The Lady Vanishes: Soviet Censorship, Socialist Realism, and the Disappearance of Larisa Shepitko by Anastasia Sorokina

Lucy Sabin Feature 04 The Lady Vanishes: Soviet Censorship, Socialist Realism, and the Disappearance of Larisa Shepitko By Anastasia Sorokina keywords: Soviet cinema, Thaw cinema, censorship, women directors, Gender, Soviet Socialist Realism ON JUNE 2, 1979, the Greatest Soviet director you’ve never heard of was killed in a car crash outside Leningrad. The tragedy opens a paGe of Andrei Tarkovsky’s diary: “Larisa Shepitko was buried, and so were five members of her team. A car accident. All killed instantly. It was so sudden that no adrenaline was found in their blood” (qtd. in Ivan-Zadeh). Shepitko was only forty-one years old. In the years that followed, the global film industry mourned her loss, transcendinG Cold War politics1 – fast-forward to the present, however, and Shepitko becomes an unfamiliar name. Today, only two of her films are available on DVD in the United States, and, accordinG to film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, these films are “scarcely shown or known” in Russia. yet, at the time of her death, Shepitko was “hot property on the international film circuit.” younG and “strikingly attractive,” the camera-ready director had just achieved above FiGure 1. Nadezhda struGGles to a career milestone with her masterpiece The fit into a Matryoshka costume in Wings Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1977), which won the (Mosfilm, 1966) Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin International Film Festival. AccordinG to Ivan-Zadeh, “she had all the live-fast-die-younG glamour that would ensure instant icon status for far inferior artists.” Why, then, was Shepitko’s work forGotten? Ivan-Zadeh suspects the answer lies in Lenin’s declaration that “of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important,” arGuinG that “Shepitko did not find it easy to satisfy communism’s cultural commissars.” Anglophone media suGGests Soviet censorship is responsible for excisinG her creative contributions from film history; both Russian and US scholarship would appear to support this claim. Valery Golovskoy, described in academic literature as “one of the most experienced and knowledGeable sources on Soviet film in the United States” (Hecht 327), Goes so far as to label Shepitko an “outsider” who enGaGed above FiGure 2. The unforgivinG landscapes in a “constant fiGht with leadership” due to of The Ascent (Mosfilm, 1976) 21 Film Matters Winter 2017 ➜ Feature 04 Anastasia Sorokina below FiGure 3. The authoritarian Abakir 1966) was released to a limited audience and in Heat (Kyrgyzfilm, 1963) later banned (Woll 219), the omnibus seGment The Homeland of Electricity (Rodina elektrichestva, 1967) was “shelved” for twenty years, and You and Me (Ty i ya, 1971) was cut to permit release to the Venice Film Festival by the Soviet Government as a national production. Shepitko also beGan production of the film Belorussian Station (Belorusskiy vokzal, Smirnov, 1971), but when “censors heard that she planned to “official efforts to iGnore and repress her work 1963), and won a grand prize at the Karlovy chanGe the optimistic tone of the oriGinal as much as possible” (Merrill 153). Others Vary International Film Festival. scenario into a bleak and traGic tale, Mosfilm lament more broadly that Soviet cinema post- Notably, for eighteen months until his removed her from the project and replaced her Stalin has “received relatively little attention,” death, she studied directinG under Alexander with a less controversial director” (Lawton 72). overshadowed by “Russian avant-Garde film Dovzhenko, who served as her “Greatest Paradoxically, Shepitko’s least successful of the 1920s, the cinema of Gorbachev’s influence” in that he represented artistic work, both commercially and with censors, perestroika, Russian pre-revolutionary film, inteGrity and “alleGiance to film as a vehicle Wings, began production under Kruschev’s and even Stalin-era cinema” (Prokhorov 5).2 of conscience” despite “enormous pressure” Thaw, a time of political liberalism, while At worst, Shepitko would appear to be the from censors to produce a cinema in service her most successful, The Ascent, was produced victim of political vendetta; at best, she has of state ideoloGy (Costlow 76). Little has been amid the cultural calcification that followed been overlooked. written about his mentorship or whether under Brezhnev.4 Here, Shepitko’s career This article will address the dynamic their shared Ukrainian heritaGe shaped her presents a counterexample to most existing relationship between Shepitko’s films and filmmakinG. While nationality is said to fiGure scholarship on Soviet cinema post-Stalin, two contexts: how her films were shaped prominently in Dovzhenko’s work, Shepitko’s which arGues that Brezhnevian censorship by, and in turn spoke to, the vicissitudes of origins remain a mystery. In contemporary placed a chokehold on innovative filmmaking Soviet censorship and evolving interpretations western media articles, she is in turn labeled and marked a return to Stalinist aesthetic of Soviet Socialist Realism. With this article, Russian, Ukrainian, and even Iranian3 – in