A magical film

Many of those who worked on this famous movie, like script­writers Ivan Mykolaichuk and Yurii Illienko (also the director of the film), cameraman Vilen Kaliuta, or actors Natali Naum and Vasyl Sym­chych, are no longer with us. Yet the film still sparkles like a precious stone, whose value continues to grow, especially given the colorless, dull, and thundering movies of today that leave the audience no room for thought or compassion.

HOW THIS 20th CENTURY FRESCO WAS BORN

White Bird… was compared by the then critics to a masterly executed fresco with rich, colorful national costumes, architecture, music, dances, painting, folk songs and poetry. It is woven with historical truth and creative imagination, with love and suffering for those Ukrainians deprived of a happy life. The 20th century was especially hard on them: they found themselves in the midst of a struggle born of class hatred and waged in the name of a “happy future,” i.e., communism, a struggle which involved half of mankind. The ideologists easily sowed the hostility with their promises and manipulations, a hostility which split peoples and families and led to fratricide. The film shows this on the example of a Bukovynian family, the Dzvonars. At the same time it proves the strength of the people, who did not allow themselves to be destroyed; it shows the people’s faith in God, in the gifted nature and creation of handmade and noble beauty. Even now the movie impresses with the unfathom­able power of its images, which, like pure life-giving water, give one strength and ardor.

Much has been written about this film, but like a truly classical work it continues to reveal ever new meanings. But today let us focus on the history of its creation. Apart from the reminiscences of those who took part in its shooting, which help to reveal what it truly is, there are also documents preserved at the State Archive Museum of Literature and Art. Those include editors’ summaries, session reports, correspondence, as well as testimonies of independent witnesses. And all of them reveal the hard and tense struggle of the creators for their movie.

Maria Mykolaichuk and Larysa Kadochnykova assert that the film was Ivan Mykolaichuk’s brainchild. Everyone who knew him remembered his creative talent and how generously he shared his ideas and numerous plans with others. He was created for making movies as part of a team. It is no accident that he realized himself in the three most important professions in cinema: scriptwriter, director and actor. Indisputably, Mykolaichuk was lucky at the beginning of his cinematographic career. One could only dream of such an experience as his first role, in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Sergei Parajanov and ca­me­raman Yurii Illienko. There was the refined artistic milieu, the university, and finally the high-level creative work. The film brought well-deserved fame to its creators. After this job, as well as the role of Taras Shevchenko in Volodymyr Denysenko’s movie A Dream, there were no more films of such creative ardor. As a student he was regularly offered some roles, but those were rather parts pertaining to party planning than works of art. He aptly wrote that there are films like houses and films like temples. So, after temples came panel house buildings. Still his soul sought to fly. In 1968 there were two films involving an expedition to the Carpathians: Leonid Osyka’s Stone Cross was shot in Pokuttia and Borys Ivchenko’s Annychka was made near the same place as Sha­dows…. The events in Annychka take place during World War II and Mykolaichuk’s hero, Roman, is a hutsul, forced to wear a uniform and carry weapons, though his entire being is against it. The youth is strongly affected when he sees policemen kill guerrilla fighters at the fascists’ orders. After all, failing to live in harmony with his conscience, Roman loses his mind.

The film has a scheme, yet there is no explanation of the events that were taking place in the Carpathians at the time. There was neither psychological, nor conceptual reasoning about the character’s fate. Mykolaichuk wanted to tell how he saw and understood those events, to tell about the people he knew well, and, after all, about his own family and its many children. The script was taking shape, but who would take it upstairs? Being no new person in cinema, he knew only too well that the fate of a neglected screenplay was unenviable. And he was going to show what was not allowed to be shown in cinema, because one of the Dzvonars’ sons was a Red Army soldier, while the second was an UPA warrior.

On May 16, 1969, on St. George’s Day he met Illienko by accident and offered him the idea of a screenplay, as a present for his name day. Illienko accepted the screenplay and they started working on it. After a bit more than a month, on Ivan’s birthday, June 15, the screenplay was ready. Without delay, they brought it to the court of the first instance, the artistic council of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studio.

“Have we forgotten how to rejoice at good screenplays?” the sharp-tongued Leonid Osyka asked the people present at the meeting. He highly assessed the work of his colleagues and tried to convince others. Since Vitalii Yurchenko, one of the most progressive editors of the film studio, was the editor, the script was submitted for approval to the State Cinema Committee of the USSR, where to the surprise of the editors and the authors, it was green-lit, without being shelved. Then it had to face Moscow, where the final permission for shooting would be given (or not). It was unclear how the experienced Moscow experts would react to this complicated story. The then head of the creative union of the studio, director Yevhen Khryniuk decided to help. His ability to communicate with the cinema officials was indeed of great value: the “doubtful” screenplay was approved with a remark that “in the interests of the film the authors will have to work thoroughly on clarifying the social essence of the problematic of the work. At the same time the images should be clear and accessible for the broad Soviet audience.” Fortunately, the inertia of the “thaw” and relative freedom still had its effect: in two years such loyalty could hardly be expected. On September 16, 1969 the studio signed a contract with the authors of the screenplay.

