Larisa Shepitko Wings Film Analysis

The Societ cinema in the 1960s sees a shift from the portrayal greatness of society to the focus on an individual. Larisa Shepitko’s Wings (1966) is about an identity crisis of a female war veteran. It depicts the ambivalent treatment of women in the patriarchal society, in which women in authority experience greater freedom in wartime and are expected to assume a domestic role in peacetime. The film shows the contradictions experienced by the protagonist, Nadezhda Petrukhina, through a narration of her troubles in the post-war life and her nostalgia for the war.
The beginning of the film purposefully centers around minor characters and provides an inconspicuous portrayal of the protagonist. The camera of the open scene places a minor male character, the tailor, at the center of the screen, follows him into a fitting room, and shows a close up of his fingers as he makes measurements of the protagonist. We can see only an impression of her back. Her name is repeatedly mentioned, but does not make an …show more content…
The chaperon tells her achievements to the children in the past tense, since most of the female fighter pilots who fought alongside her died in the war. At this moment, Petrukhina’s presence in the museum has a ghostly quality. She realizes that her existence is integrated in the past history. Standing before the photos of herself from the war, she becomes a living monument of the achievements of the fighter pilots during the war. Through the flashbacks to the war, the film further reveals that. Petrukhina’s fellow female fighter pilots and her lover Mitia all died in the war, but she continues to live in the absence of imminent death. She cannot break away from her identity as a soldier, nor can she adapt to the society’s constraints, so she seeks death to liberate herself from the “modernized patriarchality”