Trial on the Road

During the Second World War a Russian soldier, previously forced into collaboration with the Germans, escapes and joins the partisans but first has to prove his reliability. One of a number of films to re-emerge in the mid 80s, having been suppressed for being too challenging. The particular sin of this war film was to suggest that Stalin's policy of automatically shooting POWs on recovery was callous and ignored questions of conscience, treating all soldiers as potential traitors. It also shattered the idea, long upheld, of a united Soviet Union fighting the German devil: here the peasantry would prefer to be left alone by both sides since association with one brings reprisals from the other.

The Russian film Proverka na dorogakh was shown in the U.S. as "Trial on the Road (1971)". It was co-written and directed by Aleksey German. An exact English title of this movie is apparently difficult to achieve. On the film itself, the title was translated as "Checkpoint." Other Russian-speaking reviewers mentioned this title problem, and I heard it being discussed in the theater after the movie was over. People feel that "Trial on the Road" doesn't work either. I can't comment further, because I don't speak Russian.

The movie was produced in 1971, but not shown until 1986. It was censored because the official party line in 1971 was that all Russian soldiers--actually, all Russians, soldiers or not--had performed heroically during the German invasion in WWII. This movie is more like an American WWII portrayal of GI's who were ordinary people caught in an extraordinary situation. Sometimes they behaved heroically, and sometimes they didn't. (Think about "Saving Private Ryan.")

In this movie, the protagonist is someone who behaved unheroically. He surrendered to the Germans, and became a collaborator. (Apparently, some POW's could join the German forces.) After having a change of heart, he escapes from the Germans and joins the partisans, in Russia, behind the German lines. Naturally, the partisans are suspicious of him, and the plot of the film hinges on that suspicion and his reaction to it.

In a parallel plot line, the civilians in German-occupied territory are not all sympathetic with the partisans. Like so many conquering forces, the Germans carried out mass reprisals. If the partisans killed a German soldier, the Germans would retaliate by killing and blowing up everything in sight. Naturally, some of the civilians took a "plague on both your houses" position. Their hope was to somehow survive the war, and they were no more sympathetic to the partisans than they were to the Germans.

In my opinion, what made the censors dislike this movie is one of the factors that make this movie great. Naturally, I have to speculate, but my guess is that the real situation in Russia in WWII was closer to what we see in the film than what we see on the propaganda posters.

This film has other positive aspects. The (black and white) cinematography is great, and the acting is excellent. The movie keeps you in suspense throughout, and I could not have predicted the ending. (The last few minutes go beyond the actual ending. They have that added-on propaganda feel to them. This is probably because director German wanted his film to pass the censors. Obviously, this added footage didn't work, at least for the first 15 years.)

We saw the movie on the large screen at the wonderful Dryden Theatre in George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. The staffperson who introduced the movie told us that Eastman House owns the only 35mm print in the U.S. (The print belongs to Martin Scorsese, who stores all the movie prints that he owns at Eastman.) In any case, you'll have to be very lucky--as we were--to see this film in 35mm. Unfortunately, in this context, it's really meant for viewing in a theater. However, it's available on DVD, so at least you can seek it out and view it on the small screen. Director German made only six films. He is a genius, and it would appear that each of his films reflects that genius. My suggestion--find this movie and see it. If you like it, try to see the other five.

Good, solid wartime adventure films have (understandably) become anachronisms, but this Russian export, inexplicably shelved for over a decade after its completion, proves to be a rare exception. The film is a tense, realistic drama of the struggles against treachery (both internal and external) in a homeland held captive by enemy soldiers, and is as taut and exciting as it is intelligent and thoughtful. A former traitor, after collaborating with the Nazis to save his own life, surrenders to a partisan brigade operating deep within Fascist-held territory. Scorned and distrusted by his comrades, he must prove his loyalty in a daring daytime hijacking of a German munitions train. The film combines complex characters with exciting action sequences to create a striking and memorable drama, building to an edge-of-seat climax and photographed with crystal-clear, wide-screen black and white imagery.

I don't recall hearing any music in the film, except for people playing IN the film, not for the film. This is good, cause music distracts. War takes ordinary people to extraordinary situations where the real soul can be discovered. It felt natural for me to walk into the frame and participate in the dilemmas of everyone in the film. And I was not sure what I would have done in similar situations. I, simply, lack the capacity to fully absorb the depths of the soul searching in the film. It has not the brutality of Klimov, nor the conscience drama of Shepitko, but it has the same depth of penetration into the human soul at those defining moments. Just to set my scale, 10 goes to Andrei Rublev. It is NOT on a par with Klimov's "Come and see", nor with Shepitko's "Ascent".

