The Ascent

1977 · Larisa Shepitko

A Deleuzian reading

Frost on eyelashes.

The full Deleuzian reading of The Ascent →

Reception

It won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1977 — the first Soviet film to do so — yet stayed hard to see in the West for decades after Shepitko's death; the 2021 Criterion release and Letterboxd word-of-mouth turned it into a full-blown rediscovery.

How The Ascent was received, from release to now →

Influences: the films it descends from and the films it influenced

• 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.
• Forever a Woman (1955) — A woman director confronting bodily suffering and mortality through an austere, unsentimental gaze that dignifies the flesh without exploiting it, echoing Tanaka's clinical compassion.
• 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.
• 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.
• Beanpole (2019) — Deploys sustained close-up interrogation of faces under WWII moral duress as the film's primary dramatic instrument — the physiognomic method Balagov directly inherits, where endurance and moral weight are registered in the body and face rather than in action or dialogue.
• Tangerines (2013) — Soviet moral-fable war cinema staged as a spiritual reckoning between captor and captive, using austere framing and ethical legibility rather than combat spectacle — the parable-under-pressure mode Urushadze inherits.
• A Visitor to a Museum (1989) — Its Schnittke score fused to close-up martyrology — the tortured face lit as Christ-icon — models the marriage of avant-garde Soviet concert music to a narrative of spiritual suffering that Lopushansky reproduces.
• 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 Fifth Seal (1976) — Contemporaneous Eastern Bloc film that stages martyrdom-versus-survival as an explicit moral test between two captured men, with chiaroscuro-lit faces and an overt Christological parable frame.

Similar films

• Come and See (1985) — influence & lineage · often watched together
• The Cranes Are Flying (1957) — influence & lineage · often watched together
• Andrei Rublev (1966) — influence & lineage · often watched together
• Ida (2013) — influence & lineage · often watched together
• The Sacrifice (1986) — influence & lineage
• Ballad of a Soldier (1959) — influence & lineage
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) — influence & lineage · often watched together
• Woman in the Dunes (1964) — often watched together

All the films related to The Ascent →

Watch it with: curated runs of related films

• The Testing of Faith — Watch these together when you want cinema that puts belief on the rack — devout men pushed to the brink of renouncing everything while their bodies are broken and their souls interrogated.