Dr Rory Finin, director of Cambridge
Ukrainian Studies, a centre in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the
University of Cambridge, organised an interestingly diverse programme for the
tenth Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film on 17-18 November. The venue was once again the Winstanley
lecture theatre at Trinity College where the audience was treated to films old
and new.
As Dr Finin said, Friday’s two films
were intended, in their different ways, to reflect on the hundredth anniversary
of the ‘Russian Revolution’, which he pointed out was not solely Russian nor a
single event. The upheaval in Ukraine
added a desire for independence to a mix containing a range of views across the
spectrum about what type of political form should emerge from the chaos,
creating a complex, shifting situation.
The evening kicked off with the first of
two films in the festival directed by Svitlana Shymko: The
Fall of Lenin (2017), a short film dealing with the destruction of Lenin
monuments across most of Ukraine – the occupied territories being of course a
notable exception. Shymko made The Medic Leaves Last (2014), shown in
the festival two years ago. The
Fall of Lenin was made with financial support from Docudays UA, a
distributor specialising in Ukrainian documentaries, the Guardian newspaper and
the British Council.
Surprisingly, it opens with a group of
serious-looking middle-aged individuals in a library with pictures of Lenin and
Marx behind them holding a séance to contact the spirit of Lenin. They actually do allegedly get through to
Vladimir Ilyich (the spectre of communism?), who must have been surprised to
find that there is an afterlife, something a reading of Engels’ ‘Natural Science
and the Spirit World’ would have suggested to him was most unlikely. Possessing more of a sense of humour than one
suspects he displayed when alive, he claims to have been an angel in life,
though not a good one. When asked, his
prognosis for the future of Ukraine is not positive. The Ouija session gives way to documentary
footage of the erection of various Lenin statues in front of restrained crowds,
and a montage of destruction of such statues, of varying degrees of aesthetic
merit and often already badly defaced, in front of, and sometimes by, jubilant
ones.
Particularly striking is a deposed Lenin
hanging humiliatingly upside down, perhaps evoking in some thoughts of
Mussolini and Clara Petacci hanging from a girder in Milan. Another with ropes around its neck invites
comparisons with Lenin’s comment about Arthur Henderson in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. There is also footage of the destruction of
religious symbols by the Bolsheviks, making a link between their iconoclasm and
the Ukrainians ridding their country in turn of ‘religious’ symbols in the form
of the statues. Scenes in a foundry show
bronze being melted down, a shot lingering on Lenin’s face slowly dissolving. The result is a bell, and when it is tested
it rings beautifully. The message could
not be clearer.
In the final section a hand holds up old
postcards of the monuments over the locations, and then takes away the cards to
show what replaced them. The variety of
statuary, focusing on Ukrainian history or substituting a fountain, is a
contrast to the Lenin monoculture of Soviet times. What is missing from the film though is a
sense of the range of opinions the mass removals must have generated: euphoria
certainly for many, but surely regret for others. The enthusiastic crowd is not representative
of the people. Is there now perhaps an
element of ‘buyer’s remorse’ for some who feel the destruction was carried out
too quickly, and an important aspect of the country's cultural heritage (not to
mention its secular values) lost? It’s a
subject with profound implications for national identity, one that cannot be
done justice to in 11 minutes – but then in its way, despite its brevity The Fall of Lenin’s richness does
generate much to think about.
Arsenal (1929),
directed by Alexander Dovzhenko is a different, sprawling, beast entirely, and
Rory spent much of his introduction, as well as most of the festival programme,
providing the background to this remarkable film. I had last seen it at the 2003 Cambridge Film
Festival, at the Arts Picturehouse, where there had been a Dovzhenko strand,
and my verdict then had been that ‘Arsenal
is the product of a filmmaker not in charge of his material’. I had in mind the difficulty in discerning
the narrative and with a visual style that was ‘bolted on, influenced by
Eisenstein and Vertov [Arsenal was
released the same year as Man with a
Movie Camera], rather than an organic expression of the story’, and
considered it was ‘trying to cram in too much’.
It was a naive view for which I
apologise belatedly to Dovzhenko. A
second viewing shows he was fully in charge of his material. The film is a suitably monumental treatment
of a vast subject, and the programme correctly recommends treating it as a poem
in three parts: elegy, ode and epic, noting in support of this approach that
Dovzhenko was the ‘progenitor’ of Ukrainian poetic cinema. At this remove, temporal and geographic, the
episodic structure is hard to read for those more used to flowing narrative
continuity, hence the need now for signposts, but the artistry is assured.
