ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko

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.

"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."

• Introduction - Lida OukaderovaPart One. Late Socialism: Cinema, Ideology SubjectivityChapter 1. Larisa Shepitko at VGIK and in Soviet and Post-Soviet Archives and Press - Nina SputnitskayaChapter 2. Larisa Shepitko, Aleksei German, and the Trials and Tribulations of Post-Thaw Soviet Filmmaking - Tim HartePart Two. Intermediality: From Word to ImageChaptee 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 ZvonkineChapter 4. The Ordeal and the Ascent - Karla OelerPart Three. The Materiality of Moving ImagesChapter 5. The Revolutionary Past as Environment: Rain, Dust, and Faces in The Homeland of Electricity - Viktoria ParanyukChapter 6. The Senselessness of the Heroic Act and the Experience of War in The Ascent - Elizabeth A. PapazianPart Four. Time, Memory, TemporalityChapter 7. White on White and The Black Square: Shepitko’s The Ascent, Stan Brakhage, and Cinematic Abstraction - Anne Eakin MossChapter 8. Liquid Time: The Homeland of Electricity as Unprocessed Trauma - Lilya KaganovskyPart Five. Landscape and EnvironmentChapter 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 MandusicChapter 10. Larisa Shepitko’s Ecologies - Lida Oukaderova Chapter 11. The Shepitko Sky: Larisa Shepitko’s Meteorological Cinema of Immersion, Wonder, and Openness - Raymond De LucaPart Six. Shepitko in Post-Soviet CinemaChapter 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