Roads to Golgotha: why Larisa Shepitko’s war-haunted films still resonate today

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022, few outside of Ukraine are likely to have heard of Bakhmut, a small city in the Donetsk region of the Donbas. By the summer of 2023, the name had become synonymous with bloodshed after a year of brutal combat: the “meat grinder” into which the mercenary Wagner Group poured its army of recently released convicts; a battle of attrition between occupiers and occupied that utterly levelled and depopulated this 500-year-old settlement.

Although it is difficult to establish with certainty, it is likely that among the countless buildings and artefacts destroyed during the war have been the birthplace of, and memorials to director Larisa Shepitko – perhaps the most famous daughter of Artemivsk, as Bakhmut was known between 1924 and 2016. It was in that year, two years on from the initial Russian incursion into the Donbas and Ukrainian victory in the subsequent “Battle of Artemivsk”, that local authorities named a street in the west of the city in Shepitko’s honour. In 2018, a plaque celebrating her connection to the town was installed on the walls of the “Victory” cinema.

If that name now seems grimly ironic, then so does Shepitko’s connection to the site of what some have called the bloodiest military combat in Europe since the Second World War. The experience of that earlier conflict – of occupation, evacuation, a family broken apart – sits at the heart of Shepitko’s small but vital body of work. In the words of Lida Oukaderova in the introduction to a recent volume on the filmmaker’s career, “if war significantly shaped Shepitko’s life… it continues to haunt her after her death, her birth city destroyed as part of a military aggression she was unlikely to have ever imagined.” Her most celebrated films, Wings (1966) and The Ascent (1977), deal directly with the war and its aftermath, but all of her surviving works are marked by a profound awareness of the preciousness and fragility of life and the sense that the world has been knocked off its axis by forces beyond individual human control.

Shepitko was born in Artemivsk in 1938. For her, the war was a lived childhood experience, and one that was commingled with family trauma. Her father, a military officer, abandoned her mother and two siblings when Shepitko was an infant. In her own later recollections, she wrote: “My father fought all through the war. To me, the war was one of the most powerful early impressions. I remember the feeling of life upset, the family separated… The impression of a global calamity certainly left an indelible mark in my child’s mind.” Though it may veer towards armchair psychoanalysis to say so, this child’s intuition of “global calamity” – that the world was both enchanted and on the brink of destruction – was to run like a red thread through Shepitko’s artistic career.

It was a sensibility that may well have found an ally in the great Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was her first teacher upon enrolling in Moscow’s prestigious VGIK film school in 1954. Although Shepitko only studied with Dovzhenko for 18 months before his death in 1956, the notion that some kind of cinematic torch was passed between the two is compelling. Dovzhenko was the founding poet of Ukrainian cinema, an avant-gardist with a profound connection to his native landscapes and traditions. His greatest film, 1930’s Earth, is about the transformation of Ukrainian agriculture: that is, the necessity and the grief of the passing of the old world, a distinctly Shepitko-esque theme. It’s one that recurs in Poem of the Sea (1958), directed by Dovzhenko’s widow Yuliya Solntseva from material prepared by the late director, in which Shepitko made her acting debut; the plot – about a village being evacuated before it is flooded during the construction of a hydroelectric dam – rhymes with that of Shepitko’s unfinished final film, Farewell to Matyora.

Shepitko’s graduation film at VGIK, Heat (1963), is also about a world on the brink of change. Produced under the auspices of the Kyrgyz national studio (often used in the period as a testing ground for inexperienced directors out of Moscow), the film charts generational conflict and the coming of post-Stalinist morality to a remote steppe farm. The production was marked by the kinds of physical extremes that would come to define Shepitko’s personal and professional life. She drove her crew mercilessly, battling with heat so intense that the film stock melted in the camera, and refusing to shut down filming even when struck down with hepatitis and forced to direct from a stretcher. Instead, she called in a favour from Elem Klimov, a fellow VGIK student, to help her finish the film; they married two years later.

Wings (1966), Shepitko’s breakthrough feature, and perhaps her most famous, is a film about war trauma told from a peacetime perspective. Nadia (Maya Bulgakova) was a fighter pilot in the Second World War, but now lives a disappointingly ordinary life as a school principal in Sevastopol. Unable to connect with her students or her adopted daughter Tanya, Nadia is haunted by the loss of her lover and fellow pilot Mitya during the war. Rather than depicting catastrophe outright, Shepitko demonstrates how trauma dwells near the seemingly placid surface of post-war life. The Crimean port setting of Sevastopol was almost entirely rebuilt following the conflict: like Nadia, it offers only the façade of stability. As in many other sixties Soviet films (Marlen Khutsiev’s I Am Twenty, Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters), Wings plays with chronology, deploying flashbacks and reveries to underscore Nadia’s traumatised sense of self. As the critic L. Lazarev put it in his response to the film, she “remains faithful not to the meaning of the battle, but to its external forms. But these forms have either died out or petrified and remain only through inertia.”

