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ReFocus: The International Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko

Edited by Lida Oukaderova

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£95.00

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About this book

A collection of critical chapters on Larisa Shepitko, one of the most significant Soviet (Ukrainian born) filmmakers

  • Examines Larisa Shepitko’s entire oeuvre, looking not only at her best-known films such as Wings and The Ascent, but also lesser known, censored, and unfinished productions such as The Motherland of Electricity, You and I and Farewell (finished by Elem Klimov)
  • Situates Shepitko’s work within Soviet/Russian history and artistic practices, examining its relation to aesthetic and political debates of both the post-Stalinist period (1960s-70s); early avant-garde (1920s-30s); and post-Soviet cinema
  • Highlights the significance of Shepitko’s work for classical film theory and contemporary film studies through in-depth visual and textual analysis


Despite the brief span of her directorial career, lasting from 1963 to 1979, the Soviet Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko produced a remarkable body of work, one that received an expansive national and international attention and led her to winning the Golden Bear Awards at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1977. Refocus: The Cinema of Larisa Shepitko is the first volume in English to offer a comprehensive, methodologically diverse analysis of Shepitko’s oeuvre, demonstrating the ongoing significance of her work for filmmakers and scholars alike. The book not only considers the emergence of Shepitko’s cinema within Soviet political and cultural history but examines its continued relevance for thinking about such pressing contemporary issues as war and trauma, history, memory and subjectivity, and ecology and the environment.

Reviews

"This timely, wide-ranging volume is the first collection of scholarly essays in English on the Ukrainian Soviet filmmaker Larisa Shepitko. Historically grounded while also engaging with contemporary theory, it shows that the concerns Shepitko explored remain profoundly relevant today. An invaluable contribution to Soviet, global and women’s cinema studies."

Table of contents

Introduction - Lida Oukaderova

Part One. Late Socialism: Cinema, Ideology Subjectivity

Chapter 1. Larisa Shepitko at VGIK and in Soviet and Post-Soviet Archives and Press - Nina Sputnitskaya

Chapter 2. Larisa Shepitko, Aleksei German, and the Trials and Tribulations of Post-Thaw Soviet Filmmaking - Tim Harte

Part Two. Intermediality: From Word to Image

Chaptee 3. Ghosts of the Present Past: The Wings (1966), From the Script by Natalia Riazantseva and Valentin Ezhov to the Film by Larisa Shepitko - Eugénie Zvonkine

Chapter 4. The Ordeal and the Ascent - Karla Oeler

Part Three. The Materiality of Moving Images

Chapter 5. The Revolutionary Past as Environment: Rain, Dust, and Faces in The Homeland of Electricity - Viktoria Paranyuk

Chapter 6. The Senselessness of the Heroic Act and the Experience of War in The Ascent - Elizabeth A. Papazian

Part Four. Time, Memory, Temporality

Chapter 7. White on White and The Black Square: Shepitko’s The Ascent, Stan Brakhage, and Cinematic Abstraction - Anne Eakin Moss

Chapter 8. Liquid Time: The Homeland of Electricity as Unprocessed Trauma - Lilya Kaganovsky

Part Five. Landscape and Environment

Chapter 9. Methods of Conquest: Larisa Shepitko’s Heat, Soviet Russian Colonialism, and the Representation of Virgin Lands Campaign in Soviet Cinema of the 1950s-60s - Zdenko Mandusic

Chapter 10. Larisa Shepitko’s Ecologies - Lida Oukaderova

Chapter 11. The Shepitko Sky: Larisa Shepitko’s Meteorological Cinema of Immersion, Wonder, and Openness - Raymond De Luca

Part Six. Shepitko in Post-Soviet Cinema

Chapter 12. The White, the Black, and the Gray: The Problem of Choice in Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent and Sergei Loznitsa’s In the Fog - Sergey Toymentsev

About the author

Lida Oukaderova

Lida Oukaderova is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Art History at Rice University in Houston, USA, and the author of The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement.

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