That is not to say Arsenal is sui generis. There is a use of types, characters who
represent social groupings, which we are familiar with from Eisenstein. They often verge on, or crash into, caricature,
for example the fat gap-toothed German soldier laughing hysterically under the
influence of gas. The only individual
with a rounded character, and who stands in for Dovzhenko himself, is battered
Tymish, late of the imperial Russian army, who is trying to make sense of the
currents sweeping across his native Ukraine.
The crash of the train on which he is travelling – the engineer left
behind and the passengers clueless how to operate it – symbolises the
state. Climbing from the wreckage, back
in Kiev Tymish has to navigate the tensions between Bolshevism and Ukrainian
nationalism. The ambiguities in the film
echo Dovzhenko’s own as a nationalist whose country is as much dominated by
Russia as it was in Tsarist times.
How to break the tension between nationalism
and socialism firmly controlled from Moscow?
This is where I think I had my biggest problem when I first saw the
film. At the end, Tymish, who has
identified with the Bolsheviks, is confronted by nationalist soldiers. Proclaiming himself a Ukrainian worker,
thereby eliding the gap between the two identities, he urges his attackers to
shoot, and tears open his shirt in an act of defiant martyrdom. They fire, but he is impervious to
bullets. The 2017 programme argues of
this scene: ‘By the end of Arsenal,
Tymish rejects the zero-sum game placing his national identity and social/class
identity at odds with one another’, which is spot on: in a sense, by his heroic
act Tymish has transcended the difference and can hold both identities
simultaneously. That struck me as a
cop-out when I first saw the film: to the Bolsheviks here is a comrade who
cannot be killed by nationalists, but represents the inevitability of the
revolution; to the nationalists he is a Ukrainian, who will prevail whatever
may transpire.
In retrospect it feels like having your
cake and eating it, but perhaps a position one could be more confident of in
1929 than in the following decade as the Stalinist grip tightened; even so, it
feels as if Dovzhenko is sailing close to the wind. After the screening I asked Rory about its
reception in Moscow, thinking about the political situation and possible
disfavour towards showing an alternative view of the standard narrative of the
Revolution, as indicated in Eisenstein’s October
a year earlier, and highlighting the failure of the Bolshevik Arsenal
uprising. However, Rory pointed out
that, despite the failure of the Bolsheviks in overthrowing the nationalist Rada, Arsenal ultimately indicates the failure of Ukrainian nationalism
(and the film’s reception in Ukraine itself was generally critical). One wonders what Dovzhenko would have made of
the politics of Euromaidan in his artistic practice.
Saurday’s films dealt with more
contemporary, and more intimate, themes.
After another welcome viewing of The
Fall of Lenin, we saw an earlier short by Svitlana Shymko, Here Together (2013). This looks at a mother and daughter living in
Portugal, where apparently there are a significant number of Ukrainians. The mother works as a domestic, but she
conducts a rather good church choir. Her
initial idea was to work in Portugal for a year, sending money home, before
returning to Ukraine, but she missed her daughter Olesya, who only visited for
holidays, and when Olesya decided to study in Portugal, she made the decision
to settle there despite feeling the pull of home. Her daughter is also talented musically,
playing the piano to concert standard.
The pair highlight the pros and cons of living abroad: it can bring
opportunities not available, or at least harder to find, in one’s home country,
but it can also mean only finding work below the level of one’s qualifications
and abilities. The mass migration of
workers entails loss of potential, both for the individuals and at a national
level in the home country.
The final film of the festival was Dixieland (2015), directed by Roman
Bondarchuk, and it was an absolute delight.
It focuses on a children’s jazz band in Kherson, about 280 miles south
of Kiev. The children begin playing at
an early age and are very accomplished.
The film follows them as they practice, in a very dilapidated building,
and perform in public. These are
children with talent and ambition, led by their mentor, Semen Nikolayevich
Ryvkin, a gruff elderly man who is devoted to the project and his charges, and
who in turn is clearly adored by them.
You sense that for some, music is a way out of a restricted life with
limited prospects, and one lad goes off to boarding school where he can study
music. Even for those less fortunate,
playing as a group builds confidence, and the children are shown to be outgoing
and well adjusted. Shots of kites in the
sky at the beach symbolise their aspirations.
Young Polina is the star of the show, playing sax and trombone, not
afraid to busk on tour and doing very well at it.
The result could have been saccharine,
but it is not all about the music, and there is sadness along with the joy. The children grow, they lose their
director. They play for him outside his
hospital room and he waves down to them.
Polina visits him in his room, and it is shocking to see how thin he has
become. After Ryvkin’s death a young man
steps in to carry on the work, and practice continues. When he talks about studying in Kiev the
young girls are clearly upset at the prospect of losing him. He points out that everything changes, and
this applies not least to the children themselves, who must inevitably leave
the group and forge their own direction.
In Dixieland Bondarchuk has
created a subtle film of great poignancy and humanity.