To encounter this film is to step into one of the most unsettling absences of Soviet war cinema: a work completed in 1971, silenced for fifteen years, and released only when the ideological structures that had censored it were beginning to crumble. Its belated appearance in 1986, at the dawn of perestroika, makes it appear prophetic. Yet its power resides not in foresight but in moral candor-the quiet, deliberate refusal to sanctify the Second World War as myth. The difficulty of translating its title-alternately rendered as Trial on the Road or Checkpoint-feels symbolic: the film itself resists any single interpretive checkpoint, any stable moral translation.

Shot in austere black and white, the film rejects both the muscular heroics of Soviet wartime cinema and the sentimental humanism that had softened the genre in the 1950s and 1960s. Its cinematography, with its granular textures and pallid tonalities, seems designed to erase glamour from the image. Snow, mud, and fog do not function as atmosphere but as moral climate; they blur the boundaries between purity and contamination. The camera's stillness creates a sense of surveillance rather than sympathy-each frame a moral interrogation, each gesture an answer deferred. Unlike Ballada o soldate (Ballad of a Soldier, 1959), which sculpted its lyricism out of motion and youth, this film anchors itself in stillness and middle age. War here is not a proving ground for virtue but a prolonged suspension of certainty.

The acting is pitched at the edge of exhaustion. The protagonist-an ex-prisoner of war who defected to the Germans before seeking redemption among Soviet partisans-is portrayed not as an emblem of treason or rehabilitation but as an opaque human presence, a body negotiating distrust. His silence, his hesitant physicality, create a performance of moral latency. Around him, the partisans' faces-creased, unshaven, impassive-form a collective portrait of skepticism. These are not cinematic soldiers but men burdened by a reality they can neither exalt nor escape. The director's decision to keep emotion suppressed until the rare moment of rupture gives those few releases an almost physical violence.

The sound design reinforces this economy. There is virtually no non-diegetic music; what we hear are the internal sounds of that world-snow crunching underfoot, distant artillery, the crackle of fire, the muttered suspicion of men in hiding. The absence of a musical score denies the viewer the moral cues that Soviet cinema so often relied upon. It is, in this sense, a radical act of realism: emotion must be earned from the situation itself, not imposed upon it.

If the film feels closer to certain Western depictions of the Second World War-say, the ambivalence and moral fatigue that Saving Private Ryan would later articulate-it is because it recognizes that courage and complicity coexist within the same gesture. Yet even this comparison is imperfect: where Spielberg's soldiers are redeemed through shared sacrifice, Aleksey German's figures seem incapable of redemption at all. The protagonist's attempt to prove his loyalty is filmed less as penance than as a metaphysical impossibility.

A more precise comparison might be with Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1977), another Soviet film in which war becomes a test of the soul rather than the body. But while Ascent transfigures its ordeal into spiritual transcendence, this earlier work-conceived fifteen years before its release-remains earthbound. Its metaphors of snow and silence suggest not divinity but paralysis. The film never rises; it endures. The difference between the two marks the evolution of Soviet moral consciousness: Ascent was tolerated because it still sanctified sacrifice, whereas Proverka na dorogakh was buried because it showed loyalty as fragile, uncertain, and often meaningless in the machinery of war.

Understanding its censorship is essential to understanding its aesthetics. In 1971, Soviet ideology demanded that all representations of the Great Patriotic War reinforce collective heroism. To depict a Russian soldier who had once collaborated with the enemy was to acknowledge a fracture in the myth of unity. The film's realism-its recognition that civilians under occupation might resent the partisans as much as the Germans, its refusal to depict partisans as moral certainties-was intolerable precisely because it was true. When it finally emerged in 1986, the official narrative had decayed enough to allow that truth to surface, though even then it carried the residue of its own compromise: a faint, tacked-on ending that gestures toward patriotic closure, as though hoping to appease the ghosts of censors long gone.

Technically, it is one of the most controlled Soviet war films ever made. The framing is rigorous to the point of asceticism; the camera seems to fear intrusion. The composition of bodies within the frame-often static, seen through mist or window panes-conveys moral distance. At times this austerity risks monotony, and one might wish for greater variation in tempo. But the consistency of tone, the refusal of release, is integral to the film's integrity. It was never designed to move; it was designed to weigh.

Its delayed release means that it belongs to two historical moments simultaneously. As a 1971 production, it speaks from within the moral exhaustion of late socialism, when the war's mythology had become a ritualized pageant. As a 1986 release, it participated in the emerging project of historical reckoning. This dual temporality gives it a strange texture: it looks backward to an era of absolute faith and forward to an age of skepticism. Watching it now, one feels the chill of both.

Few films about the Second World War-Eastern or Western-convey so precisely the moral entropy of life under occupation. It transforms the familiar terrain of partisan warfare into an existential inquiry. Its landscapes are not battlefields but thresholds, places where conviction freezes and thaws with the weather. And in that bleak, unyielding space, Aleksey German created a film that could only have been misunderstood in its own time-a film that turns the heroic war narrative inside out and discovers, in the void, the uneasy dignity of doubt.