拉莉萨

A loving film tribute to Russian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko, who died tragically in a car aident in 1979 at the age of 40. This documentary by her husband, Elem Klimov, includes excerpts from all of Shepitko's films, and her own voice is heard talking about her life and art. Elem Klimov's grief-stricken elegy Larisa examines the life of his late wife—the film director Larisa Shepitko—through a series of direct-aress interviews and photomontages, set against a mournful visual-musical backdrop. Typically, Klimov films his subjects (which include himself and several of Shepitko's collaborators) within a stark, snow-covered forest, its tangled web of trs standing in as metaphorical representation of a perhaps inexpressible suffering, the result of Shepitko's premature death while filming her adaptation of Valentin Rasputin's novella Farewell to Matyora. Interweaving home movie footage with sequences from Shepitko's work (Maya Bulgakova's pensive plane crash reminiscence from Wings takes on several new layers of resonance in this context), Larisa's most powerful passage is its first: aompanied by the grandiose final music cue from Shepitko's You and I, Klimov dissolves betwn a series of personal photographs that encompass Larisa's entire life, from birth to death. This brief symphony of sorrow anticipates the cathartic reverse-motion climax of Klimov's Come and S, though by placing the scene first within Larisa's chronology, Klimov sms to be working against catharsis. The pain is clearly fresh, the wound still festering, and Klimov wants—above all—to capture how dp misery's knife has cut.