An Unfinished Article on Ukrainian Film
The situation in today’s Ukrainian cinema not just puzzles but, quite frankly, makes me despair. The point is not that the subject is too complicated — the subject does not exist as such. I wish I could avoid harsh words, but catastrophe is the only correct word for what has been happening until recently. Although the Dovzhenko Film Studios had acquired national status, it began to resemble a lifeless Zone from Strugatskis’ Roadside Picnic. The new Arsenal Prize, established in 1997 for the best Ukrainian full- length film and first awarded to Kira Muratova’s Three Stories and, a year later, to Olena Demyanenko’s weak movie Two Yuliyas, then sank into oblivion for want of worthwhile contenders. The years 1999-2000 were literally a realm of nothingness, with only one box-office failure, The Black Rada directed by Mykola Zverev. Ministry of Culture officials have said recently that as many as 78 projects are now in the making. Can this figure be realistic if there is a complete lack of money, acute shortage of fresh ideas, while graduates of the Kyiv Theatrical Institute’s Cinematography Department choose television or, if they are sprightly enough, leave for Russia?
What contrasts with the overall situation is the relatively stable existence of the Molodist (Youth) International Film Festival and Kino-kolo magazine. In spite of some mistakes and pratfalls, Molodist has strengthened its position over the past several years. In any case, the two last festivals came off quite well, with a good selection of competitors and full houses. The Kyiv-based purposeful film critic Volodymyr Voitenko has established, after overcoming a slew of barriers, a thick quarterly Kino-kolo. Both the magazine and the festival provide the necessary opportunities for those who contrive to make at least something: Molodist will show it, and Kino-kolo will write about it.
But if you, suppressing your frustration, cast a glance at the movie industry, you will see the only, after the Ministry of Culture, benefactor in the person of ill-assorted studios which do not improve, the situation however, and are usually set up under joint projects.
On the other hand, cooperation with the Ministry of Culture brings along a number of advantages as well as pitfalls. It can help you and at the same time tie you up with red tape; it can give you a mere pittance or suddenly choose to channel all the available funds into one ambitious project. In any case, the ministry is always a customer even as far as Muratova’s movies are concerned. Yet, this does not seem to burden the culture officials with any obligations. On the other hand, the Muratova situation deserves a special discussion. The best-known film director now living on the territory of Ukraine seems to exist in a somewhat warped and isolated reality. Although this raises no objections, what Muratova does goes far across the Ukrainian border as such. She is perhaps one of the last to be able to appeal to audiences of the overall post-Soviet space and, as I have been deeply convinced lately, to those of Europe as a whole. (This was confirmed by the latest film Chekhov’s Motives, one of her best works.) Whatever the case, this pronounced “exterritoriality” deserves a separate discussion.
Before we proceed to specific names, it is important to mention that a certain revitalization of film production in the past few years has resulted not so much from the inflow of funds into culture as from the long- awaited coming of a new generation. No, there were no conflicts or petty quarrels; everybody just took his own place: veterans stopped actively interfering with the young, and the latter displayed ardent zeal and a fair share of ideas.
2001 began optimistically: aspiring director Taras Tomenko won the Panorama competition at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2003, the same festival’s main jury awarded the Silver Bear to The No. 9 Streetcar Was Running, a film by animator Stepan Koval, another gifted Ukrainian (The Day covered this in minute detail). It is only talent and hard work that allowed Tomenko and Koval, graduates of the Kyiv Theatrical Institute’s Cinema Department, to make mature oeuvres: the former was brushing up his Shooting Gallery for almost a year, while it took Koval six months of incredible efforts and an almost ruined health to meet the deadline. Yet, neither the awards nor the talent brought about any radical changes in the two young person’s destinies. After the Berlin triumph, Tomenko won a presidential grant intended to support young talents and tried to shoot a full-length movie (tentatively titled Angel). However, he never received the promised amount of money. Incidentally, the grant story is always played out according to the same scenario. Once, Stepan Koval’s project and Volodymyr Tykhy’s screenplay of Car Washers won grants, but both directors had to go through the usual red tape. After months of delays, Koval received a much smaller sum than promised. So did Tykhy. Running up debts, scrimping and scraping, the latter still managed to finish and present the movie at the Kinoshok (Film Shock) and Molodist contests. This full-length Ukrainian movie, the first in the past few years, also stirred up fond, if illusory, hopes.