Inertia would come to define Shepitko’s career in the years that followed. Hired as one of three directors on the omnibus film Beginning of an Unknown Era, intended to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, she turned to the modernist author Andrei Platonov for inspiration, adapting his short story The Homeland of Electricity. Like Heat, the film depicts a world ravaged by drought and poverty. But Beginning was denied a release – and Shepitko’s next major project, the drama You and I (1971) was butchered by censors in the edit. The film follows a doctor who leaves Moscow for the wilds of Siberia following an existential crisis: yet another Shepitko protagonist drawn to the peripheral and protean edges of Soviet life. The farrago around the film prompted what she called “a monstrous mental and physical exhaustion”; then, while recuperating in a Sochi sanatorium, she badly injured her spine in a fall. When she became pregnant shortly afterwards, she was warned that the injury meant that carrying to term could be fatal but chose to have the child regardless. Confined to bed and facing her own mortality, she read the novel Sotnikov by the Belarusian author Vasil Bykov and decided on her next project: “All motion pictures are personal, but the desire to film The Ascent was almost a physical need. If I had not shot this picture, it would have been a catastrophe for me.”

The Ascent (1977) ticks all the Shepitko boxes: a brutal landscape, spiritual crisis, wartime trauma. It follows two Soviet partisans in Nazi-occupied Belarus, the wan Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and the pugnacious Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin), who are captured by collaborationist forces and faced with a mortal ethical dilemma. Filming took place in January 1974 outside Moscow in temperatures 40 degrees below zero. Shepitko, still struggling with her spinal injury, had to be carried onto set by Gostyukhin, who described the shoot as “death in every frame. [But] it was worth it to die in each scene in order to feel her gratitude.” As a backdrop, cinematographer Vladimir Chukhnov created what critic Michael Koresky calls “a physical and moral winter that envelops everything in its path”. Everything that stands out against the white of the snow is somehow broken or crooked: black overcoats, a dead tree, dismembered houses.

Why did Shepitko pursue her childlike “impression of a global calamity” to such extreme ends? Her personal experience notwithstanding, the director seems to have seen this dedication as a kind of moral imperative. “Our most horrible ideas of what [the war] was like paled before the inhuman realities,” she later wrote. “We have tried not only to understand the pain, but to relive it.” Her conviction certainly made an impression: The Ascent won the Golden Bear in Berlin, seemingly setting Shepitko up for a glorious third career act. It no doubt helped when she approached Valentin Rasputin, the author of the novel Farewell to Matyora, to ask him for permission to adapt it. Rasputin was opposed to screen adaptations of his work – “but Larisa managed to persuade me very quickly,” as he later recalled. “She was so passionate about it, so interested in it, that I completely forgot my intention.” Another tale of global calamity, one which explicitly recalled the world conjured by Dovzhenko/Solntseva all the way back in Poem of the Sea, Rasputin’s novel concerns a small island soon to be flooded by the construction of a hydroelectric dam, and the reluctant elderly residents who find themselves on the brink of displacement. Shepitko and four members of her crew were killed in a car crash in 1979 during location scouting. Klimov later completed his own version of Farewell in tribute.

In the end, Shepitko’s persistent evocation of “the feeling of life upset” was an expression of empathy. Certainly, her work still resonates in a world in which her hometown has experienced calamity from which it is unlikely ever to recover. Even though “sacrificing oneself” for art, as the injured and unwell Shepitko insisted upon doing, can’t come close to the trauma depicted onscreen, the gesture implies that it’s important to honour the suffering of others. When Soviet censors were on the verge of banning The Ascent for its religious overtones, Elem Klimov invited the first secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus, Pyotr Masherev, to an impromptu preview. Masherev had fought as a partisan in the war; in 1942, his mother was hanged by the Nazis. Masherev watched the film in tears, and afterwards delivered a 40-minute speech in the screening hall in which he is reported to have asked: “Where did this girl come from, who experienced nothing of the sort but knows all about it?” The Ascent was accepted without revisions.

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