![]() ![]() In both of these, the whiteness of snow and clouds punctuates the plight of the human figures. Her greatest works possess a startling intimacy: Wings is the story of a former fighter pilot, once ecstatic in the air, now dulled by her return to ordinary earth as a school principal The Ascent is a wartime parable whose stark winter landscapes throw its characters’ suffering into terrible relief. She went on to make three more feature-length films- Wings (1966), You and I (1971), and The Ascent (1977)-in addition to two student shorts, a segment of an omnibus film, and a movie for television. (The last children to witness this have almost disappeared.) But Shepitko was destined for more.įrom her first feature, her graduation film, Heat (1963), she was recognized and awarded. We still stirred the batter and shook out the broom and changed the sheets by turning them over. The realist films being made throughout Europe in the postwar period provide a glimpse of a time before women had or expected much. By the time of the cultural thaw that began after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, they were beginning to be able to express in film and literature what they had seen, and in this way analyze it beyond politics and psychology.Īt film school, Shepitko found her mentor in Alexander Dovzhenko, a major figure of early Soviet cinema. The war had been permanently etched into the minds of Soviet children, who had witnessed its atrocities or lived with their effects. She entered the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), where Andrei Tarkovsky was then still studying. She was sixteen and sure of her vocation. Her mother raised her and her two siblings on her own, and the moment Larisa graduated from school, she was on the road to Moscow to study filmmaking. Her mother was a schoolteacher her father, who left the family, fought in World War II. Larisa Shepitko was born in eastern Ukraine in 1938.
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