The preparation process started, the director made screen tests, which had to be submitted for approval like many other stages of the work on the film. It was winter outside, the film was supposed to include winter scenes, so the crew had to set out to the shooting site. Suddenly an unprecedented thing happened. The USSR State Cinema Committee filed numerous claims to the literary screenplay, approved at all levels (by then it was already the director’s screenplay, which had no conceptual differences, compared to the previous one). At first on January 7 (!) several laconic claims were outlined and signed by the chief editor of the screenplay-editorial board of the State Cinema Committee of the USSR D. Prykordonny, his deputy head Yu. Novykov and member of the screenplay editorial board H. Zeldovych. Apart from exceeding the scope and unsatisfactory finale, there was the following statement: “Though Yu.H. Illienko’s attitude to a number of concrete notes is creative and active, we cannot leave without attention the decisions which, in our opinion, have not been well founded: showing the three horrible years of fascist occupation; the gang headed by Orest is shown in complete separation from the occupants, moreover Orest simply declares independence from both the Germans and the Soviets; the meaning of Dzvonar’s attempts to earn some money by smuggling remains unclear...”

However, the process of movie­making had already been launched, and apparently neither the authors, nor the head of the film studio Vasyl Tsvirkunov were going to stop, because ideology is important, but nobody would applaud the disruption of work on a plan unit. And the explanatory note of Khryniuk to the chief editor of the film studio Yu. Bedzyk mentions that on January 16 the authors of the screenplay, Illienko and Mykolaichuk, had a conversation with Zeldovych: “The director’s story about the end of the movie seemed more impressive to Zeldovych than on paper. The director explained that he would be able to shoot the film in a more convincing way than on paper.”

“IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW MANY REMARKS THEY WILL MAIL US, WE WILL LISTEN TO THEM AND IMPROVE OUR WORK”

So the order on the trip to the Carpathians was signed, resulting in a menacing letter from the head of the State Cinema Committee of the USSR Sviatoslav Ivanov with an official order of his institution: “[the State Cinema Committee of the USSR], having familiarized itself with the director’s script and actors’ screen tests, consi­ders that the main remarks and wishes of the Cinema Committees of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR have not been fully taken in account. The work on the director’s screenplay will be continued under a strict control of the studio’s administration and its screenplay board. The shooting of the film will take place only at the permission of the Cinema Committee.”

The official letter was followed with a wordy paper from the above-mentioned officials of the screenplay-editorial board of the State Cinema Committee of the Ukrainian SSR. Apparently, they did not waste time during that month and were laboriously seeking new faults in White Bird…. “The screenplay presented by the authors is not satisfactory. The class position there is substituted by the abstract Biblical concept of the struggle between good and evil, with an additional coloring of, again, the Biblical topic of knowledge from the renowned tree of Paradise. In the director’s screenplay and during the shooting of the film the abstract approach to the problem of good and evil should be removed, and the line of a deeper revelation of the concrete historical evil with its class essence should be built.” They found all kinds of examples of sedition in the screenplay. Instead of Vivdia, whose image is given too much space, and Heorhii’s child love, in their opi­nion, they offered the “idea of historical necessity to liberate Bukovyna from Romanian rule.” They demanded to emphasize that Dana goes from the wedding “directly into Orest’s arms.” And the image of Orest the bandit, in their opinion, should have been made “more precise.”

Clearly the human relationships, passions, and feelings, which fill the characters of White Bird… to the brim were not taken in consideration: the cinema official thought in ideological categories. “We cannot agree that in the last part of the screenplay, which shows the village after liberation, tragic scenes prevail: the dumb Boh­dan comes, Vivdia dies, people get killed in the mine field, Dana tries to hang herself, Petro and Ostap burn down, someone kills Heorhii, and even the priest loses his mind. […] So, there is even more suffering than previously, and it is unclear what we fought for. The idea is apparently wrong and cannot be part of the film’s concept.”

It seems the shooting should have been brought to a halt after all these accusations. “When I try to trace back consistently the process of creation of this film,” Yurchenko recalls, “it seems to me like a lonely cruiser, surrounded by motor torpedo boats on all sides. And the experts are sitting on these boats. And they hit the cruiser with torpedoes. And the torpedo breaks the board and penetrates within, and an explosion is supposed to take place, breaking the cruiser in two. But no explosion followed. It seems that the cruiser swallowed the torpedoes and followed its course without firing back.”

