![]() Not for nothing would Bykov later call her “Dostoevsky behind the camera”. Shepitko’s script treatment significantly varied her source material, Vasil Bykov’s novella Sotnikov (titled after one of its protagonists). Variations of her truly photogenic image, from her childhood in Ukraine through to her years at Moscow’s Institute of Cinematography – she studied with Alexander Dovzhenko and fully absorbed the humanistic influence of that “master” – to the beginnings of her career, which was periodically interrupted by injury and ill health, and marriage and family life, recur almost hypnotically.īut it’s The Ascent that remains Shepitko’s lasting testament, presented here in a 4K Mosfilm digital restoration that does full justice to its singular visual palette, the harsh white snowscapes against which its story of wartime Belorussian partisan resistance unfolds (Klimov’s Come and See would loosely cover some of the same historical ground, though the two films are very different). Two substantial documentaries from 2012 made for Russia’s Kultura television channel fill in as much of the biographical background as we can hope to find in one place. The expansive extras that Criterion includes on this disc offer a compelling portrait of Shepitko as both director and individual: there’s a new video introduction by her son Anton Klimov, as well as the 25-minute film tribute Larisa that her husband had made the year after her death. Those were the two compatriots whom she mentioned in that Berlinale interview as contemporaries with whom she “shared a system of coordinates” from foreign directors she references Bergman as key, alongside Bresson and Bunuel. Her death deprived Soviet cinema of a talent that can be ranked alongside Andrei Tarkovsky and her husband Elem Klimov ( Come and See), who would become the guardian of her legacy in every sense (he stepped in only days after her death to complete that unfinished film, released under their joint credits as Farewell). Lasting hardly half an hour, it's an utterly compelling appearance, one in which the director defines much about what might be called the philosophy of her work.īarely a year later, Shepitko was dead, killed in a road accident outside Leningrad just as she was embarking on her next film. She had only just turned 40 yet speaks about her World War II film with the absolute authority – not least about moral and spiritual subjects – of a figure far more established on the world cinema scene (her achievements to date were remarkable anyway for the hurdles she had overcome as a woman emerging from an overwhelmingly male Soviet film establishment). The director was talking in 1978 to Bavarian Television at the Berlin Film Festival, where The Ascent had won the top award, the Golden Bear, the previous year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |