The Ascent (1977, Larisa Shepitko)

Monday 11th of November, 5pm in the Professor Stuart Hall Building LG02

Join us on Monday the 11th November from 5pm (film starts at 5:15pm) in the Professor Stuart Hall Building (here) room LG02 for a screening of Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977). The film is 1 hour 51 minutes long, so the screening should finish just after 7pm.

Set during the Second World War, two Soviet soldiers are in Nazi-occupied Belorussia and have to leave their starving unit to search a nearby farm for supplies, which has been taken over by the German army. After being captured, and facing death, they are taken on an existential journey and the film attains the spiritual dimensions of a religious allegory, bearing some comparison to Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956).

Written by Shepitko with Yuri Klepikov, the film was an adaptation of the Belarussian author Vasil Bykaŭ’s 1970 book Sotnikov [The Ordeal]. The film went on to win the Golden Bear at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival in 1977. It is generally considered Shepitko’s greatest work but it was unfortunately her last - she was tragically killed in a car accident in 1979.

Shot in black and white, the Criterion Collection released a restoration of the film in 2021. Read Fanny Howe’s essay for the Criterion release here.