“Larisa Shepitko was buried, and so were five members of her team. A car accident. All killed instantly. It was so sudden that no adrenaline was found in their blood.” – From the diary of director Andrei Tarkovsky
When Soviet filmmaker Larisa Shepitko died in a car accident in 1979 at the age of forty-one, she was on the brink of a towering career. Having already made two internationally acclaimed films – Wings (1966), her first feature after graduating from the All-Russian State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK), and The Ascent (1976,) her award-winning last film – she was poised to take her place among the envelope-pushing giants of twentieth century cinema. Instead, except for hardcore cinephiles, or maybe women’s studies students tackling the history of women filmmakers, she’s barely known today.
The short documentary Larisa (clocking in at just under twenty minutes) is an excellent introduction to the woman and her work. Made by her film director husband Elem Klimov (best known for his 1985 masterwork Come and See) a year after her death, it elegantly distills her clear-eyed philosophies on art and life, on the moral and ethical steadfastness she felt must gird both. “If you stumble once,” she is quoted as saying, speaking about the downward spiral of artistic compromise, “you’ll never get back on the path of truth, you’ll forget the very way.” It’s an almost brutally unsustainable belief system, one she learned as a film student while studying with her mentor, the iconic filmmaker and scholar Alexander Dozhenko.
Klimov opens the film with a montage of photos that carry the viewer from Larisa’s infanthood to childhood, from her days at film school to standing on the stages of international film festivals. With her large intelligent eyes and high cheekbones, she’s gorgeous enough to be a model. The montage, set to an elegiac score, ends on a shot of Klimov’s grief-stricken face at his wife’s funeral. From there, he uses footage from her films – including behind-the-scenes material, photos, and audio recordings – that put forth the stark beauty of her visual aesthetic while also capturing the existential and political concerns that drove her artistically and intellectually. There’s no pretense of objectivity – it’s a film made from love and through grief – but it’s precisely because of the intimate place from which it springs that the viewer is given an understanding of Larisa as a woman and artist that might otherwise have only been hinted at, at best.
Larisa’s recorded interviews are as powerful as the images set forth, as she speaks on life, death, immortality, and what women filmmakers might uniquely bring to the table. She does all of it while maintaining a rigorousness of thought and analysis. Her extended explanation of what she learned from Dozhenko about principled filmmaking and living is both inspiring and daunting, almost inapplicable for the way most of us have to live (creative type or not) but it’s substantive food for thought.
