Komissar
USSR,
1967, 110 min
Shown in 1988
CREDITS
- dir
-
Aleksandr Askoldov
- scr
-
Aleksandr Askoldov
- cam
-
Valeri Ginzberg
- cast
-
Nonna Mordyukova, Rolan Bykov, Raisa Niedashkovskaya
- prod co
-
Gorky Studio
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Aleksandr Askoldov in person.
OTHER
In 1967, a Soviet film director told a tale of Jewish life, Jewish suffering, Jewish bravery and Jewish fatalism in a movie about a Red Army commissar who finds herself living with a small-town Jewish family while civil war rages around them. The movie, Commissar, an indictment of anti-Semitism, was Aleksandr Askoldov’s first and last feature film. Shortly after its completion, Mr. Askoldov was dismissed from Gorky Studio in Moscow for “professional inadequacy.” The film was locked away. This week Commissar was shown to small audiences for foreigners and the Soviet elite at the Moscow Film Festival, and officials have promised its official release.
—Felicity Barringer, New York Times
Twenty years ago, Aleksandr Askoldov was preparing to take his film Commissar to the San Francisco Film Festival when his work was banned and the trip canceled. Last week Askoldov, 50, had an unprecedented triumph when his long-shelved production was suddenly and mysteriously shown to a cheering audience at the Moscow Film Festival... Askoldov was pleased that his film has again been requested for the San Francisco event. “It is my dream that in America, people will see the place where they were born and understand that this is a memorial to their parents and to my father dedicated to the defense of those who needed help.”
—Judy Stone, San Francisco Chronicle
The artistic and emotional impact of Commissar is formidable. In 1966, while official Soviet filmmakers like Bondarchuk were reworking historical and literary themes in prosaic realist terms, while Tarkovsky was developing his private visionary language, Aleksandr Askoldov had mastered a poetic, civic-minded style that reanimated the tradition of Dovzhenko and Eisenstein.
— William Fisher, Sight and Sound
FACTOID #12
In our occasional film series, The Unvanquished, we showcased the work of filmmakers who continued to make their art despite suffering artistic repression. Those honored include directors Paul Carpita (1996), Paul Meyer (1996), Abraham Polonsky (1996) and John Berry (1998) and actors Karen Morley (1999) and Behrouz Vossoughi (2001).
