Introduction
Thank you very much, Alicia (Kozma), for that kind introduction.
Let me begin by commending you and the staff of the IU Cinema on its continued success. In its nearly 12 years of operation, the cinema has hosted more than 3,000 public events and engaged in diverse and innovative programming and collaboration with partners right across the Bloomington campus. The cinema has, of course, also hosted more than 300 distinguished visiting filmmakers and scholars, including such luminaries as Glenn Close and Meryl Streep, who have praised the cinema as one of the finest university cinemas in the nation.
I would also like to thank most gratefully the faculty and staff whose generous gifts in 2017 made possible the establishment of the McRobbie's Choice Film Series and I am delighted to be here tonight to say a few words about the films I have selected as part of this semester's series.
The War in Ukraine
Today is the 254th day of Russia's barbaric and criminal invasion of Ukraine.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has verified more than 6,300 civilian deaths in Ukraine during this war—among them more than 400 children.[1] The UN notes that these numbers are likely even higher. The war has also triggered a massive displacement of people, the largest since World War II, with more than 7.7 million refugees fleeing Ukraine, and another 6.2 million displaced from their homes there.[2]
Hundreds of Ukrainian cultural institutions, including at least 270 religious sites, have been deliberately destroyed or damaged in the war. These abhorrent incidents, which are intended to erase Ukrainian culture, are being tracked as war crimes by groups like Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties, which earned a share of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
From the very start of the invasion, the world has marveled at the heroic character of the Ukrainian people, from the extraordinary leadership of President Volodymyr Zelensky to the courageous fortitude of ordinary Ukrainian citizens.
And, of course, IU is home to a number of Ukrainian students and scholars, some of whom are here this evening. Many of them have loved ones back home who continue to endure the horrible repercussions of the war.
Hence, in the context of this massive human tragedy and threat to world peace and stability, and the deliberate Russian efforts to destroy and eliminate Ukrainian arts and culture, it seemed only appropriate this semester to select a series of three great Ukrainian films that underscored the independent standing over more than a century of Ukrainian cinema.
Ukrainian Cinema
Earlier this year, President Zelensky gave virtual addresses to audiences at the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Biennale about the power of filmmakers and artists to stand up to dictators. "There are no tyrannies that would not try to limit art," he said to the Venice audience, "because they can see the power of art. Art can tell the world things that cannot be shared otherwise."[3]
Indeed, Ukrainian filmmakers were long at the forefront of the resistance to Soviet control and the struggle for cultural recognition in the face of Russian imperialism and cultural chauvinism.
Lenin said that "The cinema is for us the most important of the arts,"[4] and after the 1917 revolution, national film studios began to be established in most of the Soviet republics by the mid-1920s. Ukraine's Yalta Film Studio, established in 1917, the Odesa Film Studio, founded in 1919, and the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (or the VUFKU), founded 100 years ago this year, were among the first. The VUFKU existed for less than nine years, but over that time it released more than 140 feature films, including the one you will see tonight, several hundred documentaries and newsreels, and dozens of animations, and it gained fame as the "Ukrainian Hollywood." By 1927, Ukrainian films produced by VUFKU accounted for 37 percent of the film production in the entire Soviet Union.[5]
But conflicts sprang up almost immediately between the Kremlin and the national film industries over differing definitions of national cinema. Stalin believed that the purpose of Ukrainian cinema was to make Ukrainians into good communists. Nonetheless, Ukrainian directors—most notably, Oleksandr Dovzhenko—made films during the golden era of Ukrainian cinema that centered on questions of Ukrainian national identity.
The end of the silent film era coincided with an even greater push by the Kremlin to crush Ukrainian culture. The country’s film production was subordinated to central Soviet film organizations in Moscow, and the number of films produced in Ukraine declined steadily. By the beginning of World War II, only a handful of films were made annually in Ukraine, and reduced levels of production continued through the late 1950s.
In the 1960s, the Ukrainian "poetic cinema" movement emerged, taking inspiration from Dovzhenko and the New Wave movements in Western Europe. Production levels rose, but Ukrainian filmmakers continued to face the pressures of Russification policies, and a number of outstanding Ukrainian films made during this era were banned by censors.
In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing economic crisis, Ukrainian cinema again went into a period of decline. The number of feature films shot in Ukraine decreased from 45 in 1992 to four in 2000.
Prior to this year's invasion and war, Ukrainian cinema had been undergoing something of a renaissance. Between 2014 and 2019, 173 films were made in Ukraine, a number of which were accepted by and won awards at prestigious international film festivals.
One week from tonight, the cinema will screen a film that was part this recent resurgence: director Valentyn Vasyanovych's 2019 film, Atlantis. Set in 2025, Atlantis with great prescience, envisions a Russian invasion of Ukraine and its aftermath. None of the roles in this haunting dystopian film were played by actors. It features only Ukrainian soldiers, veterans, and volunteers. Fittingly, Atlantis will be screened on November 11, which is Veterans Day in the United States, and in many other countries commemorates the end of the devastation of the First World War.
