Larisa Shepitko facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Larisa Shepitko
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| Born | 6 January 1938 |
| Died | 2 July 1979 (aged 41) |
| Resting place | Kuntsevo Cemetery, Moscow |
| Nationality | Ukrainian |
| Occupation | Film director, screenwriter, actress |
| Years active | 1956–1979 |
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Notable work
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Wings (1966), The Ascent (1977) |
| Spouse(s) | |
| Children | 1 |
| Awards |
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Larisa Efimovna Shepitko Ukrainian: Лариса Юхимівна Шепітько; 6 January 1938 – 2 July 1979) was a Ukrainian Soviet film director, screenwriter and actress. She is considered one of the best female directors of all time, with her film The Ascent being the second film directed by a woman to win a Golden Bear and the third film directed by a woman to win a top award at a major European film festival (Cannes, Venice, Berlin).
Shepitko was also considered one of the most prominent Soviet filmmakers during both the Thaw and the Post-Thaw. The Thaw was a direct response to the limitations that were forced upon Soviet citizens during Stalin’s reign, and essentially marked the inception of an innovative return to the cinematic arts.
Contents
Early life and education
Shepitko was born in Artemovsk, a town in Eastern Ukraine now known as Bakhmut. One of three children, she was raised by her mother, a schoolteacher. Her father, a Persian military officer, divorced Shepitko's mother and abandoned his family when Larisa was very young. She recalled, "My father fought all through the war. To me, the war was one of the most powerful early impressions. I remember the feeling of life upset, the family separated. I remember hunger and how our mother and us, the three children, were evacuated. The impression of a global calamity certainly left an indelible mark in my child's mind." Because of this, her work often deals with loneliness and isolation.
In 1954, she graduated high school in Lviv. Shepitko moved to Moscow when she was sixteen, entering the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography as a student of Alexander Dovzhenko. She was a student of Dovzhenko's for 18 months until he died in 1956. She felt a kinship between their shared heritage and social realist imagery. She also adopted his motto, "Make every film as if it's your last."
Shepitko was the only female filmmaker studying at VGIK at the time. Despite working in a very male dominated environment with a historical legacy of primarily male-made films to learn from, she would later state that, "I never tried to take male directors as a model, because I know only too well that any attempt by my female friends, my colleagues—both junior and senior—to imitate male filmmakers makes no sense because it’s all derivative."
Shepitko graduated from VGIK in 1963 with her prize winning diploma film Heat, or Znoy, made when she was 22 years old. Kemel, a recent school graduate, travels into an isolated part of the steppes to work in a small communal farm camp in Central Asia during the mid-1950s. The film was influenced by a short story, "The Camel's Eye", by Chingiz Aitmatov. Her film showed Dovzhenko's impression, both in its parched setting and its naturalistic style. During the editing phase of the film, Shepitko was helped by Elem Klimov who also was a student at VGIK at that time. In 1963, they married and their one child, Anton, was born in 1973. During the filming of Heat, Shepitko contracted Hepatis A and oftentimes she would direct portions of the film from a stretcher. Temperatures on locations could reach upwards of 50 degrees Celsius which caused the film to melt inside of the camera numerous times. Heat won the Symposium Grand Prix ex aequo at the Karlovy Vary IFF in 1964 and an award at the All-Union Film Festival in Leningrad.
Career
Films
- Wings (Krylya, 1966) – Shepitko's first post-institute film Wings concerns a much-decorated female fighter pilot of World War II. The pilot, now principal of a vocational college, is out of touch with her daughter and the new generation. She has so internalized the military ideas of service and obedience that she cannot adjust to life during peacetime. Shepitko brings to light the inner life of a middle-aged woman who must reconcile her past with her present reality. She expresses this by contrasting her character's repression, marked by claustrophobic interiors and tight compositions, with heavenly, expansive shots of sky and clouds, representing the freedom of her flying days. Actress Maya Bulgakova inhabits this stern but reasonable woman with empathy and humor. The film aroused considerable Soviet press controversy at the time, as films were not meant to depict conflicts between children and parents (Vronskaya 1972, p. 39). It started a public debate by acknowledging a generation gap and for painting a war hero as a forgotten, lost soul.
- Beginnings of an Unknown Era (Nachalo nevedomogo veka, 1967) – In 1967, she shot the second of the three episodes in this portmanteau film, made to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Shepitko's episode, The Homeland of Electricity (Rodina elektrichestva), follows a young engineer who brings electric power to an impoverished village. The film as a whole was judged by the authorities to show the Bolsheviks in an unflattering light, and was left unreleased. Two of the episodes, including The Homeland of Electricity, were found and shown publicly for the first time in 1987, but the film in its complete original form is believed lost.
- In the 13th Hour of the Night (V trinadtsatom chasu nochi, 1969) – In 1969, she shot her first color film, a musical-fantasy film titled In the 13th hour of the night, a New Year's revue starring Vladimir Basov, Georgy Vitsin, Zinovy Gerdt, Spartak Mishulin and Anatoly Papanov.
- You and Me (Ty i ya, 1971) – Shepitko's third film follows the lives of two male surgeons struggling with different notions of fulfillment. It is both a character study and a critique of consumerism. This was her second and last film in color. It was favorably received at the Venice Film Festival.
