Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw

264 Pages·2014·3.137 MB·English

by  Joshua First

U
Joshua First is the Croft Assistant Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and
Professor of History and International k Identity during the Soviet Thaw is the first
Studies at the University of Mississippi. concentrated study of Ukrainian cinema
‘Joshua First’s timely, well-researched study traces the r
He has published on a variety of topics a in English. In particular, historian Joshua
history of Ukrainian cinema [...] and how film-makers
related to Soviet cinema after Stalin, First explores the politics and aesthetics
mapped out Ukrainian space and Ukrainian identity [...] i
ranging from film audience research n of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema during
to melodrama to his present interest in It is [...] an important book for understanding the Soviet 1960s-70s. He argues that
i
Ukrainian cinema. He teaches courses developments within the post-Stalinist USSR and the a film-makers working at the Alexander
on modern Russian and Soviet history Dovzhenko Feature Film Studio in Kiev
historical evolution of Ukrainian nationhood.’
n
and on contemporary Russian politics were obsessed with questions of identity
Stephen M. Norris, Professor of History and Assistant Director of the Havighurst
and culture. and demanded that the Soviet film
Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University, Ohio. C
industry and audiences alike recognize
Ukrainian cultural difference. The first two
i
‘This meticulously researched book takes the reader on a n chapters provide the background on
tour of Ukrainian cinema, from the mythical landscapes of e how Soviet cinema after Stalin cultivated
the Carpathian highlands [...] to the smoke filled halls of the an exoticised and domesticated image
m
of Ukrainians, along with how the film
studio [...] A must read for anyone interested in Soviet film.’
studio in Kiev attempted to rebuild its
Dr. Serhy Yekelchyk, Associate Professor, Department of Germanic and Slavic a
reputation during the early Sixties as a
Studies, University of Victoria, Canada.
centre of the cultural thaw in the USSR.

The next two chapters examine Sergei
Paradjanov’s highly influential Shadows
of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and its
role in reorienting the Dovzhenko studio
toward the auteurist (some would say
Ukrainian
elitist) agenda of Poetic Cinema. In the
final three chapters, Ukrainian Cinema
looks at the major works of film-makers
Yurii Illienko, Leonid Osyka, and Leonid
J Cinema
o Bykov, among others, who attempted
s
h (and were compelled) to bridge the
u
growing gap between a cinema of
a
F auteurs and concerns to generate profit
irs Belonging and Identity during for the Soviet film industry.
t
the Soviet Thaw
Jacket image: Still from Yurii Illienko’s film St. John’s Eve
(Vechir na Ivana Kupala) from: Sovetskaia ekran, no. 11 (June 1968).
Joshua First
Jacket design: www.paulsmithdesign.com
Joshua First is the Croft Assistant Professor of History and
International Studies at the University of Mississippi. He has pub-
lished on a variety of topics related to Soviet cinema after Stalin,
ranging from fi lm audience research to melodrama to his present
interest in Ukrainian cinema. He teaches courses on modern
Russian and Soviet history, and on contemporary Russian politics
and culture.
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Published and forthcoming in KINO: The Russian and Soviet Cinema Series
Series Editor: Richard Taylor
Advisory Board: Birgit Beumers, Julian Graffy, Denise Youngblood
Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Film
Rachel Morley
The Russian American Hero in Soviet Film: Cinema’s Role in Shaping the Early
Culture of the USSR
Marina Levitina
Through a Russian Lens: Representing Foreigners in a Century of Russian Film
Julian Graffy
Cinema in Central Asia: Rewriting Cultural Histories
Edited by Gulnara Abikeyeva, Michael Rouland and Birgit Beumers
The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time
Nariman Skakov
The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov
Edited by Birgit Beumers and Nancy Condee
Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema
Robert Robertson
Sergei Eisenstein Selected Works
Edited by Richard Taylor
Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin
Peter Kenez
Dziga Vertov: Defi ning Documentary Film
Jeremy Hicks
Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (second, revised edition)
Richard Taylor
Forward Soviet: History and Non-Fiction Film in the USSR
Graham Roberts
Propaganda and Popular Entertainment in the USSR: The Mezhrabpom Studio
Jamie Miller
Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw
Josephine Woll
Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema
Edited by Birgit Beumers
Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking
Anne Nesbet
Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin
Jamie Miller
Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde
Amy Sargeant
Queries, ideas and submissions to:
Series Editor: Professor Richard Taylor – [email protected]
Cinema Editor at I.B. Tauris: Anna Coatman - [email protected]
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Ukrainian
Cinema
Belonging and Identity during
the Soviet Thaw
Joshua First
Ukrainian Cinema_title page.indd 1 03/12/2014 15:23
Published in 2015 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
Distributed in the United States and Canada
Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Joshua First 2015
The right of Joshua First to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by the
author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,
may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior written permission of the publisher.
Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book.
Any omissions will be rectifi ed in future editions.
References to websites were correct at the time of writing.
KINO: The Russian and Soviet Cinema Series
ISBN: 978 1 78076 554 9
eISBN: 978 0 85773 626 0
ePDF ISBN: 978 0 85772 670 4
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
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CONTENTS
vi List of Illustrations
viii General Editor’s Preface
x Acknowledgements
xii Note on Transliteration
1 Introduction
21 Chapter 1 Stalinism, De-Stalinization and the
Ukrainian in Soviet Cinema
45 Chapter 2 Rebuilding a National Studio During
the Early 1960s
76 Chapter 3 Sergei Paradjanov’s Carpathian Journey
103 Chapter 4 P aradjanov and the Problem of Film
Authorship
124 Chapter 5 ‘U krainian Poetic Cinema’ and the
Construction of ‘Dovzhenko’s Traditions’
154 Chapter 6 Making National Cinema in the Era of
Stagnation
180 Chapter 7 ‘U krainian Poetic Cinema’ between the
Communist Party and Film Audiences
202 Conclusion: Ukrainian Cinema and the Limitations of
National Expression
210 Notes
228 Bibliography
237 Index
v
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Chapter 1
1.1 The ‘Friendship of Peoples’ in Ivan Pyr’ev’s Tractor
Drivers (1939) 31
1.2 Domesticated Nationality in Ivan Pyr’ev’s Tractor Drivers
(1939) 33
1.3 The Stalinist Folkloric in Ihor Savchenko’s Bohdan
Khmel’nyts’kyi (1941) 35
1.4 The Hetman willfully signs the Pereiaslav Treaty with the
Russians in Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi. 35
Chapter 2
2.1 Taras, the unkempt Ukrainian projectionist in Oleksii
Mishurin’s The Gas Station Queen (1963) 56
Chapter 3
3.1 ‘To the authors of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’, drawing
from 19 November 1964 in Radians’ka kul’tura 82
3.2 Camera movement emulates impressionistic painting in
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors 96
3.3 Flattening of space in Sergei Paradjanov’s Shadows of
Forgotten Ancestors (1965) 98
3.4 Subjective violence in Sergei Paradjanov’s Shadows of
Forgotten Ancestors (1965) 99
Chapter 5
5.1 Tonal minimalism in Iurii Illienko’s A Well for the Thirsty
(1965) 137
5.2 Dream image in A Well for the Thirsty (Illienko, 1965):
Levko (Miliutenko) and his wife (Kadochnikova)
at the well. 138
5.3 The old man dying in (top to bottom) Dovzhenko’s
Earth (1930) and Illienko’s A Well for the Thirsty (1965) 140
5.4 Poet Bulaienko discovers the stolen black earth in
Leonid Osyka’s Love Awaits Those Who Return (1966) 147
vi
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii
Chapter 6
6.1 List of Ukrainian ‘Leaders in Distribution’, 1964–1974 162
6.2 Ivan Mykolaichuk as popular action hero. Images from
5 November 1969 in Za Radians’kyi fi l’m and February
1969 in Novyny kinoekrana 164
6.3 Ivan Mykolaichuk as popular action hero. Image from
February 1969 in Novyny kinoekrana 165
Chapter 7
7.1 Translating the early Gogol to the screen in Iurii
Illienko’s St. John’s Eve (1968) 182
7.2 Solarization techniques in Iurii Illienko’s
St. John’s Eve (1968) 183
7.3 Ethnographic survey of Bukovynian peasant faces in
Illienko’s White Bird with a Black Mark (1971) 195
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KINO: THE RUSSIAN AND SOVIET
CINEMA SERIES
General Editor’s Preface
Cinema has been the predominant art form of the fi rst half of
the twentieth century, at least in Europe and North America.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the former Soviet Union,
where Lenin’s remark that ‘of all the arts, cinema is the most
important’ became a cliché and where cinema attendances were
until recently still among the highest in the world. In the age of
mass politics Soviet cinema developed from a fragile but effec-