And two weeks from tonight, the cinema will screen The Long Farewell, by Ukrainian director Kira Muratova, who has been called "one of the most wildly inventive, acerbic, and unsentimentally humane filmmakers in cinema history."[6] The film was completed in 1971 but was shelved by censors. It was not released until the arrival of perestroika in 1987, when it was hailed as a lost masterpiece.
Introduction of Dovzhenko's Earth
Tonight, we begin the series with one of the most celebrated films in the history of Ukrainian cinema and what is regarded as one of the greatest silent films ever made, Oleksandr Dovzhenko's 1930 film, Earth.
Along with Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, who made his key films in Ukraine for VUFKU, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dovzhenko was one of the most important early Soviet filmmakers and a pioneer of Soviet montage theory. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who has called him "one of the most-neglected major filmmakers of the 20th century," writes, "(Dovzhenko) was a Ukrainian who fought against the Russians, and, as a consequence of having done so, is said to have lived under the surveillance of the Soviet government for the rest of his life while making Soviet films, most of them set in Ukraine."[7]
Earth is widely considered to be Dovzhenko's masterpiece, though it reminds us that even the most humanistic artists are affected by the complex events of their times and their relationships to their native lands. The film was created to celebrate Stalin's collectivization project, which pushed peasant farmers in Ukraine off their land onto large communal farms, and in part led to the genocidal horrors of the Holodomor, the famine Stalin caused that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933.
With his two previous films, Zvenyhora and Arsenal, Earth comprises what is often called Dovzhenko's "Silent Trilogy." But the film you will see tonight is regarded as the highest expression of his lyrical style.
As film scholar Birgit Beumers writes in the Directory of World Cinema: "Earth seems more interested in capturing the cyclical rhythms of natural life, including the inseparability of birth and death, than in telling a story or conveying an ideological point. "This," she continues, "caused some critics to reject the film as nostalgic to the point of being reactionary."[8]
In fact, the film was banned by Soviet authorities just nine days after its release.
The original negative of Earth was destroyed by a German air raid on Kyiv during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Dovzhenko Centre, the Ukrainian state film archive, restored the film in 2012. The version of the film stored in the Russian State Film Fund had Russian intertitles, and only one Ukrainian title card survived. In restoring the film, the Dovzhenko Centre reconstructed the font of the surviving Ukrainian intertitle and used it create new Ukrainian title cards for the entire film based on the original Ukrainian dialogue. This is the version we will see tonight, with a score by the renowned Ukrainian folk quartet DakhaBrakha who recently toured to great acclaim in the United States.
I want to thank Stas Menzelevskyi, who is a doctoral student in IU's Media School and the former head of research and programming at the Dovzhenko Centre, and who is here tonight, for advising on the curation of this semester's film series.
Earth was voted one of the twelve greatest films of all time by a group of 117 film historians at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. It was also named one of the top ten greatest films of all time by the International Film Critics Symposium.
For Dovzhenko, cinema represented the surest means of synthesizing his multifaceted perspective on Soviet life. "What can an artist show on canvas?" he once asked. "Only a small part, an episode of what happens here," he answered. "But," he continued, "film can capture everything completely, show it during its development, show its rhythm, breathing, and human fate…"[9]
In Earth, you will experience all of this on the screen, as well as the director's great affinity for the Ukrainian land and the people who worked it.
Please enjoy Oleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth.
Source notes
[1] Number of civilian casualties in Ukraine during Russia's invasion verified by OHCHR as of October 23, 2022, Statista, Web, Accessed October 24, 2022, URL: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293492/ukraine-war-casualties/.
[2] Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Ukraine situation Flash Update, Web, Accessed October 24, 2022, URL: https://data.unhcr.org/en/documents/details/96361.
[3] Volodymyr Zelensky, as quoted in Anushka Patil and Eleanor Stanford, “‘The hate of men will pass, and dictators die’: Zelensky quotes Chaplin in an address to Cannes,” The New York Times, May 17, 2022, Web, Accessed October 10, 2022, URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/movies/ukraine-zelensky-cannes-film-festival.html.
[4] Vladimir Lenin, Conversation with A.V.Lunacharsky (April 1919); also quoted in Peter Cowie, A Concise History of the Cinema: Before 1940 (1971) 137, and Complete Works of V.I.Lenin, 5th Edition, Vol. 44, 579.
[5] William Dever, “Celebrating the Ukrainian Cinematic Soul,” LinkedIn, March 1, 2022, Web, Accessed October 8, 2022, URL; https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/celebrating-ukrainian-cinematic-soul-william-dever/?trk=articles_directory.
[6] European Studies Council, Yale University, Web, Accessed October 9, 2022, URL: https://europeanstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/event/long-farewell-film-series-long-farewell
[7] Jonathan Rosenbaum, “In Stalin’s Shadow,” The Guardian, July 3, 2003, Web, Accessed October 12, 2022, URL: https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/07/in-stalins-shadow-on-dovzhenko/
[8] Birgit Beumers (editor), Directory of World Cinema: RUSSIA 2, (Intellect Books, 2015), 33.
[9] Oleksandr Dovzhenko, as quoted in George O. Liber, Oleksandr Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film, (British Film Institute, 2002), 70.