Antagonism speaks loudly, confronts forcefully, engages aggressively. In cinematic terms, that default expectation for antagonism likely conjures examples of formal experimentation that challenge the norms of mainstream filmmaking (of the Brakhage, Anger, or Deren variety), agitprop calls-to-action or awareness (the late Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park (1971), or explicit transgressions meant to startle buttoned-up viewers (that scene from Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct).  All emblematic of overt forms of cinematic antagonism sharpened to provocatory precision; antagonisms sitting upon the epidermal surface of the film’s body.

What then of antagonisms that lie below the surface, confronting the genre, the State, the body; a bubbling agitation rather than a boiling one? Take Larisa Shepitko’s graduate thesis film Znoi/Heat (1962), appropriately adapting a narrative of individuals toiling to draw up what’s below a craggy, inhospitable terrain.  Only registered onscreen through formal shifts into impressionistic, dreamy renditions of an indigenous history being tilled away from the Kazakhstan/Kyrgystan border steppe plow by plow, Heat’s antagonisms pool not on the screen’s surface but behind it.  Enumerating these posterior antagonisms expands the concept of this theme week, drawing attention to subtle forms of antipathy, registered not formally, but generically, politically, and bodily.

To reach that which is buried, the surface must be broken loose.  Categorizable as a type of Soviet cinema occupied with communal farm labor (kolkhoz films), Heat’s narrative does center certain blatant antagonisms. Concentric conflicts between a young, Komsomol laborer and a demanding taskmaster as well as their commune battling the unforgiving landscape propel the plot while serving genre conventions. Meant as propaganda for Khrushchev’s Virgin Land campaign - an initiative designed to batter inhospitable countryside into a crop-bearing resource - films that share the moniker weave narratives not dissimilar from those found in American Westerns. Heroes, here mounting tractors rather than horses (though, also sometimes horses), seek to conquer the landscape, symbolically imparting communist ideologies through battles between “good” and “bad” workers. Yet, also like the American Western, there exist revisionist entries, including Heat. Tutored by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Shepitko’s mentality as a filmmaker was reflective of his influence, with her viewing “cinema as a weapon of ideological struggle” (Rosenberg 119). Resisting the propagandistic mandate of the cycle her film fell into, handheld camerawork and a parred down cast treat the topic with less State-sanctioned grandeur and more authentic appreciation than its peers. These gaps left in the generic soil provide enough room for audiences to question the messaging, even the entire intention of the Virgin Land film, as a subtle rebuke to the system from within it.

Likewise, Shepitko chose to populate her cast with native Kyrgyz actors, which was uncommon at the time. However, here another possible antagonism arises. To satisfy industry standards, the entire cast was dubbed over by non-Kyrgyz voice doubles in “standard Russian,” despite Shepitko’s complaints (Mandušić 194).  As Zdenko Mandušić suggests, that alteration produces an atonality between the image and audio throughout the film. Verbal arguments between members of the commune – metaphorically and directly voicing propagandistic adages of the Virgin Lands campaign – simultaneously, yet inadvertently disrupt Khrushchev’s intention for those who are listening closely, sonorously exemplifying the erasure of a culture with each spoken word. 

Finally, again echoing Dovzhenko, Shepitko was known to “approach each film as if it were. . .[her] last,” including this first production (Rosenberg 119).  Foreshadowing not only later instances in her career - including being hospitalized during the making of You and Me (1971), then again for a spinal injury while pregnant - but also her untimely death while shooting her final film (incidentally titled Farewell), Shepitko directed portions of Heat from a stretcher after her and other crew members contracted Hepatitis A. Arguably, Shepitko’s entire career encompasses one extended antagonism between her and the grueling process of filmmaking.  While extreme, her career illustrates a perpetual antagonism between the project-at-hand and the director’s (and other crew members’) bodies, of the physical and emotional labor that exists underneath any finalized film release; a murmur of antagonism that has the potential to vibrate within the viewer. Compositionally impressive, varied, and evocative, each frame of Heat conveys the diegetic labor of the plot, but likewise carries a resonance of the pain endured to yield those images for the intended audience to partake. 

Antagonism within the cinema regularly radiates off the screen by way of form, content, or explicit politics, but Shepitko’s Heat settles instead like a dense humidity, exemplifying how antagonism can be located posterior to the film’s surface.

Works Cited

Mandušić, Zdenko.  “Methods of Conquest: Larisa Shepitko’s Heat, Soviet Russian Colonialism, and the Representation of the Virgin Lands Campaign in Soviet Cinema of the 1950s-60s.”  ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko, edited by Lida Oukaderova, Edinburgh University Press, 2024, pp. 179-199.

Rosenberg, Karen.  “Shepitko.”  Sight and Sound, vol. 56, no. 2, Spring 1987, pp. 119-122.

Sorokina, Anastasia.  “The Lady Vanishes: Soviet Censorship, Socialist Realism, and the Disappearance of Larisa Shepitko.”  Film Matters, vol. 8, no. 3, Winter 2017, pp. 21-27.