Larisa Shepitko- Восхождение/The Ascent (1977)- DVD9 (NTSC Format)

I was blindsided by Larisa Shepitko's film Wings. I could not believe I had only learned of the existance of such a masterpiece a day or two before. I went into The Ascent expecting to be similarly blindsided, and I was: It could not have been more different.

Part War story, part religious allegory, The Ascent follows two soldiers across frozen Byelorusse. Both face tests of loyalty and morality. But even if allegory isn't your thing, it's easy to ignore how messagy it is and love this film for its beautifully layered shots alone. Shepitko is an amazing director.




From Jamie S. Rich:

Larisa Shepitko's fourth and final film, 1977's The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye), is a bleak trek across the frozen Byelorussian landscape during WWII. Set in the small Eastern European country just north of the Ukraine, it details the ravages its people suffered under the German invasion and their perseverance in the face of crisis and tragedy.

Two young soldiers break from their squad to find food for the civilians they are escorting to the next safe encampment. Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) is a grizzled trooper who speaks like a veteran, whereas his companion, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov), is fresh-faced, fair-haired, and seemingly out of his depth. As they hike through the snowy wilderness, they encounter collaborators, enemy gunmen, and innocent bystanders, and each of these meetings will eventually have their consequences. Sotnikov gets shot in the leg, and the search for shelter in which to thaw out and recuperate pushes them farther from their goal and gets them deeper into trouble. They are eventually captured, along with Demchika (Lyudmila Polyakova), the mother of three whose shack they tried to hide in. Soon, they find themselves in a Sartrean prison alongside the old man (Sergei Yakovlev) they met two nights prior, a supposed collaborator whose life they spared, as well as a young Jewish girl, Basya (Victoria Goldentul), who has refused to name the people who had been hiding her.




Trapped in this dank cellar, with Sotnikov having been tortured and barely hanging on, all five prisoners begin to question how they ended up there and what it would take to survive. Each is faced with a choice, and as secrets are revealed, it's discovered that some have already made just as crucial choices before arriving here. Both the old man and the girl let out information that could hurt them, and Rybak, who has proven to have much less fortitude than his stoic companion has displayed or his own earlier boasts would have suggested, has even had an offer to save his skin by joining the other side. The local commissar, Portnov (Anatoli Solonitsyn), is looking to earn points with his new German bosses, turning his back on the people who knew him. Sotnikov was a classmate of his, and Basya had him as a choirmaster. There is even a suggestion that they could save themselves by exposing his true identity, and that is why he is so hungry to attain Sotnikov's real name.




Yet, to give up his real name would be to give up who he really is, something Sotnikov would never do. Shepitko and co-writer Yuri Klepikov, adapting a novel by Vasili Bykov, are clear on what it would mean to put your own self-interest ahead of the good of others. No life touched by Sotnikov or Rybak, no matter how innocent, remains unscathed. (Even sparing the old man ultimately earns him condemnation.) One stays more true to who one is by sticking to one's principles, and as Rybak lets go of his integrity, he becomes less of a man, ironically less capable of even being able to save himself. He has fantasies of running for it, of risking being gunned down, and he can't make himself do it, even after he has promised Sotnikov that he will only become a collaborator in order to escape and take the country back. Even if a peasant woman hadn't called Rybak a "Judas," his positioning in relation to the near angelic Sotnikov would be clear. Like the Biblical traitor, Rybak is left to question the price he received and whether it's worth what he gave up for it; unlike the Judas of old, however, Shepitko won't let him escape his true punishment easily.

Given this Biblical allusion, The Ascent could be seen as a rather subversive film. I am always amazed how Russian filmmakers were able to slide their messages past the Communist censors. On one level, The Ascent affirms the struggle of the proletariat against a corrupt world, but like Eisenstein's historical epics, what might appear to be pro-Soviet rhetoric could also be read as a subtle indictment of the same. Replace the Nazis with Stalinist agents, and the message against collaboration with one's enemy is not nearly as "Red" as the first blush would suggest.




