Neutralized Poetry
Two weeks ago Oleksandr Dovzhenko Studio in Kyiv
celebrated its seventieth anniversary at the Cinema House,
in an almost closeted atmosphere.
Back in the 1960s, unexpectedly for the world – and perhaps for themselves – they came out with several top quality pictures: The Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Stone Cross, and Well for the Thirsty turned out all-time aesthetic records in world cinematography that are still unmatched. But then the communist regime unleashed a ruthless ideological campaign against the studios, starting with a brutal ban on The Well. This taming of the shrew the Soviet way lasted for many years and used a variety of methods. Suppose we call it cinemacide.
In the middle of the totalitarian period a magic flower blossomed miraculously in the historical night of what looked a hopelessly flowerless studio fern. And again it was ruthlessly crushed by the heavy secret police cum Central Committee Ideology Sector boot. I will not mention any nomenklatura names. Let the cinematography historians dig up the dusty files, provided, of course, some of nomenklatura turncoats do not turn up among them. My story is about people who worked for the Dovzhenko Studios for long decades and who knew no equals in their field anywhere in the world. Most of the studios’ staff were topnotch professionals who would be happily hired by any Hollywood producer.
Friday before last some of them met at the Cinema House to celebrate the jubilee. For seventy years, paid token money, they had supplied the needs of the Soviet movie industry which at first produced endless films being “part of the general proletarian process,” meaning sheer propaganda. As soon as “elite pictures” appeared (eventually identified as the “school of Ukrainian poetic cinematography”) the system tried to destroy not only these productions and their directions, but erase the notion from people’s memories. What made the whole thing even more tragic was that, once Ukraine became independent, the authorities instantly cut off all supplies, leaving these people to rely on their own nonexistent resources. Alone with their “National Studios” now looking like a comatose patient, alone with their miserable lot.
And so all those nomenklatura abominations have every reason to rejoice: the “new” political system, following some barbarian dialectic, completed their dirty intrigue against national culture.
The jubilee evening passed on an understandably nostalgic note; everyone recalled the good old days when there was always work to do. Somehow, no one mentioned that “intrigue,” probably because true creative personalities have a special memory in which things unprofessional, especially brutally malignant, cannot be stored for long. Years back, in NKVD/KGB prison camps, prisoners of conscience talked in whispers about their professional problems, not about those who had thrown them behind barbed wire.
Yet the celebration ended in a strangely symbolic way, by showing a mediocre US comedy, Nothing Left to Lose. So what happened to the veteran Ukrainian film directors that evening? Or maybe the title is the truth of the matter: the Dovzhenko Studio has nothing left to lose?