In the late 1980s Illienko explained that when working on this film with Mykolaichuk they “set a Jesuitically formulated task: no matter how many remarks we face, we will do everything they say if it helps to improve the film, because there are no limits to improvement. For officials working in the sphere of art red-tape is paramount, following the principle: we told them — they made changes. The essence frequently remains unnoticed. For example, they tell us to remove a scene, and we turn it in such a way that some things were revealed in a more precise, unexpected, and truthful manner.” In his letter to the Polish film critic Janusz Gazda he said: “Some people say that the material in the film is enough for several films, but I would like to make something like a supersaturated solution — when chemists say it begins to crystallize.”

So the cruiser pursued its course: the shooting went on, and the studio’s employees wrote regular explanations to the officials. In yet another summary for the director’s screenplay, dated June 10, Bedzyk, Voitenko, Khryniuk, and Yurchenko reasonably emphasized that the committee had approved the first version of the screenplay and expressed their surprise at the abrupt change of attitude.

Officials were unable to stop the ardor and power of a young, creative mind. When they showed their material at the studio and State Cinema in autumn, it was clear to everyone that this was a creative success. Various summaries carried hackneyed demands to strengthen the social message, but nobody paid attention to them.

The 5th issue of the Polish magazine Ekran (February, 1971), which regularly covered events in Ukrainian cinema, announced that the shooting of the film was over, and the movie was shown in several movie theaters (at the film studio and Moscow’s Cinema House), where it was accepted with enthusiasm and described as one of the most outstanding works of Soviet cinema in the last few years.

THE TRIUMPH OF UKRAINIAN CINEMA

In March the film was shown at the Ukraina Palace of Culture for the de­legates of the session of the Communist Party of the USSR. An unexpected thing happened: the Secretary of the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast Party Committee Dobryk started a row, saying that the film was anti-Soviet. The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine Shelest immediately convened a broad council, to which the top official cinema authorities from Moscow and Kyiv were invited. During the discussion professor Kudin from Kyiv revealed some “false notes” in the film: a Red Army officer could not marry a priest’s daughter. However, Mykola Mashchenko justifiably appealed that it was not important for us whose daughter it was, because the entire scene was symbolical; the most important thing was the philosophy it was bringing, and it was bringing the right philosophy. The secretary of the USSR Union of Cinematographers Kara­ga­nov asserted that the film was clearly and firmly establishing a class view of history, that the film was poetic, and that he did not agree with professor Kudin in that nobody is opposed to the bandits, because working people and their folkways are opposed to them. He added: “Illienko is simply a wizard as a director and cameraman.” Moscow’s Professor Kapler emphasized that Illienko’s film was made in a very ta­lented manner. Baskakov, the first deputy head of the State Cinema Committee of the USSR said that he was sure that for the residents of other republics the film would become a real revelation, and that Illienko was a great and talented artist.

The film was successfully defended from all the attacks and accusations and included in the competition program of the Moscow Film Festival. White Bird with Black Mark caused a heated debate among cinematographers, which soon went international. In July 1971 at the 7th Moscow Film Festival, at the Palace of Sessions with its capacity of 4,000 people, it drew a long applause and won the golden medal. The reporter of the magazine Ekran Henryk Zelinski called Illienko and Mykolaichuk’s film the most interesting work of the festival. The film was called a triumph of Ukrainian cinema. Svia­toslav Ivanov, who was removed from office when Shcherbytsky came, wrote a thesis entitled “Ukrainian fiction film,” where he polemicized with critics, including Bleiman: “Predictions in art are dangerous. When Bleiman’s article, declaring a lack of prospects for the ‘school of archaists,’ was being printed at the printing house, Illienko was already working on the film White Bird... Not only Bleiman, but also some other critics opined that the arsenal of figurative methods used by poetic cinema lovers, who regularly enriched it, could be used only for fairy tales, legends, parables, and historical films. But they were wrong. In the film White Bird poetic cinema enters the sphere of new ideas and problems [...] The authors of the film confirmed the vitality of aesthetics in poetic cinema.”

White Bird with Black Mark was seen in many countries; it won va­rious international awards, like the Silver Sirens Prize in Sorrento, Italy; the Golden Pectoral of Iran’s Shah International Film Festival in Teheran; the diplomas of the International Film Festival in San-Francisco, Belgrade, Tokyo, Sydney, Melbourne etc. Like any truly classical work, it remains impressive and fresh, just as it was 40 years ago.