The Ascent
1977 · Larisa Shepitko
During a freezing WWII winter, two Soviet partisans on a mission to gather food contend with the temperature, the occupying Germans, and their own psyches.
dir. Larisa Shepitko · 1977
Two Soviet partisans trudge through Belarusian snow on a foraging mission that becomes a trial of the soul — Larisa Shepitko's final film transmutes the Great Patriotic War into something closer to religious ordeal. Made within a state cinema that preferred its war heroes uncomplicated, The Ascent smuggles Christian iconography past the censors in plain sight: haloed close-ups, a Judas figure, a Golgotha of the collaborationist village. Shepitko shot in genuinely lethal cold, and the frost on the actors' lashes is real; her camera studies faces with a severity worthy of Dreyer, whites burning against blacks. The film won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1977 — the first Soviet film to do so — and stands as the summit of a career cut off two years later, when Shepitko died in a car crash at forty-one. Her husband, Elem Klimov, would carry her unfinished projects forward and, in Come and See, extend her vision of Belarus at war. Hers remains the more austere masterpiece: a war film in which the decisive battlefield is conscience.
Lines of influence
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) — The template Shepitko openly copies: the martyr's tear-streaked face isolated in extreme close-up against blank sky, lit so the skin becomes a luminous, near-haloed surface that carries the whole spiritual argument without dialogue.
- Day of Wrath (1943) — Dreyer's slow, high-contrast chiaroscuro of persecution and confession — deep blacks around a pale accused face — supplies the monochrome grammar Shepitko uses for Sotnikov's interrogation.
- The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) — Bresson's structuring of martyrdom as an interrogation transcript — flat, unadorned exchanges between captor and captive as a moral trial — is the narrative spine of the Sotnikov/Portnov cellar scenes.
- The Cranes Are Flying (1957) — Urusevsky's expressionist, subjectively mobile camera and blown-out white skies established the Thaw-era Soviet war image Shepitko inherits, then freezes into stillness on the Belarusian snowfields.
- Ballad of a Soldier (1959) — Chukhrai shifted the Soviet war film from mass heroics to the tested conscience of one ordinary soldier — the humanist scale of moral trial that The Ascent inherits and darkens.
- Ivan's Childhood (1962) — Tarkovsky's poetic, high-key monochrome of war — bare winter birches, water, faces held in silent duration — is the immediate Soviet precedent for Shepitko's lyrical treatment of the killing landscape.
- Andrei Rublev (1966) — Its explicitly Christian iconography and staging of physical torment as spiritual passage across a bleak monochrome Russia licenses Shepitko's overt religious ordeal within an officially atheist cinema.
- Earth (1930) — Dovzhenko's low-horizon lyricism, where sky-filling close-ups of peasant faces are fused to landscape, is the Soviet lineage of Shepitko's snow-and-sky compositions of the condemned.
- Winter Light (1963) — Bergman's austere, wintry study of a crisis of faith — cold light, unblinking close-ups, silence standing in for God — parallels the theological interrogation Shepitko dramatizes.
- Wings (1966) — Shepitko's own earlier film builds the method she perfects here: a single protagonist's interior moral pressure read almost entirely off a held, unglamorous face.
- Come and See (1985) — Made by Shepitko's widower on the same Belarusian WWII terrain, it extends her lethal-cold ordeal aesthetic — the war atrocity registered through the transfigured, staring face of a witness.
- Son of Saul (2015) — Nemes locks a shallow-focus camera to one man's face through an unbearable moral trial, updating Shepitko's principle that atrocity is best rendered as a haloed close-up rather than spectacle.
- Ida (2013) — Shares the high-contrast monochrome of religious conscience — a novice's ascetic face framed against empty space and snow, the frame's silence carrying a spiritual reckoning.
- The White Ribbon (2009) — Deploys the same severe black-and-white moral austerity — cold, deep-focus monochrome as an instrument of ethical judgment over a community's collaboration and cruelty.
- The Turin Horse (2011) — Extends the endurance-as-ordeal image into monochrome extremis: wind, whiteness, and a face weathering privation, treating physical suffering as a metaphysical trial the way Shepitko does.
- The Sacrifice (1986) — Carries forward the Christian-ordeal narrative in which one man's self-immolating act redeems others — the martyr's logic Shepitko gives Sotnikov, staged with the same solemn duration.