One of the most influential figures of the film from the Soviet Union is a woman nearly forgotten to film history. With Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Dovzhenko, and Bondarchuk, Larisa Shepitko came out of a male-dominated industry from film school to create a unique voice that stood out among her male counterparts. Her tragic death at the age of 41 cut off what would have been a much bigger career, but what Shepitko made already placed her among the finest filmmakers to come out of the Soviet Union. Only in recent years have her films been remastered and analyzed further to dissect Shepitko’s stories and how far she would take her movies at the risk of her own health.
Shepitko was born in current-day Ukraine in 1938. Her childhood played an influence in her career as she was raised through World War II and long separated from her father who abandoned the family entirely. Loneliness and isolation was a common theme in her works. At the age of 16, Shepitko moved to Moscow and enrolled in the now-named Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography to study filmmaking with Alexander Dovzhenko. Her time with him, ending with his death in 1956, was critical to Shepitko in developing her craft starting with her final thesis film, Heat, in 1963. The story of a recent graduate who works on a farm led by an authoritarian landowner who abuses his workers when they make even the smallest mistakes was acclaimed and awarded Shepitko the Grand Prix at Karloff Vary International Film Festival.
The making of Heat would be similar to other instances of Shepitko braving harsh elements to make her movie. Shot during an unusually hot summer caused Shepitko to fall ill, but insisted on staying, being carried around on a stretcher to locations. While editing the movie, she would meet another director who would later become her husband, Elem Klimov.
Her first post-school movie, Wings (1966), challenged Soviet rules about showing conflicts between children and parents as it went against the regime’s strong belief in portraying united families. This story, about a female WWII pilot who struggles to connect with the current generation of children who do not revere the same heroes from that time, touched a nerve between the youth, born after 1945, and the parents who live through the war.
Her first two films and the rest that followed continued the realism trend but would always skirt the Soviet censors desire for a socialist type of film. Wings was given a limited release before being pulled out entirely and her follow-up, The Homeland of Electricity, would not be released for another twenty years due to unfavorable angle it portrayed Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. You And Me, released in 1971, was well received at the Venice Film Festival, but again, the portrayal of a doctor in an existential crisis which makes her travel to Siberia to escape bothering Soviet authorities.
Shepitko refused to compromise on her personal belief for the truth of the matter (something the Soviets were never fond of) and would be prevented from making certain projects. Her motto was one she learned from Dovzhenko, “Approach every film as if it were your last.”
Shepitko’s most acclaimed film and masterpiece was also her last movie, The Ascent. It premiered at the 1977 Berlin International Film Festival and won the Golden Bear, making Shepitko the second female director (after Marta Meszaros’ Adoption two years earlier) to win the top prize. Facing the censors again, the film bypassed their hands thanks to the help of a major Communist politician in Belarus who praised the film as very much like in war and its patriotic qualities. Set during one cold winter in WWII, two partisans get lost and are captured by the Nazis; they must either give up their comrades to save themselves or be hanged.
Like Heat, the weather was punishing to Shepitko, now dealing with frostbite and hypothermia because she did not wear the same protective clothing as others. From the start of the shoot in January of 1974, temperatures dropped as low as 40 degrees below zero and had to be carried around to and from the hotel. However, her push paid off with the naturalism The Ascent is made from in giving an unglossed portrait of war where the hidden religiosity of Jesus and Judas is clearly seen.
The Ascent got the attention of Francis Ford Coppola, who wanted to invite her to Hollywood to make a movie, but she declined. Reportedly, Coppola showed a partial film cut of Apocalypse Now and was receptive to what he had made. Without restraints by the authorities, Shepitko was scouting locations with a crew for her next movie when she and the group were killed in a car accident outside St. Petersburg. Her husband would finish the project, Farewell, in 1983, then follow up with his own strong war film, Come and See, in 1985. Today, it is considered among the greatest of war films and Elem Klimov would credit the movie to his late wife for giving him all the inspiration to make such a brutally honest film, which he would never again make.
Criterion released Wings and The Ascent for the first time in 2008 (and re-issued the latter film as a stand alone release), but her other films are not readily found. Shepitko even today does not get the same amount of recognition with other legendary Soviet directors, including her husband. In fact, most female directors from Eastern Europe would not get bigger recognition until 1980s and 1990s. For Elem Klimov, he spent the rest of his life maintaining the legacy of deceased wife and used her own work to show how important she was to cinema.
The most notable was his tribute film, Larisa, made the year after her death, featuring the last thing she ever filmed: a tree with branches that just seem to expand upwards with no end. Even in isolation, Shepitko found beauty in everything in the middle of harsh conditions, nature in progress, and they are what remain from her long after death.
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