Klimov Kniga Nanoplazmonika

Facing Death, Confronting Human Nature: The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977) Larisa Shepitko’s black-and-white feature film Voskhozhdeniye ( The Ascent, 1977) is based on the 1970 novella Sotnikov by the Belarussian writer Vasil Bykov. Set in Nazi-occupied Belarus during World War II, The Ascent follows two Soviet partisans who brave harsh winter landscapes in search of food to sustain their fellow escapees. The soldiers’ perilous journey, however, leads to a series of fateful encounters, including their capture, interrogation, and torture by Nazi soldiers and collaborators. As the narrative unfolds, complex moral and existential dilemmas arise. The young and sickly Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and the physically stronger, experienced soldier Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) are ultimately forced to choose between life and death, as survival will only become possible by betrayal. While Shepitko focuses on the extreme physical and psychological experiences of war, the film raises questions that interrogate human nature more broadly. The Ascent marks the highpoint of the Ukrainian-born filmmaker’s career, securing her critical acclaim both in the Soviet Union and abroad.

See, for example Elem Klimov (ed.), Larisa: Kniga o Larise Shepitko (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1987). Gillespie, Russian Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. Such films include Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letyat zhuravli ( The Cranes Are Flying, 1957), Grigorii Chukhrai’s Ballada o soldate ( The Ballad of a Soldier, 1959.

Mobogenie app download apk old version. Despite limited distribution in Soviet cinemas, the film was positively reviewed in major Soviet film magazines and was generally well received by state officials. Moreover, The Ascent won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin International Film Festival, after which Shepitko showed the work at film festivals in Telluride and Toronto, and even returned to the Berlinale in 1978 as a member of the international jury. Heiti tc medium font download. Even though The Ascent and Shepitko’s other masterly films have since been praised by critics and scholars in both the East and the West, they remain far less known and exhibited than those of her contemporaries at the VGIK film school in Moscow – Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and her husband Elem Klimov.

Like many female filmmakers’, Shepitko’s contribution to the history of cinema has often been downplayed or overlooked, but her extraordinary talent and the significance of her work have recently begun to receive greater recognition. Writing in 2014, for example, David C. Gillespie, declared The Ascent to be “perhaps the most important war film of the 1970s and one of the key films of the entire Brezhnev period.” With Brezhnev’s rise to power in 1964, a long period of cultural stagnation began, defined by a return to strict censorship and creative limitations that had been alleviated under Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s Thaw had allowed filmmakers, for the first time, to move away from heroic propaganda narratives about the Great Patriotic War and to explore more personal and unsettling aspects of the war. Despite the shifting political and cultural landscape under Brezhnev, which saw for example Yuri Ozerov’s epic five-part war film series Osvobozhdenie ( Liberation, 1971), The Ascent aligns itself with this earlier line of investigation into the psychological dimension of personal struggle and suffering in war rather than of its battles.

Notably, the only longer combat sequence between Germans and Soviets plays out behind the opening credits. The opening title sequence of The Ascent. The Ascent is uncompromising in its representation of the cruel realities of war. When Rybak and Sotnikov find shelter with Demchika (Lyudmila Polyakova), a young mother living with her three children, they are discovered by a German patrol who take them away to their headquarters in another village, leaving the small children behind with almost no hope of survival. Sotnikov is the first to be interrogated by the Russian Nazi collaborator Portnov (Anatoly Solonitsyn) but refuses to answer any questions, even when he is submitted to brutal torture, as a star is burnt on his chest with a red-hot branding iron.

Paradoxically, it is Rybak, the stronger and more experienced soldier, who immediately answers all questions in order to save his life, ultimately becoming a police officer in the service of the Nazis. By choosing to depict a potential Soviet hero as a traitor and collaborator, Shepitko ventures into dangerous territory. Alexei German’s Proverka na Dorogakh ( Trial on the Roads, 1971) was banned and released only under perestroika in 1987 due to its controversial depiction of a Red Army soldier who became a Nazi collaborator but ultimately died in an act of redeeming heroism. As a counterpoint to Rybak, The Ascent casts Sotnikov first as an unlikely hero who turns into a Christ-like figure, sacrificing himself for higher ideals and his motherland. Sotnikov interrogated by Portnov; Sotnikov in cellar prison after torture, surrounded by fellow detainees.