dictates.5 A closer look at the production I aim to bridGe Russian and US scholarship any case a product of the Soviet Union and a histories of Shepitko’s films reveals how Soviet to provide a more complete assessment of member of the Moscow intellectual elite. censors, far from uniform and centralized Shepitko’s career. My contention is that while in their oversiGht, were arbitrary enouGh to contemporary texts acknowledge Shepitko as sanction some culturally transGressive films controversial, scholars and critics have yet to Soviet Censorship and Socialist while suppressinG others. map out the spectrum of culturally specific Realism, from Stalin to Shepitko Ultimately, as Shepitko’s contemporary, transGressions that compelled her institutional Andrei Smirnov, recalls, there were “no suppression. In re-examining Shepitko’s In her short lifetime, Shepitko was able to clearly formulated rules” in the process aesthetic, I will arGue that she be admitted complete four feature-lenGth films, a television of workinG with Soviet censors, where into the pantheon of art cinema auteurs, movie, and one seGment of a filmic omnibus. “everythinG depended on the particular takinG her riGhtful place alonGside not only Of her six total productions, three were official who said yes or no” (Sivkova). For Akerman and Varda as a director of women’s censored to varying deGrees. Wings (Krylya, instance, husband Elem Klimov contends that cinema, but also alonGside Tarkovsky and Sokurov as a director deservinG of praise below FiGure 4a. StiflinG city environments without gendered qualifiers. and open skies in Wings (Mosfilm, 1966) Locating the Biography of a Lost Filmmaker Born in 1938 in the Ukrainian SSR, Larisa Shepitko moved to Moscow in her teens to attend the Soviet Union’s most prestiGious – and the world’s oldest – school of cinema, Russia’s All-Union Film Institute (VGIK). At the VGIK, Shepitko was a member of what The New York Times named the “most prodigiously gifted generation of Soviet filmmakers since the pioneers of the 1920’s” (Kehr): Tarkovsky had Graduated only a few years earlier, and her immediate contemporaries included Elem Klimov, whom she would later marry. Shepitko Graduated from the institute in 1963, already having produced a feature-length film, Heat (Znoi, 22 Film Matters Winter 2017 Feature 04 The Lady Vanishes Soviet ofcials thus made explicit expectations of the role women should play in cinema – located anywhere but behind the camera. The Ascent was shown in theaters only because to leveraGe her personal network, turninG Government arGuably had every political the film was first screened in Belorussia, its to a classmate with whom she studied at interest in promotinG domestic filmmakers, settinG. There, it was seen by Pyetr Masherov, the VGIK, Gemma Firsova, to fast-track especially those considered proGressive: after the First Secretary of the Communist Party production permits. They should have been The Ascent won a Golden Bear, Shepitko of Belorussia (Klimov 12). AccordinG to easy to come by – Shepitko’s script stuck “was allowed to travel to film festivals in Klimov, after the screeninG, Masherov “wiped closely to the acclaimed novella on which Telluride, Toronto, and aGain to Berlin, away his tears and broke the crowd’s stunned the film was based. But, as Firsova admitted where she was a member of the jury in 1978” silence (and official censor protocol) by in a 2006 article for Isskustvo Kino, her lies in (Merrill 153) – Brezhnev’s isolationist policy speakinG for forty minutes on the importance lobbyinG authorities backfired, prolonGing notwithstanding. Although Golovskoy insists of the film” (qtd. in Merrill 153). Within the entire filmmakinG process: from castinG to that no Soviet cinematoGrapher, nor film several days, the film was officially accepted soundtrack, official permissions were delayed studio “hurried to commemorate” Shepitko without a single change (Merrill 153) – this, at every step. From the moment Shepitko upon her death (265), the state itself awarded despite the many “apprehensions” about read Vasil Bykov’s Sotnikov, on which her film her a posthumous prize for her contributions its fate durinG production (Golovksoy 262). was based, it took four years to commence to filmmakinG (Merrill 153). RevisitinG Shepitko’s film, in depictinG the psycholoGical production (Firsova). Shepitko’s filmography Shepitko’s filmoGraphy allows us to reconsider quandaries of Soviet partisans caught by thus sheds liGht on how loopholes in the a narrow intellectual focus on the Soviet film Nazi patrols, gripped the many war veterans Soviet censorship system could simultaneously industry that dismisses it as categorically present in the audience. Masherov himself render even a sinGle film both politically repressive, in turn breakinG down what film was a veteran and a “hero of the Belorussian problematic and politically untouchable. scholar Lilya KaGanovsky calls “the standard, partisan movement,” whose mother had Shepitko’s very career was built on this totalitarian approach to Soviet cinema” that been executed by the Nazis for assisting tension. imagines its film industry – and, I would add, guerrilla forces (Klimov 12).

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