Commissar (film)
| Commissar | |
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Film poster (1987)
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| Directed by | Aleksandr Askoldov |
| Written by | Aleksandr Askoldov |
| Based on | "In the Town of Berdichev" by Vasily Grossman |
| Starring | Nonna Mordyukova |
| Music by | Alfred Shnitke |
| Cinematography | Valeri Ginzburg |
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110 minutes |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Language | Russian |
Commissar (Russian: Комиссар, translit. Komissar) is a 1967 Soviet film based on one of Vasily Grossman's first short stories, "In the Town of Berdichev" (В городе Бердичеве). The main characters were played by two People's Artists of the USSR, Rolan Bykov and Nonna Mordyukova. Made at Gorky Film Studio.
Maxim Gorky considered this brief story one of the best about the Russian Civil War and encouraged the young writer to dedicate himself to literature. It also drew favorable attention from Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pilnyak, and Isaac Babel.
It was shot in the political climate of the post-Khrushchev Thaw. From the outset of the production, Goskino censors forced the film director Aleksandr Askoldov to make major changes; 1967 was the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution and the events were to be presented in the Communist Party-mandated style of heroic realism.
After making the film, Askoldov lost his job, was expelled from the Communist Party, charged with social parasitism, exiled from Moscow, and banned from working on feature films for life. He was told that the single copy of the film had been destroyed. Mordyukova and Bykov, major Soviet movie stars, had to plead with the authorities to spare him of even bigger charges. The film was shelved by the KGB for twenty years.
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