Once again the film festival organised by Rory Finin,
director of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, a centre in the Department of Slavonic
Studies at the University of Cambridge, has brought Ukraine to the Winstanley
lecture theatre at Trinity College in Cambridge for two evenings, 11-12
November. The past couple of festivals
unsurprisingly had a major focus on Maidan and the political turmoil which has racked
Ukraine, with the emphasis on documentaries exploring filmmakers’ responses to
the crisis. The ninth festival returned
to the more traditional format of mixing documentaries portraying broader
perspectives on the lives of contemporary Ukrainians with classic fiction. The festival was run in collaboration with
the Docudays UA International Documentary Human Rights Film Festival and the
Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre.
The first film on Friday evening was a short, Has-Beens (Olena Moskalchuk and Dmytro
Burko, 2015), about the Petrivka book market next to the railway line in
Kyiv/Kiev. Opening with the sounds of
the trains as the camera tracks along a passageway lined with books, we are
introduced to a world the twenty-first century seems to have forgotten: a
market crammed with decaying books, piled high and scattered around, but few
customers for them. One seller sadly
notes people don’t read these days, while a smartly dressed man hunts only for
books not available as digital versions.
Many of the units are shuttered and it must be a
long time since this forlorn space saw any kind of bustle. One wonders how the market keeps going, with
customers haggling over books that are relics from another era, as the one
containing pictures of a young and old Lenin amply demonstrates. Yet the sellers and their customers are in
good humour, boasting and telling jokes.
There is even an effort to repair books that might have to wait a long
time to find a loving owner. It is
heartening to see the occasional young person browsing, but on this showing the
second-hand book trade is not in good health.
A rather sad film for bibliophiles, but more context to allow the viewer
to gauge Petrivka’s position in the world of Ukrainian bookselling generally
would have been useful.
The second documentary of the evening was
feature-length, and also dealt with a vanishing world: Hollywood on the Dnipro: Dreams from Atlantis (Oleh Chornyi, 2014),
Rory pointing out that the title is a nod to the Odessa Film Studio’s nickname
of ‘Hollywood on the Black Sea’. Hollywood on the Dnipro charts the rise
and decline of the village of Buchak, about 150 km from Kiev, as a destination
for filmmaking during the Soviet era.
Alexander Dovzhenko, who proclaimed the area ‘Ukraine’s Switzerland’,
planned to shoot his final film, Poem of
the Sea, here. After his death in
1956 his widow Yuliya Solntseva undertook the project, and the association gave
Buchak a boost that attracted other projects throughout the 1960s and into the
70s.
Over the years a significant number of directors
arrived, taking full advantage of the picturesque rural setting. Andrei Tarkovsky, who used it to great effect
in his debut feature Ivan’s Childhood,
may have been the most notable, but there was a roll-call of directors in what
seems to have been a renaissance in Ukrainian cinema paralleling New Wave
movements elsewhere in Europe. An enthusiasm
hinting at boundless possibilities is on display in these films. As dyed cows in one suggests, the area somehow
lent itself to play, a poetic approach bordering on surrealism. It could be that the feeling of remoteness
from government strictures encouraged a sense of escape, though there could not
be total freedom from state censorship.
The filmmakers talked to those who worked on the
films, both sides of the camera, as well as locals who remembered the
productions and often acted in them as extras.
Tarkovsky’s Ivan himself, Nikolai Burlyayev, discusses the film and its
director while Larisa Kadochnikova, who spent a year filming Ivana Kupala Night here in the 1960s,
is given a tour as she tries to pick out landmarks half a century later.
The second part of the film’s title comes from the
fact that today the village has largely disappeared under water. In the early 1970s, against fierce local
opposition, the Soviet government authorised the Kaniv hydropower plant which
entailed building a reservoir. Some
residents moved to abandoned dwellings above the water line but most were
relocated to other villages where they had to build their own houses with no
government assistance. As a result
Buchak has been left almost completely deserted, its famous windmill which appeared
in many films fallen into decay, though it remains home to a handful of
bohemians who value the solitude.
Towards the end there is a shift from celebrating Buchak’s cinematic
heritage to highlight the fragile ecosystem and the environmental degradation,
with activists fighting to prevent further flooding and preserve the natural
beauty along with sites of archaeological significance.
The film’s writer Stanislav Tsalyk, who also
appeared in the film, was present to introduce it, and do a Q&A afterwards,
though the latter turned out to be a single question from Rory and an extremely
lengthy answer that covered most of the questions the audience might have
asked. Tsalyk pointed out some of the
problems making the film, notably that many of those who had been involved
during the village’s golden age had died or moved away, reducing the number of
people they could interview. Memories
were fallible because those who had acted in the films only actually saw them
once DVDs became available because there were no cinemas close by, and no
electricity. He added that the films
discussed are only a slice of those which used Buchak as a location.
This was an important oral history of the Dnieper’s
very own dream factory, bringing to light a significant aspect of Ukrainian
cinema. There was undoubtedly an
atmosphere of nostalgia and loss hanging over Hollywood on the Dnipro, but it was too an indicator that such
excitement and experimentation can once again energise the country’s film
making, and reinforce national identity in the process.
Saturday’s screenings, Two Days (Heorhii Stabovyi, 1927) and The Night Coachman (Heorhii Tasin, 1928), were a complete change of
pace, two gripping hour-long dramas that were a fascinating alternative to the
didacticism of Sergei Eisenstein’s films in the same period (though a shot of a
sleeping stone lion in Two Days may have
been intended to echo the first of the famous trio of lions in Eisenstein’s
1925 Battleship Potemkin). Where Eisenstein’s primary concern was the
movement of the masses, subordinating the individual and assuming a common
motivation based on class, these two films examined the human cost,
particularly intergenerational frictions, as a new world was born, leaving
those who were stuck firmly in the old in confusion and despondency. There were commonalities between the two:
both show the brutal execution of a child who has joined the Communists – a son
in Two Days, a daughter in The Night Coachman – at the hands of the
Whites, and the revenge of the aged father, culminating in death or despair. In each case the father (a widower) is out of
sympathy with his offspring’s views, but aghast at the way the Whites, with
whom he naturally feels an affinity, behave.
