The Ascent · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Frost on eyelashes. Not a makeup effect: Shepitko shot in cold that could genuinely kill people, and what sits on the actors' lashes is what the air put there. Hold on that one detail and her method opens up. She isn't illustrating hardship. She films what weather does to a body, and then she stays on the face long after the point where a normal war picture would cut away. Before this film says anything about God or country, it is two men walking, and the walking is the substance. Deleuze called this a cinema of the body: posture and exhaustion carrying duration, the everyday body doing the work that dialogue usually does.

The errand is food. Two partisans go out into Belarusian snow to forage. Say that flatly, because Deleuze had a name for films built out of appetite and cold, and it isn't a flattering one. He called it the impulse-image, the cinema of naturalism: stories run by drives rather than decisions, where hunger and temperature do the plotting, and where beneath the visible social setting — a war, an occupation, a village — a rawer and older world keeps showing through. That second layer he called the originary world. Its signature is a slope, and in Stroheim and Buñuel the slope runs down. Bodies wear out. Appetite wins. Everything tends toward the ditch.

Shepitko assembles every part of that machine and then titles the film The Ascent. That is the formal argument in one word: keep naturalism's apparatus, reverse its direction. The same degradation that elsewhere ends in waste is here the mechanism of rising. Nothing is added to make it spiritual. The cold does not relent, the bodies do not recover, no one is rescued. The slope simply runs the other way.

How does she turn the direction? With light. The picture keeps going white. Snowfields, blown-out sky, whites burning against blacks. Deleuze's term for a space that has stopped functioning as a place where things can happen is the any-space-whatever, and its purest version is the empty white field: no distance to judge, no cover to reach, no route to plan. Action needs a world with handholds. This one has none.

What fills that white is what Deleuze called lyrical abstraction, and it is the concept that unlocks the film. He set it against expressionism. Expressionism stages its struggle in shadow — things clawing out of the dark, matter with a sick life of its own. Lyrical abstraction does the opposite: it builds a luminous field and puts a decision in it. Dreyer and Bresson are his examples, and the dossier's lineage says Shepitko went straight to them. But the decision isn't good against evil. Deleuze is exact here: the alternative is between two ways of existing. There is the person who knows a choice is being made and stakes everything on it, and the person who proceeds as though no choice were available, only necessities. That second one is the Judas, and Shepitko's smuggled Judas figure is devastating precisely because he never experiences himself as choosing. He does the next needful thing, then the next.

So the film puts two kinds of face in the same white. Deleuze, following Balázs, splits the close-up in two. There is the reflecting or contour face: held still, expressing one pure quality, wonder or resolve, not reacting to anything. And there is the intensive face, where small movements accumulate toward a threshold that will be crossed. Sotnikov's tear-streaked face against blank sky, lit until the skin is a luminous surface, is the first kind — it carries the argument without a line of dialogue. The other man's face is the second kind. Watch her cut between them and you are watching two grammars of the human face put in direct competition.

Then the cellar, and the film's real break. The interrogation with Portnov is built on Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc: flat exchanges, captor and captive, a transcript rather than a duel. Deleuze's name for an image where a character can only look and listen, with no action available, is the pure optical and sound situation, and the person it produces is the voyant, the seer. This is not an atmospheric choice, it is structural. The Soviet war film ran on the sensory-motor circuit: see the situation, act, transform it. Shepitko amputates that circuit at the halfway mark. Nothing either man does from the cellar onward can alter the situation. Suspense is gone; what replaces it is duration, and a question about who each man will have been. That is what The Ascent did to war narrative — it moved the decisive event off the battlefield entirely and into a room where no one can move.

And the village. The dossier's phrase is exact: a Golgotha of the collaborationist village. Soviet cinema was founded on the people as its collective subject, the crowd as one body with one will. Here the collective is the audience at an execution. Deleuze's term for modern political cinema is that the people are missing — the political has to be made in the absence of a people who could act. In a state cinema that wanted its war heroes uncomplicated, that absence is the boldest thing in the film, and it passed because it looked like scripture.

The debts are open. Dreyer's Joan gives her the whole grammar: the martyr's face isolated against nothing, the skin as light source. Day of Wrath gives her the deep blacks around a pale accused face for the interrogation. Bresson gives her the trial structure. From her own tradition she takes the Thaw's inheritance and cools it: Urusevsky's mobile, subjective camera and blown white skies in The Cranes Are Flying, frozen here into stillness; Chukhrai's shift in Ballad of a Soldier from mass heroics to one tested conscience, darkened; Tarkovsky's bare winter monochrome in Ivan's Childhood, its faces held in silence. Downstream, her husband Elem Klimov took her Belarus and her held faces into Come and See.

She won the Golden Bear with it, the first Soviet film to do so, and died two years later at forty-one. What she proved is that the martyr-face grammar of 1928 silent cinema was not a period style — it could carry a modern war film, in real cold, past a censor.

Watch it again for the light. Every time a face goes bright, ask what is doing it: the snow, or the film granting something. Shepitko never quite tells you, and that undecidability is the point of the ascent.