Car Washers is the story of a team of street teenagers who earn a living by polishing other peoples’ foreign- made limousines. The team competes with other teams, fights for its territory, gets seriously hassled by grown-up bandits, and breaks up due to inner conflicts. Each of the characters has a love and vital values of their own. Tykhy filmed real-life teenagers who showed straightforwardness and the nature peculiar to their age to make up for insufficient acting skills. They act out love triangles and struggle for power so sincerely and fervently that even some adult professionals pale before them. The director tries to avoid, when possible, socially dangerous moments, maximally easing the story and filling the dialogue with such slangy phrases as “you’ve really grossed me out” which whipped the Molodist audience into a wild frenzy. The action unfolds as if it were a computer game commented upon live by a fashionable FM radio station: the titles are voiced over by an indefatigable deejay. The prematurely grown-up Bura, Lepa, Tina, and Guslia find themselves in the most diverse strata of society only to learn that it is difficult to take a new place because everything has already been divided between the ordinary scum and the influential scum. Vanessa Mae being the only bright ideal, all the rest is decay and violence. Conflicts go as far as an open armed clash between the car washers and grown- up bandits. Alas, a serious slipup ruins the most crucial moment. The director seems to have lost control of the situation. He does not say clearly who fires at whom, who has survived, and what has happened to whom, although these are quite important questions in such an action movie as Car Washers. Except for this, the film is a sufficiently fast-paced, quite a social, and easy-to-see show.
I will say again that both the ulcers and the achievements of Ukrainian cinema cannot be put down to the opposition of generations alone. Nor is it fair to draw a distinguishing line between auteur cinema and mainstream films. It is now time for other indicators and traditions. The tradition which Tomenko and Tykhy uphold embraces the directors who shun the proverbial “poetic realism.” Their work is based on current events, where the social aspect is only one of the components. Even when it is the question of recent historical events, as in Les Yanchuk’s film, The Undefeated, the goals are set in clear-cut terms. After Famine-33, Yanchuk devotes his new excursus into the Stalinist evil era to Ukrainian nationalist underground leader Roman Shukhevych. The film has already been shown in Russia and triggered a mixed reaction. Critics primarily raise politically based complaints, which is quite understandable. For reconciliation between the 1940s Western Ukrainian underground and the heroes of “mainland” Ukraine and incorporation of the mythologies of Halychyna and Slobozhanshchyna into a unified historical entity still remains a very acute problem. A sizable part of Ukrainian society still regards the phrase “Bandera’s follower” and the abbreviations OUN and UPA as terms of abuse. Even numerous confirmations of the fact that the West Ukrainian underground fought against the Nazis as fiercely as they did against Stalin’s NKVD fail to change the situation. The split of the Ukrainians into “westerners” and “easterners,” especially as far as modern history is concerned, reciprocal hatred inside one nation, is our unhealed pain. So the role of art is difficult to overestimate here.
The sneak preview of Yanchuk’s film drew a packed house. It should be noted, alas, that The Undefeated is unable to claim the status of an artistic or political manifesto. For, although the film deals with anti- Soviet resistance, it was made in the spirit of standard Soviet war movies. The same unnatural loftiness, the same staging and acting cliches. Even the participation of Hryhory Hladiy, an excellent actor taught by Hrotovsky, cannot save the film. The plot focuses on the struggle of the legendary underground leader who fought against all occupation regimes, starting with that of Poland in the 1920s. Everything pivots on a time-tested method: the warrior recalls the bygone days on the eve of crucial battles. Military actions intermingle with lyrical scenes (with Viktoriya Malektorovych playing the female lead).