However, in neither case is the retributive act carried out from class
consciousness, but from a more visceral hatred of cold-blooded murderers.
The evening began with Two Days. A wealthy
bourgeois family flees before the advancing Reds, leaving their elderly
retainer to look after the house. During
the loading of the car a puppy is accidentally killed, a seemingly minor act in
the scheme of things but the beginning of a chain of events which drives the
tragedy. The Reds arrive and the old
servant is astonished to find his son with them, someone he had thought dead in
the war but who is now a commissar. The
young man though makes it clear his loyalty is to the Revolution. His father is hiding the young son of the
family in his attic room, at considerable risk to himself, as the youngster had
been left behind in the confusion.
Unfortunately the puppy’s body is dug up by its mother and this leads to
the Reds finding a chest with the family’s valuables, buried for safekeeping. They remove the chest but the boy in hiding
mistakenly thinks the old man had told the revolutionaries of its whereabouts,
and when the Reds retreat and the Whites come back, he denounces his erstwhile
protector. The commissar had been
ordered to remain undercover but the boy betrays his hiding place, the Whites
find him and promptly hang him from the tree under which chest and puppy had
been buried. The old man in his agony
burns the house, killing everybody in it, including the boy, before himself
expiring on the road.
In depicting the conflict Stabovyi does not create the
simplistic dichotomy of noble Reds and dastardly Whites one might expect in the
1920s. The former are a boorish lot with
bad manners, whereas the Whites are cultivated and at least know how to play
the piano (and don’t put lit cigarettes on it).
But the Whites are ruthless when it comes to dealing with the captured commissar. The old man’s political sympathies are
entirely with them but he still has personal loyalties, and cannot reconcile
the two. Not seeing where his true interest
lies is his tragedy. Thus he experiences
false consciousness by allying himself to the bourgeoisie, sheltering an
ungrateful youth who symbolically takes his bed while he has to sleep on the
floor. At one point the old man sits in
his room and fondles his old Imperial Army cap.
He sighs that those days are long gone, and indeed they are. Alone, with nothing left to live for, his
time is over as a new society rises from the ashes of the old.
The
Night Coachman is a story about an elderly coach
driver who has worked nights for 30 years, living comfortably with his daughter
who is employed, so he thinks, at a printing works. In fact she is a Communist, secretly producing
revolutionary literature. Her father
discovers that she is no longer at the works and is associating with, in his
eyes, bad company, a fellow radical. The
pair have stashed printing equipment in the loft above the stable, and thinking
to save her, the father brings in a ruthless counterintelligence officer when
he believes the young man will be in the loft alone. Unfortunately the daughter is there instead,
with incriminating evidence. In a
chilling scene the officer forces the old man to drive them to the
mortuary. After telling the custodian
there is a body for him while the camera shows the daughter sitting passively,
the officer shoots her (in practice one would have expected him to interrogate
her to find out as much as possible about her network, but the scene is
superbly dramatic).
The following day the old man is in a daze, out in
his carriage in daylight for the first time in decades. He sees at a street
corner the officer interrogating the very person with whom his daughter had
associated, and when the man is detained the officer orders the father to drive
them to – the mortuary. The father whips
up the horse, tells the young man to jump, and crashes the carriage on some
steps. His impulsive act kills the
officer and the horse, and leaves him dazed and injured as the film ends with
him reaching for the scarf he had earlier given his daughter as a gift.
Technically the film is a marvel, with a great deal
of night shooting done on location in Odessa.
Early on there is a sequence where the old man is driving the officer
and the latter sees a pretty woman in another carriage. He orders the old man to speed up and drive
alongside, then he hops into the other vehicle to exercise his charms on the
lady. It is similar to a sequence in
Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera
(1929) in which the camera in a car drives next to another car, filming its
occupants; perhaps this is where Vertov got the idea.
As is the case in Two Days, an old man furthers the revolutionary cause, but not from
radical motives: here it is to atone for causing the death of his
daughter. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 film Mother has a mother and son pitted
against each other initially; however, she comes to understand the system’s
injustice after seeing the harsh way it treats him, and she adopts his
revolutionary outlook. Both Stabovyi and
Tasin by contrast demonstrate that the way individuals respond to reality is
not always so neat. Ultimately, if one
cannot change one’s views in accord with the forces of history, the forces of
history will roll over you. The old, as
symbolised by the father, will give way to the new, albeit at the cost of great
sacrifice on both sides.
Rory Finin is doing a fine job organising the
festival and bringing us gems. As well
as familiar faces it consistently attracts those new to Ukrainian film, and the
number of students willing to give up the more usual pleasures of weekend nights
(or even Radio 4’s Any Questions?,
which was being recorded at the Cambridge Union at the same time on Friday
evening) is testament to its attractions.
Watching the clips in Hollywood on
the Dnipro made me realise just how many films Rory could potentially
programme for future festivals. Next
year (coincidentally the centenary of the Russian Revolution) will mark the
tenth. There is no shortage of potential
material so there is scope, budgets willing, for an expanded festival, perhaps
occupying all day on the Saturday. The
festival has always been free, but I am sure that a charge to help defray the
extra costs would not deter attendants.
I hope Rory will consider pushing the човен out and making the tenth
festival of Ukrainian film even more enjoyable than the preceding nine.