tive tool for gaining support among the overwhelmingly illiter-
ate peasant masses during the civil war that followed the October
1917 Revolution, through a welter of experimentation, into a mass
weapon of propaganda through the entertainment that shaped the
public image of the Soviet Union – both at home and abroad for
both elite and mass audiences – and latterly into an instrument to
expose the weaknesses of the past and present in the twin processes
of glasnost and perestroika. Now the national cinemas of the successor
republics to the old USSR are encountering the same bewildering
array of problems, from the trivial to the terminal, as are all the
other ex-Soviet institutions.
Cinema’s central position in Russian and Soviet cultural history
and its unique combination of mass medium, art form and enter-
tainment industry have made it a continuing battlefi eld for confl icts
of broader ideological and artistic signifi cance, not only for Russia
and the Soviet Union, but also for the world outside. The debates
that raged in the 1920s about the relative merits of documentary as
opposed to fi ction fi lm, of cinema as opposed to theatre or painting,
or of the proper role of cinema in the forging of post-revolutionary
Soviet culture and the shaping of the new Soviet man, have their
echoes in current discussions about the role of cinema vis-à-vis other
art forms in effecting the cultural and psychological revolution in
human consciousness necessitated by the processes of economic and
political transformation of the former Soviet Union into modern
democratic and industrial societies and states governed by the rule
viii
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KINO: THE RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA SERIES ix
of law. Cinema’s central position has also made it a vital instrument
for scrutinizing the blank pages of Russian and Soviet history and
enabling the present generation to come to terms with its own past.
This series of books intends to examine Russian, Soviet and
ex-Soviet fi lms in the context of Russian, Soviet and ex-Soviet cine-
mas, and Russian, Soviet and ex-Soviet cinemas in the context of the
political history of Russia, the Soviet Union, the post-Soviet ‘space’
and the world at large. Within that framework the series, drawing
its authors from both East and West, aims to cover a wide variety of
topics and to employ a broad range of methodological approaches
and presentational formats. Inevitably this will involve ploughing
once again over old ground in order to re-examine received opin-
ions but it principally means increasing the breadth and depth of
our knowledge, fi nding new answers to old questions and, above all,
raising new questions for further enquiry and new areas for further
research.
The current monograph is our second book on the Thaw period
and our fi rst to examine the cinema of a single union republic other
than the Russian Federation. The study of Ukraine and its cinema
during the Thaw period poses particular problems, politically, his-
torically, geographically, linguistically and culturally and these are
ably addressed throughout the book, beginning with the author’s
note on transliteration.
The continuing aim of this series is to situate Russian, Soviet and
ex-Soviet cinema in its proper historical and aesthetic context, both
as a major cultural force and as a crucible for experimentation that
is of central signifi cance to the development of world cinema cul-
ture. Books in the series strive to combine the best of scholarship,
past, present and future, with a style of writing that is accessible to a
broad readership, whether that readership’s primary interest lies in
cinema or in broader political history.
Richard Taylor
Swansea, Wales
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