The struggle of the two men to survive and the journey they undertake also reminds me of the work of Andrzej Wajda. Like Wajda, Larisa Shepitko is interested in how these extreme situations of war affect the individual. Just like in Wings, her camera is constantly searching for the humanity in her characters, regardless of how vile they may be. Even Portnov gets a couple of her many lingering close-ups, silently contemplating his actions, framed only by his conscience. The characters are obviously more important to her than the action of a typical war picture. The one full-on fight is shown at the beginning of the movie, obscured by the opening credits, whereas there is nothing to get in the way in the final scenes, as each of the condemned gets one last look into the lens. Shepitko shows them as standing strong, neither breaking down nor even flinching. That fate is saved for the pathetic Rybak, whose final cries of anguish end the film, sounding as sad and useless as everything else he has done up until that point.

The Ascent became an international sensation when it was released, winning the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival. Sadly, it was to be Larisa Shepitko's last completed project. She died in 1979 in a car crash on the way to the set for what was to be her next movie. Though it wasn't intended to be her final cinematic statement, The Ascent stands tall as such. The reverberations you will feel as the picture closes won't fade anytime soon, a testament to the incisive eye of a gifted filmmaker and her own testament to the capacity of the individual to persevere.




Technical Information:

Title: Восхождение/The Ascent
Year: 1977
Country: USSR
Director: Larisa Shepitko

Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
DVD Size: DVD9
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 6.32 GB
Length: 1:49:08
Programs used: DVD Decrypter, ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~8600 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: Dolby AC3 mono Russian @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: yes
Video: untouched
DVD Extras: none on source





The Ascent Megaupload Links

Larisa Shepitko- Крылья/Wings (1966)- DVD5 (NTSC Format)

I'd never heard of Larisa Shepitko until a few days ago, but since watching her 1966 movie Wings, I've become a diehard, lifelong fan. Carried by lead actress Maya Bulgakova, who appears in nearly every frame, Wings is one of those films where each shot is perfect, but nothing feels staged. We'll be posting her later film Ascent soon, so watch out for more Shepitko!




From Larushka Ivan-Zadeh:

On June 2 1979 one of cinema's greatest female directors was killed in a car crash outside Leningrad. She was 39. Her name was Larisa Shepitko, and, even if you're a film buff, the chances are you've never heard of her. Barely any of Shepitko's mesmerising films have been screened in Britain. None is available on DVD. In fact they're scarcely shown, or known, in Russia. Yet, at the time of her sudden death, Shepitko was hot property on the international film circuit: she was young for a film-maker; she was strikingly attractive; her exquisite masterpiece The Ascent had won the prestigious Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin festival. She had all the live-fast-die-young glamour that would ensure instant icon status for far inferior artists.

So why has Shepitko's work remain buried for so long? For the answer, look no further than Lenin's declaration that "film for us, is the most important art". Shepitko did not find it easy to satisfy communism's cultural commissars.




Born in Ukraine in 1938, Shepitko was one of three children raised by her schoolteacher mother. Her father, a Persian officer, had abandoned his family through early divorce - an act that Larisa never forgave. When she enrolled in the Moscow film academy in 1955, her dramatic eyes and dark, cheekboned elegance attracted much attention. However, her sole focus was film-making, and in 1958 she studied direction at the State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK), a few years behind Andrei Tarkovsky. Her tutor was Alexander Dovzhenko, a towering figure of early Soviet cinema and contemporary of Eisenstein. His poetical imagery and passionate celebration of Ukranian folk culture were a marked influence on the young Shepitko, who called him "my mentor" and took to heart his motto: "You have to approach each film as if it were your last."

Shepitko's graduation film, Heat (1963), was an extraordinary first undertaking. A daring fusion of political drama and Western-style showdown between an idealistic high-school youth and a Stalinist farm leader, it was shot on the barren steppes in such extreme climate conditions that Shepitko fell dangerously ill. Stretchered off set, she called in another young film-maker to help complete the project; this was her fellow VGIK student Elem Klimov, whose war film Come and See (1985) Stephen Spielberg would later cite as an influence on Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan.




Elem (named from the first letters of Engels, Lenin, Marx) had previously proposed marriage to Shepitko, but, like all the others, been rejected. Now he was accepted - but only after he vowed he wouldn't try to influence Shepitko's work.

