Barely two years after her greatest international triumph?winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for The Ascent?Ukrainian filmmaker Larissa Shepitko died in an automobile accident. The Soviet cinema thus prematurely lost one of the major talents of its postwar generation, and the international film community was robbed of one of its emerging?and potentially most significant?creative lights. Summarily, Shepitko and her work pretty much have remained unknown and ignored in North America, despite a small but fervent cult of admirers (including Martin Scorsese and Stan Bra
In Russia, as directors traditionally do their own editing, famous film editors are rare. A great exception to this rule was Esther Shub. After gaining her reputation and experience in the early 1920s on the strength of her reediting of foreign productions and a dozen Soviet features, she became, largely on her own initiative, a pioneer of the ?compilation film,? producing work that has seldom since been equaled. She brought to this genre far more than her speed, industry and flair; she brought a positive genius for using all sorts of ill-considered odd bits of old footage as a painter uses
