, yet only silence fills the crisp wintry air with a mournful reverence and a profound sense of loss.   

Trial On the Road (Proverka na dorogakh)

TRIAL ON THE ROAD (Proverka na dorogakh)        A                    

Russia  (96 mi)  1971  ‘Scope  d:  Aleksei German

Set during the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest battles in history leaving nearly two million dead, this is an uncommonly bleak war film, but one which perfectly captures the mood of Russian starvation and deprivation during the 3-year Nazi occupation of Belarus, exactly the same region portrayed in Elem Klimov's Come and See (Idi i smotri) (1985), where the German Army devoted 50,000 troops to rounding up and killing Jews, where somewhere between one and two million Soviet Jews were killed, also many thousands of Soviet civilians were executed, while millions died of starvation.  As they retreated from Ukraine and Belarus, the German occupiers applied a scorched earth policy, burning Belarusian villages to the ground, slaughtering all the inhabitants, literally attempting to wipe Russians off the face of the earth, leaving whatever civilians that survived to starve or die of exposure to the cold.  The maltreatment of the local population from this sadistically planned death march contributed to rising factions allied against the Nazi’s, including many non-Russian nationalists and anti-communists who allied with the Soviet partisans.  This film reflects some of that torn allegiance, based on a story Operation Happy New Year! inspired by real events documented by the director’s father Yuri, a friend of Gorky, also a playwright and war reporter, where the main character is a Junior Sergeant in the Red Army, Lazarev (Vladimir Zamanskiy), who in the early stages of World War II defects to the Nazi’s under mysterious circumstances, claiming he was forced along with many others, but by the winter of 1942 he turns himself back over to the Russian partisans, where he remains under intense scrutiny.  So long as he’s useful and can perform under duress, he’s welcomed by the more benevolent commander Lieutenant Lokotkov (Rolan Bykov), who may have a special assignment for him, while the more disciplined Party enforcer and most likely member of the secret police, is Major Petushkov, played by Tarkovsky favorite Anatoliy Solonitsyn, an intolerant and overly strict officer that repeatedly places him under arrest, continually testing his psychological fortitude.

The film was banned for 15 years due to the morally conflicted lead Russian character whose actions are paramount to wartime treason, hardly a fit example according to the teachings of the Party, remaining shelved until Party Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev released the film under the more lenient terms of glasnost.  The film joins the ranks of several other major Russian war masterpieces, Kalatozov’s eye-opening The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli) (1957) or Larisa Shepitko’s (Elem Klimov’s wife) psychologically disturbing The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1977), each one challenging the Stalinist conception of what constitutes a Russian hero during wartime.  Perhaps the only character that fills the traditional role of Soviet hero is Petushkov, a Stalinist seen wearing a Chekist cap, the insignia of the secret police, but in the film, he comes across as severely intolerant and narrow minded, refusing to even consider the possibility that Lazarev is anything but a traitor to his country and deserves to be shot.  His view is reflected after the war, where the routine prison sentence for those who fought for the other side was 10 to 25 years, no questions asked, even when guns were pointed at their heads to force compliance.  This strict adherence to order (when there was no order) is more reminiscent of German ideology, refusing to consider the madness of war, where often decisions are made at the barrel of a gun, or perhaps to save someone else’s life, where a refusal to even look at the underlying psychological implications of changing sides seems to be incompatible with bravery or true heroism.  More likely the film takes notice of the small pleasures of Lokotkov, the everyday, ordinary man, often seen soaking his feet in hot water after a day spent marching through the snow, or enjoying a joke with his fellow soldiers, where he was a local policeman before the war, a man used to sizing up people during interrogations, where despite his previous errant behavior, he doesn’t view Lazarev as a threat to his men, but keeps a close eye on him.  His way of dealing with the situation is assigning the man hard work, where his performance will be duly noted.  The conflict between the two Russian officers is a major theme of the film, constantly probing for the existence of humanity during wartime. 