United by intelligence, introspection and a certain dash, the Klimovs, along with Tarkovsky, were at the forefront of the Russian "New Wave" that flourished under Khrushchev before the cultural clampdown of 1967-8. In 1966 Shepitko was able to create her controversial second feature, Wings, which drew a stellar performance from Maya Bulgakova as a once-famous Stalinist fighter pilot now a disenchanted provincial schoolteacher.

An ill-fated omnibus called Beginning of an Unknown Era was Shepitko's first real loss to censorship. Commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, its unsentimental depiction of the early days of communism was hardly the banner-waving Bolshevik propaganda the Party had hoped for - particularly Angel, the segment directed by Andrei Smirnov, where a worker menaced by an officer with a gun comments: "How simple it is to kill and to condemn in the name of the revolution." The film was not shown until 1987.




The banning of Beginning depressed Shepitko. However, her primary concern as an artist was not political protest, but the more intimate exploration of the individual in society, struggling with that eternal question: "Why do we live?"

You and Me (1971), set in contemporary Russia, is her most experimental feature, and her only one in Technicolor. This is an existentialist narrative about two male surgeons in crisis about their ideals, balancing individual despair with hope in a wider humanity and responsibility. "I always used to think it was all or nothing," Dr Pyotr says to a suicidal girl, "But there's always somebody who needs you."

Now 35, Larisa took time off from work to have a child. It was a life-changing moment. As she said in her final interview in June 1979, "I saw death very closely. I had a serious spine injury, and at the time I was expecting a child. I could have died, because I decided to keep the child. At that time I was facing death for the first time, and like anyone in such a situation I was looking for my own formula of immortality."




The result was her numinous masterpiece The Ascent (1976). Drawn from Vasily Bykov's novella Sotnikov, it's the tense tale of two starving partisans crawling across the hostile snows of Belarus during the 1942 Nazi occupation. The film is outstanding not just for its ravishing aestheticism, but its Dostoevksian soul-wrestling and gripping central performances. The final scenes, where the Christ-like hero Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) dies because of his own stubborn convictions, form one of the most hypnotically powerful moments of 1970s cinema.

Despite The Ascent's success - international as well as national, although the Soviet authorities banned export of other masterpieces such as Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev - Larisa was increasingly preoccupied by death. Highly superstitious, she had her fortune told in Bulgaria in 1978, after which she immediately took her friend to a nearby church and made her swear that, should anything happen to her or Elem, she must look after their young son, Anton. A few months later, she was killed. It was so abrupt; the Soviet film community was stunned into numbness. Tarkovsky wrote in his diary: "Larisa Shepitko was buried, and so were five members of her team. A car accident. All killed instantly. It was so sudden that no adrenaline was found in their blood."




Shepitko had been on location for a new film, The Farewell. Just a week after the accident, her husband was on set to complete it. The film, in which a traditional Siberian peasant village is condemned in order to facilitate the march of progress, is another implicit critique of modern communism. Interesting though it is (it was allegedly a favourite of Gorbachev's), Klimov's Farewell lacks the perfect pitch of the best of Shepitko's work.

Today, 25 years after Shepitko's death, her films have finally reached Britain. Leeds International Film festival, working with Soviet Export Film, has organised a retrospective of her entire oeuvre, from her four finished features to her prize-winning shorts (plus The Farewell and a tribute from Elem Klimov). All, particularly the last features, deserve an audience not as dated curiosities from another era, but because Shepitko's mysticism is rooted in an ever-relevant sense of humanity. It's time this long-lost Soviet visionary was brought in from the cold.




Technical Information:

Title: Крылья (Wings)
Year:1966
Country: USSR
Director: Larisa Shepitko

Source: DVD5 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 3.83 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter, ImgBurn
Screen Format: 720x480 1.33:1
Audio Language: Russian
Audio Format: mpga mono
Subtitles: English

Menu: Untouched, intact
Video: Untouched, intact
DVD Extras: N/A





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Wings Megaupload Links


Note: If you have trouble playing the file, take the Russian name out of the title and it should work fine.