Another director, who seeks poetics outside the “poetic cinema,” is Serhiy Masloboishchykov, an artist, theater producer, and film director. After making an unorthodox screen version of Kafka’s Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk in 1994, he devoted himself completely to theater. In 1999 he made an experimental video film For Bulgakov at the Kontakt studios, in which he attempted to blend the narrative of The Master and Margarita with acted-out and documentary scenes. The second full-length piece, A High Wind, based on the author’s own script, was finished in 2002. This time Masloboishchykov dropped the flashy and modernistically pretentious style of Josephine the Singer... This story about a conflict-ridden family, which the child yearns to break out of, unfolds in outdoor settings against the backdrop of rural landscapes. The musical theme, a variation of Schubert’s piece Erlkonig based on Goethe’s homonymous poem, supports the leitmotif of ghosts and a dream killed and turned into the chimera of oblivion. Like Josephine..., this movie has a mixed, 50%-50% professional, cast. Although the overall result may raise objections, the very attempt to reanimate the family drama genre on the national screen with a maximal esthetic effect is quite commendable.
As to “poetic realism,” a supposedly Ukrainian original trend, it is still the object of heated debate. This category does not seem to exist any longer in its traditional classical form because there are no bearers of this tradition left. Indeed, poetic cinema was from the very outset a kind of esthetic, covert, resistance which could simultaneously inspire political resistance. It is obvious, however, that there still exists a certain film-making technique based on poetic vision. For instance, Serhiy Bukovsky’s documentary Red Soil can in general be considered as part of a poetic-realistic discourse. Fortunately, the director managed to find such appealing outdoor settings as the settlements of Ukrainians who emigrated to Brazil a century ago. Bukovsky watches closely and tactfully the everyday life of an extraordinary community. He resorts to no artificial plots or what may be called documentary voyeurism — the film shows ordinary fragments of their daily routine. Still, you cannot, for some reason, take your eyes off the screen, where people attend a wedding, dance, ride horses, look in wide-eyed surprise at modern Ukrainian money, fell trees, and plow the fertile red soil. A sunflower and a green parrot, an agile 73-year-old man gossiping about his stern “missus,” an accordionist playing on top of a tractor, a dazzling turquoise-blue sky over a crimson roadway — the whole film looks like a set of some familiar images that have suddenly flashed in an unexpected light and are, therefore, still dearer to you.
Apparently, the Ukrainian poetic tradition really needs this kind of standard-breaking approach. For this tradition seems to be suffering from ironclad unity: film directors keep walking along the vicious circle of the same subjects, heroes, and times. Making films about olden Cossack times is now profitable semi-governmental business. The whole “hetmaniad” seems to be cut to the same cloth, which always brings about disastrous results. No sooner had the failure of Mykola Zaseyev-Rudenko’s Black Rada been forgotten than a tide of other similar projects — the serial Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the telefilm Secret of Genghis Khan, swept over us. After the box-office success of Jerzy Hoffman’s With Fire and Sword, Bohdan Stupka is now the chief onscreen mace holder. He also starred in Yury Ilyenko’s Prayer for Hetman Mazepa, so far the largest Ukrainian project. As all the media have repeatedly commented on what has at least something to do with this 160 minute saga, there is no sense to broach the subject again.
An entirely different view of Ukrainian history has been taken by Oles Sanin, a pupil of Leonid Osyka of Stone Cross fame. Sanin took two medieval parables — one of Cossacks and one of the Tatars — as a basis of his Mamai. The former tells about three Cossacks escaping from Tatar captivity. The latter deals with three Tatar brothers pursuing the Cossacks who stole their ancestral regalia. Sanin says he was astonished that the two stories composed independently of each other at an interval of several decades have practically the same plot. The scene is laid against the background of a vast steppe streaked with the never-ending movements of horsemen. Nature also speaks: people seem to blend with the stone or the sun-scorched ground. Mamai’s landscapes assume the power of a separate metaphor, one of a life-and-death choices. Some scenes, such as a swimming horse photographed from under the sun-drenched water, are extremely beautiful. Perhaps, despite some obvious drawbacks of the screenplay, Mamai has the right to be called a piece of true poetic cinema, one of few words but full of visual images, which at times break into a number of dazzlingly beautiful pictures. For some, the movie is an antithesis to the “king-size paternal cinema” embodied by Mazepa; for others, it is a modern and correct vision of the Cossack era; still others will regard it as a new poetic wave... Let us stop at expectations.
This is all we — critics, immature and mature directors, and audiences — have so far. We who live in the land that seems to have forgotten Dovzhenko, Vertov, and Paradzhanov. Our films have not been made or finished. For this reason, expectations should be complemented with a belief that this article will eventually be finished.