The film opens in a downpour of rain, where the austere realism couldn’t be more downbeat, reflecting the grim weariness of war, as soldiers are forced to move tanks and heavy artillery through oceans of mud, where they never dry off, leading to a deplorable mental state while also succumbing to a kind of battle rot that literally inhabits their bodies.  This  is one of the better films highlighting the extreme conditions of battle, including the paralyzing Soviet winter that precipitated massive fatalities on both sides due to starvation and freezing, literally taking the viewer into the heart of a small group of Russian partisans knee deep in the forest snows, occasionally making ambushes on the road, stealing whatever guns or provisions they can find, often surrounded by heavy woods, where they make their camp among the birch trees.  What follows afterwards is another isolated shot of a rural farmhouse where a woman (Maya Bulgakova) lives with two small children with no food or livestock, all stolen long ago, where her deteriorating state of mind leaves her in a paralyzed state of near madness, cursing the soldiers before following after them, as they are her only choice for survival.  From out of the woods, a lone soldier in a German uniform overpowers a young Russian partisan, but then hands him his rifle and turns himself in.  Thus begins a snowy and often bewildering journey of whether or not a man can clear his conscience and redeem the mistakes he’s made in his life.  Initially set for the firing squad, they have to move camp instantly due to an unexpected emergency, expressed in an eerie morning scene in the fog when marching German soldiers appear out of the fog, seen as silhouettes lining the entire landscape.  

Given a second chance, Lazarev has an opportunity to prove himself on the road, assassinating two Germans by himself, but when one gets a shot off before he dies, killing one of his Russian compatriots, Petushkov is sure the bullet was Lazarev’s, implicating him in murder even after risking his life, sending him into a tailspin of depression where he literally attempts suicide.  It is Lokotkov that slowly brings him back to life, giving him a chance to erase his disloyalty, but under no illusions about having betrayed his nation, where by now the terms hero and traitor have little significant meaning any more, where in the moral ambiguity of war it’s hard enough just to survive, sending him out on a still more dangerous mission, as they need to re-route a German supply train that can help feed his starving troops.  The film is interspersed with an absolutely haunting use of Russian music from Isaak Shvarts, who composed music for nearly 100 films, where one of the most unforgettable shots is seeing a barge packed with Russian POW’s as they float effortlessly down the river while the German guards play Russian music, where Lokotkov is perched overhead, set to blow up a German train crossing the bridge over the river, but he refuses to do so if it means killing so many Russian POW’s directly below when the train passes, where his refusal to act is in itself an act of courage.  The extended finale is a dazzling set piece in the snow, much of it seen from the vantage point of a watch tower, featuring tracking shots in and around the trains, also plenty of handheld camerawork from Lev Kolganov, B. Aleksandrovsky, and Yakov Skylansky, creating what is easily the most dramatic action sequence in the director’s career.  The film is considered the greatest Soviet feature film debut since Tarkovsky’s harrowing first film Ivan's Childhood (1962).

The Five Best Soviet Era War Films

Stalingrad, February 1942

Five Best Soviet Era War Films 

There’s an interesting article written recently by Michael Sontheimer from Der Spiegel that contains historical accounts from interviews of Russian soldiers directly after the Battle of Stalingrad, only recently released from the Russian archives, dated November 2, 2012

An Inside Look at World War II's Bloodiest Battle 

Over the next few days, a different choice will be posted each day.  This should be an interesting challenge, where the theme will be restricted to WWII, since the most horrific human conditions imaginable occurred during that part of Russia’s past.  Some of the most grim and unforgettable war images come from Soviet era war films, as none were bleaker and more miserable, matching their wretched history, as Russia lost 15 – 20% of their entire population, and anywhere from 22 to 26 million deaths overall, not to mention captured soldiers, the injured, or the missing, to keep the Germans from overrunning Moscow and Stalingrad in World War II, coming within 20 miles of Moscow, which is something unfathomable to Western sensibilities and perceptions, but the extreme degree of misery and loss is the essential ingredient in understanding Soviet war films.  In contrast, America lost less than half a million war dead in WWII, and 58,000 in Vietnam.  It’s probably fair to say the fatalistic bleakness of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr comes from the Soviet sensibility, where humans under extreme duress were challenged to such an unheard of degree that hopeless futility was common, where the spirit was literally sucked right out of a people, when all odds were continually against them.  This was an era when people were expected to do the impossible, survive the harsh winter elements on no food or worn out boots, or maintain their health and spirits when people all around them are dying, not to mention have the fortitude to endure the many psychological tests, such as poor leadership, or the many secret police interrogations which are all part of the war experience.  Perhaps the most uniquely defining element captured in these films is the psychological complexity of understanding the dread and fear of the characters seen onscreen, who are unlike those in any other era, where the idea of surviving the madness of it all is an enduring testament of humanity.