Ukrainian poetic cinema: the flowering and the tragedy with Vitaly Chernetsky | Kino 2025
Date and time:
Friday 21 March, 2025
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
ONLINE
In the late 1920s, Ukrainian cinema reached its peak: due to well-thought-out policies of local culture elites, a peculiar school of Ukrainian film avant-garde, led by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, arose alongside highly popular commercial cinema. However, the triumph didn’t last long. In 1930, the local film production was placed under the control of Moscow authorities with the aim of turning film into a means of propaganda. This coincided with technical challenges: the emergence of sound dramatically changed the established avant-garde aesthetics.
Despite the pressure, Ukrainian filmmakers attempted to preserve the local film tradition, which was under attack from Moscow. In 1933, the autonomy of Ukrainian film production was restored for a short time. Under the guise of inventing a newly proclaimed official socialist realism style, Ukrainians created a specific version that blended the methods of avant-garde with local poetic and expressionist tradition. Destroyed shortly after 1936, it remains undeservedly forgotten in Ukraine and completely unknown elsewhere.
If you are a Friend, please see your emails for the discount code to apply during checkout. If you cannot find the code, please email us, and we will furnish it for you.
£35 general £25 student Friends and Benefactors of the Institute are also eligible for a discount.
Lecturer
Vitaly Chernetsky
Vitaly Chernetsky is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas and currently a URIS Fellow at the University of Basel. A native of Ukraine, he received his PhD. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007), of five edited or co-edited volumes, and numerous articles on modern and contemporary Slavic and East European literatures and cultures where he seeks to highlight cross-regional and cross-disciplinary contexts. A book in Ukrainian, Intersections and Breakthroughs: Ukrainian Literature and Cinema between the Global and the Local, is forthcoming. Prof Chernetsky is a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies; and in 2024, he served as the President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). In December 2024, he was elected President of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US.
