The Ascent
After a break, we’re back with our features covering ‘The Ascent’ dir. by Larisa Shepitko.
Born in eastern Ukraine in 1938, Larisa was raised with three sisters by her mother. Their father left the family shortly after fighting in the war. At sixteen, she moved to Moscow to study film at the VGIK alongside contemporaries Andrei Tarkovsky and Elem Klimov (her eventual husband). Mentored by Alexander Dovzhenko, she directed her first feature and graduate film ‘Heat’ in 1963, aged 22. Filmed in the sweltering climate of Kazakh steppes, temperatures would often reach over 50°C, causing the film to melt into the camera. While on set, Larisa contracted Hepatitis but refused to stop production, directing from a stretcher.
Although the film was met with wide acclaim, Larisa’s next four films would be brutally shut down by the Soviet government. The censoring took a toll on her mental health, and she enrolled in a sanatorium following a breakdown. While pregnant, she fell and suffered a severe spinal injury. Deciding to keep the child despite personal imperilment, she lay bed-ridden for seven months. Haunted daily by the possibility of death, she sought to find her “own formula of immortality”. Upon recovery, she immediately began work on ‘The Ascent’.
Loosely based on Vasil Bykov’s novella ‘Sotnikov’ that she read while hospitalised, the film is a Dostoyevskian essay of treachery and grit with weighted spiritual implications. Set in wartime Belorussia, it revolves around two Soviet partisans who separate from their unit while searching for provisions. Thrust against purgatorial plains of ice and sheets of snow, the partisans are captured by the Germans and interrogated. One soldier, Sotnikov, refuses to crack under torture, while the other immediately betrays information to save his own life. Characteristic of the Khrushev Thaw period, the film moves away from ‘heroic propaganda’ to portray the unsettling, psychological aspects of war from a humanistic, personal perspective. Close-up framing relies on “the human face as a terrain to be explored”, showing the suffering and morality of war through a transcendent lens that is echoed through every action the characters take. Shortly after it was completed, Larisa died in a car crash aged 41.
Sources
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7256-the-ascent-out-in-the-cold
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/soviet-cinema/1977-ascent-larisa-shepitko/
https://www.artforum.com/columns/zack-hatfield-on-larisa-shepitkos-_the-ascent_-1977-249265/
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/jan/10/russia
https://jasonamerrill.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Shepitko-Ascent-Merrill.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_(1977_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larisa_Shepitko
https://filmobsessive.com/film/film-features/the-criterion-collection/the-ascent-the-apex-of-larisa-shepitkos-accomplishment/#google_vignette