ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko: (ReFocus: The International Directors Series)

About the Book

Despite the brief span of her directorial career, lasting from 1963 to 1979, the Soviet Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko produced a remarkable body of work, one that received an expansive national and international attention and led her to winning the Golden Bear Awards at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1977. Refocus: The Cinema of Larisa Shepitko is the first volume in English to offer a comprehensive, methodologically diverse analysis of Shepitko's oeuvre, demonstrating the ongoing significance of her work for filmmakers and scholars alike. The book not only considers the emergence of Shepitko's cinema within Soviet political and cultural history but examines its continued relevance for thinking about such pressing contemporary issues as war and trauma, history, memory and subjectivity, and ecology and the environment.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - Lida Oukaderova Part One. Late Socialism: Cinema, Ideology Subjectivity Chapter 1. Larisa Shepitko at VGIK and in Soviet and Post-Soviet Archives and Press - Nina Sputnitskaya Chapter 2. Larisa Shepitko, Aleksei German, and the Trials and Tribulations of Post-Thaw Soviet Filmmaking - Tim Harte Part Two. Intermediality: From Word to Image Chaptee 3. Ghosts of the Present Past: The Wings (1966), From the Script by Natalia Riazantseva and Valentin Ezhov to the Film by Larisa Shepitko - Eugénie Zvonkine Chapter 4. The Ordeal and the Ascent - Karla Oeler Part Three. The Materiality of Moving Images Chapter 5. The Revolutionary Past as Environment: Rain, Dust, and Faces in The Homeland of Electricity - Viktoria Paranyuk Chapter 6. The Senselessness of the Heroic Act and the Experience of War in The Ascent - Elizabeth A. Papazian Part Four. Time, Memory, Temporality Chapter 7. White on White and The Black Square: Shepitko’s The Ascent, Stan Brakhage, and Cinematic Abstraction - Anne Eakin Moss Chapter 8. Liquid Time: The Homeland of Electricity as Unprocessed Trauma - Lilya Kaganovsky Part Five. Landscape and Environment Chapter 9. Methods of Conquest: Larisa Shepitko’s Heat, Soviet Russian Colonialism, and the Representation of Virgin Lands Campaign in Soviet Cinema of the 1950s-60s - Zdenko Mandusic Chapter 10. Larisa Shepitko’s Ecologies - Lida Oukaderova Chapter 11. The Shepitko Sky: Larisa Shepitko’s Meteorological Cinema of Immersion, Wonder, and Openness - Raymond De Luca Part Six. Shepitko in Post-Soviet Cinema Chapter 12. The White, the Black, and the Gray: The Problem of Choice in Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent and Sergei Loznitsa’s In the Fog - Sergey Toymentsev

About the Author :
Lida Oukaderova is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Art History at Rice University in Houston, USA, and the author of The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement.

Review :
"This timely, wide-ranging volume is the first collection of scholarly essays in English on the Ukrainian Soviet filmmaker Larisa Shepitko. Historically grounded while also engaging with contemporary theory, it shows that the concerns Shepitko explored remain profoundly relevant today. An invaluable contribution to Soviet, global and women’s cinema studies."