If a car accident in the summer of 1979 had not cut short the life of Larisa Shepitko, she would perhaps in her late 70s be enjoying an international reputation, maybe even on a par with Andrei Tarkovsky. Instead, only four features remain, along with shorts and this rarely glimpsed segment, Homeland of Electricity. What’s apparent is that Shepitko was a filmmaker of extraordinary sensitivity, ambition and skill.
Ian Christie
Presenter, Film Programme, BBC Radio 4
Ian Christie is Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the co-curator of our exhibition at GRAD Unexpected Eisenstein. He co-curated Eisenstein: His Life and Art (Oxford Museum of Modern Art/Hayward Gallery, 1988). Ian also co-edited Eisenstein Rediscovered (1993) and The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (1988). He is the author of monographs on Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and Martin Scorsese.
Read Francine’s Programme Note for ‘A World to Win: Revolution on Screen’
To read Francine Stock’s programme note on Beginning of an Unknown Century, please download our catalogue: A World to Win: A Century of Revolution on Screen, curated by Ian Christie, Maria Korolkova and Justine Waddell. This catalogue also includes programme notes by Academy Award winning director Bernardo Bertolucci, Academy Award winning screenwriter Christopher Hampton and Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw.
