ABSTRACT
Larisa Shepit’ko’s 1977 film Voskhozhdenie (The ascent) had a large impact on late socialist culture with its tale of suffering and surviving both natural and human elements during Second World War. This chapter considers how Alfred Schnittke’s film score for Voskhozhdenie shapes an audience’s empathetic response to the physical, emotional, psychological, and ethical travails of two Soviet partisans, the film’s central characters. Voskhozhdenie brings together several themes that were important to late socialist culture: a persistent fascination with the Great Patriotic War, a concern for historical memory in general, and a focus on morally complex issues, particularly loyalty and betrayal. At critical moments in the film’s narrative, Schnittke’s music lends insight into each soldier’s internal experience of war and thereby constructs an audience’s sense of empathy for both soldiers. The musically inflected experience of empathy in Voskhozhdenie complicates the conventional narrative of Soviet triumph over fascism and enables the viewer to interpret the film subversively as presenting a parallel between the Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism.
