A French View on the Tenth Ukrainian Muse

Liubomyr Hoseiko, a Ukrainian Frenchman, presented his book History of the Ukrainian Cinema at the Cinematographers Home in Kyiv on April 2. The event attracted the cinema beau monde, starring practitioners as well as theoreticians. The organizing committee – officials from the Ministry of Culture, French Embassy, and Cinematographers Union – were seated at the table in the blue guest room, under tapestries with princes, Red Army men, and intellectuals clad in white gowns. Naturally, Monsieur Hoseiko was in the center, as befitted the guest of honor. Copies of his work, a rather thick volume, were seen here and there, held by VIPs in attendance. He also acted as emcee, speaking Ukrainian, asking himself and answering provocative questions. Regrettably, the acoustics left much to be desired and his voice was muffled by a small brass band performing old songs under the windows of the blue room. The musicians played to attract visitors to a fair of industrial goods, turning the respectable Cinematographers Home into a second-hand goods market.

Mr. Hoseiko’s history recently appeared in France and was, of course, in French. Anna Khmil, assistant state secretary of the Ministry of Culture, pointed out that the cinema is the French calling card across the world, and that the new publication is evidence of their keen interest in movie making in other countries. Mr. Hoseiko has encyclopedic knowledge and is very much a trailblazer in the field. His book offers documents recently discovered in Marseilles, attesting that the famous brothers Lumiere showed their short clip with an oncoming train in Odesa in 1896 shortly after their sensational demonstration in Paris. His studies of the Ukrainian cinema embrace the following hundred years. Liubomyr Hoseiko said his work is marked by a “Western cinema expert’s outlook but with an Eastern sensuality.” Among the most pressing problems of the Ukrainian cinema Mr. Hoseiko mentioned the absence of a cohort of good film directors.

His speech was interspersed by laudatory remarks in the audience, yet such unanimous appreciation of a foreign edition, in a foreign language, looked somewhat suspicious to an onlooker. With this in mind, The Day asked domestic experts with fluent French to comment on the hew history. Prof. Vadym Skurativsky of Kyiv’s Karpenko-Kary Theatrical Institute described Mr. Hoseiko’s book as “an elegant and highly intellectual edition,” providing “a good all-Union context, without which the history of the Ukrainian cinema is incomprehensible to the French.” This noted expert on culture believes that such works are “Ukraine’s way to Europe.” Oksana Musiyenko, head of the institute’s chair of cinema studies and corresponding member of the national academy of sciences, stressed that “a foreigner’s view always reveals fresh nuances, for its range is not as limited as ours in some or other way. We will start working on Sketches from the History of the Ukrainian Cinema, supervised by the Academy of the Arts of Ukraine, and then on a multivolume history. Mr. Hoseiko’s book will be a basic reference point. In this sense, Shevchenko’s ‘learn from others and do not turn away from your own’ says it all.”

There is a possibility that the book’s Ukrainian version will be available before long. Mr. Olivier Guillaume, counselor of the French Embassy, declared that it will help the project, and that the embassy plans to support the idea of an annual Ukrainian film festival in France. What little is needed to make the idea a reality is the presence of new Ukrainian films.