It’s nearly perfect and utterly profound, a masterpiece — Larisa Shepitko made only four theatrical features yet this Soviet movie about the Great Patriotic War earns her a firm place in film history. Moral betrayals under stress, in the face of profound evil… it’s the human condition. Astonishing for a Mosfilm production of the time, the film equates nationalistic sacrifice with Christian martyrdom. Criterion’s extras tell the impressive story behind the making of this major Soviet production.
The Ascent
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1063
1977 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 109 min. / Voskhozhdenie / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 26, 2021 / 39.95
Starring: Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Sergey Yakovlev, Lyudmila Polyakova, Viktoriya Goldentul, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Mariya Vinogradova, Nikolai Sektimenko, Sergei Kanishchev.
Cinematography: Vladimir Chukhnov, Pavel Lebeshev
Film Editor: Valeriya Belova
Original Music: A. Shnitke
Written by Yuri Klepikov, Larisa Shepitko from a novel by Vasiliy Bykov
Directed by Larisa Shepitko
A few months...
The Ascent
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1063
1977 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 109 min. / Voskhozhdenie / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 26, 2021 / 39.95
Starring: Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Sergey Yakovlev, Lyudmila Polyakova, Viktoriya Goldentul, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Mariya Vinogradova, Nikolai Sektimenko, Sergei Kanishchev.
Cinematography: Vladimir Chukhnov, Pavel Lebeshev
Film Editor: Valeriya Belova
Original Music: A. Shnitke
Written by Yuri Klepikov, Larisa Shepitko from a novel by Vasiliy Bykov
Directed by Larisa Shepitko
A few months...
- 2/27/2021
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Sergei Loznitsa's stark parable about Soviet collaboration with the Nazis has echoes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy, a fable about the increasingly nightmarish journey of a lorry driver lost in a violent post-communist Russia, was well received at Cannes three years ago but is yet to be released in this country. His second film, In the Fog, based on a highly regarded novel by Vasili Bykov, also received a warm welcome in Cannes and is one of the best Russian films to open in Britain over the past decade. It's set in Loznitsa's native Belarus in 1942, and the fog of the title is both literal and metaphorical, the fog of war that swirls around its three principal characters, Russians involved in the struggle against the German invaders.
In the Fog unfolds at a stately pace, beginning with a striking opening sequence shot in what appears...
Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy, a fable about the increasingly nightmarish journey of a lorry driver lost in a violent post-communist Russia, was well received at Cannes three years ago but is yet to be released in this country. His second film, In the Fog, based on a highly regarded novel by Vasili Bykov, also received a warm welcome in Cannes and is one of the best Russian films to open in Britain over the past decade. It's set in Loznitsa's native Belarus in 1942, and the fog of the title is both literal and metaphorical, the fog of war that swirls around its three principal characters, Russians involved in the struggle against the German invaders.
In the Fog unfolds at a stately pace, beginning with a striking opening sequence shot in what appears...
- 4/29/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
When a Nazi collaborator is led into the Belarusian forest to be executed, why doesn't he protest? Sergei Loznitsa's chilling drama explores the agonies of war and puts European history on trial
The fog of the title is the fog of war, the fog of fear and the abysmal fog of European history: it is a kind of residual pall of smoke across the field of battle – maybe it also means the obliteration brought by death itself. This is the chilling and mysterious historical parable from film-maker Sergei Loznitsa, based on the 1989 novel by the Belarusian author Vasili Bykov, resembling Elem Klimov's Come and See. (Bykov also wrote the 1970 novel The Ordeal, filmed by Larisa Shepitko as The Ascent.)
Its subject is the Nazis' invasion of the Soviet Union, and in particular the poisonous shame of collaboration that they disseminated in every part of the Reich. An important...
The fog of the title is the fog of war, the fog of fear and the abysmal fog of European history: it is a kind of residual pall of smoke across the field of battle – maybe it also means the obliteration brought by death itself. This is the chilling and mysterious historical parable from film-maker Sergei Loznitsa, based on the 1989 novel by the Belarusian author Vasili Bykov, resembling Elem Klimov's Come and See. (Bykov also wrote the 1970 novel The Ordeal, filmed by Larisa Shepitko as The Ascent.)
Its subject is the Nazis' invasion of the Soviet Union, and in particular the poisonous shame of collaboration that they disseminated in every part of the Reich. An important...
- 4/26/2013
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
I wanted to talk to Sergei Loznitsa about time because My Joy (which Daniel Kasman wrote about in this year's Cannes coverage) begins with a body being thrown into a concrete mixer and then there's a truck driver lost in a Russian backwater and then a prostitute and then a scene set over half a century earlier and none of these changes represent detours or dovetails, but a continuous forward movement through a "time" (cinematic / historical / narrative) that is folding in on itself. My Joy is an anti-psychological film in the sense that, instead of portraying time the way its characters see it, it portrays its characters as they are seen by time: as echoes. But of course there were other questions as well—about his background as a documentary filmmaker, about his next feature, about the presence of a couple of prominent Romanian New Wave figures in his film—which the erudite Loznitsa,...
- 9/29/2010
- MUBI
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