- The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1977) – her last completed film and the one which received the most attention in the West. The actors Boris Plotnikov and Vladimir Gostyukhin gained their first major roles in the film. Adapted from a novel by Vasili Bykov, Shepitko returns to the sufferings of World War II, chronicling the trials and tribulations of a group of pro-Soviet partisans in Belarus in the bleak winter of 1942. Two of the partisans, Sotnikov and Rybak, are captured by the Wehrmacht and then interrogated by a local collaborator, played by Anatoly Solonitsyn, before four of them are executed in public. This depiction of the martyrdom of the Soviets owes much to Christian iconography. The Ascent won the Golden Bear at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival in 1977. It was also the official submission of the Soviet Union for the Best Foreign Language Film of the 50th Academy Awards in 1978, and it was included in "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" by Steven Schneider.
- Shepitko wanted to film to adhere to the authenticity of what Soviet soldiers would have experienced during World War II. The cast derived of no-named actors whose backgrounds fit similar to how she wanted their characters to portray. The film was shot in Murom during the severe winters of Russia where temperatures reached 40 degrees below zero. Shepitko refuse any special treatment and only wore clothing that the cast wore to embody the suffering that they went through.
Shepitko's growing international reputation led to an invitation to serve on the jury at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival in 1978.
Acting
Before Shepitko directed feature-lengths, she acted in three films during her time at VGIK. She played an extra in Eldar Ryazanov's Carnival Night. She played Hanna in Yuriy Lysenko's Tavriya. Lastly, she played Nina in Nikolai Litus and Igor Zemgano's Obyknovennaya istoriya.
Style and Themes
Style
- Shepitko's style of filmmaking is often associated with realism. Her storytelling has a substantial amount of naturalism to it, often emitting a genuine depiction of the subject matter she explores. Most of her films are shot in black-and-white. She usually films in isolated settings with her shot compositions often focusing on body parts to make her characters seem more intimate. She also focuses on grand landscape shots to emphasize the isolated environments that her characters face. Some examples of this can be found in The Ascent, where two soldiers fend for themselves in the middle of a snowstorm, and in Wings where an ex-war-pilot flies alone to showcase her disconnect from modern society.
- Shepitko's style evokes a lot of visual, poetic symbolism.
Themes
- The most noticeable theme in Shepitko's filmmaking career is "war". More specifically, World War II in hindsight of how it relates to the modern age. In Wings, Shepitko depicts a post-World War II setting where an ex-pilot reminisces being seen as a hero of the war. For The Ascent, Shepitko describes in an interview that the reason for her wanting to make a film actually set during World War II was because she saw its thematic substance applicable to what she sought out of the modern climate of Soviet culture: “Each time period brings certain issues to the surface, and the question of heroism in today’s times is perhaps just as burning an issue now as it was in a time of war.”
- The Calvert Journal states that, "Shepitko is a political filmmaker, but one rooted firmly in humanism rather than ideology. Both Wings and The Ascent are fiercely pacifist works which explore — albeit from different angles — the tragic consequences of conflict. Heroic myths are brutally stripped away, leaving instead unapologetically unpatriotic accounts of the toxic cost of war."
- According to Shepitko's husband in his Larisa tribute short film, "Larisa came close to the central theme of her work—the unsparing judgement of oneself and the great responsibility each of us has for the things we’ve done in life." This was in response to his thoughts on her film You and Me, and how from there on forward this would become the prominent exploration in her films The Ascent and Farewell.
- Shepitko's films sometimes also feature religious themes, like in The Ascent which uses the story of Judas and Jesus to compare and contrast her two main characters.
Awards
Larisa Shepitko won four awards for her 1977 film The Ascent at the Berlin International Film Festival:
- Golden Berlin Bear - Best Film
- OCIC Award - Competition
- FIPRESCI Prize - Competition
- Interfilm Award Special Mention - Competition
Death
Shepitko died in a car crash on a highway near the city of Tver with four members of her shooting team in 1979 while scouting locations for her planned adaptation of the novel Farewell to Matyora by Valentin Rasputin. Her husband, the director Elem Klimov, finished the work under the title Farewell and also made a 25-minute tribute entitled Larisa (1980).
Farewell is about a small village on a beautiful island threatened with flooding. The film follows the inhabitants and their farewell to their homeland. "Critics maintained that the final product lacked Shepitko’s unique personal vision, obviously a point of view that could never be replicated". Composer Alfred Schnittke dedicated his String Quartet No. 2 (1981) to Shepitko's memory.
Klimov's tribute short film Larisa claims that Shepitko had been preparing all her life to make Farewell, and that it would have certainly been the high point of her career.
The author of the novel that Farewell is based on, Valentin Rasputin, stated that, "...I wanted to try and prevent Matyora from being filmed. I wanted to preserve Matyora in its original genre, as a piece of prose, but Larisa managed to persuade me very quickly. She started describing what she imagined the future film to be like, and she was so passionate about it, so interested in it, that I completely forgot my intention not to let go of Matyora." Shepitko's enthusiastic and determined passion to make this film makes her death all the more tragic.
See also
In Spanish: Larisa Shepitko para niños
