An article by Anna Morgan of the Ukrainian Institute London, published by Ukrainian Events in London, 8 Jun 2017.
AUTHOR
Anna Morgan, Ukrainian Institute London.
On 7 June 2017, for just one hour, the Ukrainian Institute London took us back in time and showed how Kyiv looked in the spring of 1929. Nature waking up after winter, melting snow, carriages stuck in mud, Easter celebrations alongside the new Soviet May holidays, football matches, planting and construction sites, kids playing on the streets, a mix of modern and traditional Ukrainian clothes on young and old…
Mikhail Kaufman’s film ‘In Spring’ is a true gem, yet to be discovered by world critics. This screening was the first in the UK, showing the renewed digitalised version produced by the Dovzhenko Centre, Ukraine’s largest cinemateque, which has been working recently on recovering early Ukrainian films stuck for years in its archives. The new music score added to the renewed version of the film significantly enhances its character, giving it a contemporary dynamic feel.
The actual man behind the movie camera
Mikhail Kaufman is one of the three Kaufman brothers. The best-known of them, Denis (or David) Kaufman, worked under the pseudonym of Dziga Vertov. His film ‘Man with a movie camera’ was recently screened at the British Film Institute Southbank London. It has been voted as the greatest documentary ever made in a 2014 BFI poll of 300 critics and movie experts. Mikhail was the actual ‘man behind the movie camera’ filming for his brother Denis, who was directing the now world-famous film. Vertov was clearly fascinated with industrialisation, development of machinery and production. Mikhail Kaufman, when making his own films, revealed a more human perspective.
There’s so much more nature and humanity in Mikhail’s film, unlike in those by Vertov.
“The most striking feature of ‘In Spring’ is the human perspective, focus on people, and their daily life. There’s so much more nature and humanity in Mikhail’s film, unlike in those by Vertov,” commented Ian Christie, professor of film and media history at Birkbeck College.
Mikhail Kaufman is clearly interested in processes. In ‘In Spring’ he focuses on construction sites, food production lines, street cleaning and road repairing. One episode shows the construction of brick roads, some of which still exist today. Those familiar with Kyiv will also recognise certain buildings, the views over the Dnipro river and Andriivsky descent. The film shows crowds watching a football game featuring Dynamo Kyiv, a team that had then been established for just a few years (in 1927); and children playing ‘gorodki’, the now-forgotten street game popular in the past century.
Some scenes are still familiar to contemporary Kyivites, such as tons of melting snow in spring that create huge dirty puddles, with pedestrians and carriages trudging through them.
Another fascinating part of the film concentrates on crowds celebrating spring holidays. The incredible contrast between those celebrating Easter with religious services, Easter breads (pasky) and homemade alcohol, and those marching in the newly established Labour Day demonstrations, showcases the clash of two cultures, both still vivid and massive at the time. The following years brought with them, as we know, a clampdown on religion and religious holidays in Ukraine as well as in other Soviet states.
The early Soviet period of cultural freedom
When cultural freedom in Moscow started to deteriorate, Kyiv was still a centre of relative cultural freedom. The Kaufman brothers were invited to work with VUFKU – an all-Ukrainian film administration created in 1922. Although it only survived for eight years, it earned the fame of the richest cultural institution in Ukraine at the time. VUFKU entered foreign markets in Europe and the US, producing films that were successfully screened abroad, for the first time in the history of Ukrainian cinema. Ukrainian film directors travelled to Europe (while this was still possible) and saw themselves as part of European cultural processes.
This amazing cultural boom had a sad fate. After 1929, all political and cultural freedom ended with Stalin’s centralisation and Sovietisation of culture. Stalin announced that Ukrainian culture wouldn’t be tolerated, as there was a place for Soviet culture only. The Soviet project was ‘successful’ and the West bought into it. Even now, the prevailing homogenised view of Soviet culture is the idea of Russian culture, not only in cinema but in arts, literature and other cultural spheres.
Photo: Stanislav Menzelevskyi, Programme Director, Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre. Photo by Anna Morgan, Ukrainian Institute London.
Recreating Ukraine’s cultural heritage
Trying to recreate the cultural heritage of Ukraine isn’t an easy task. But is there an appetite to rewrite history? Is there enough will to unpick and challenge the common perception, to look from a slightly different perspective on a period that – despite political restrictions – has produced some remarkable, world-class cultural artefacts?
There are too many books about Eisenstein. More needs to be told about figures like Dovzhenko and Mikhail Kaufman.
The talk that followed the screening focused on these and other questions of rediscovering Ukrainian culture of the past century. Two invited experts – Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History, Birkbeck College and Stanislav Menzelevskyi, Programme Director at Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre – agreed that filmmakers like Kaufman and Dovzhenko deserve far more attention and should be researched as part of the European and world avant-garde, and its unique period called ‘poetic documentary’. “VUFKU is still a hugely underresearched phenomenon of independent filmmaking in the early Soviet Union,” observed Stanislav Menzelevskyi, while Ian Christie said “There are too many books about Eisenstein. More needs to be told about figures like Dovzhenko and Mikhail Kaufman.”
Marina Pesenti, Director at the Ukrainian Institute London, called the talk “an eye-opener on the incredible and unknown history of Ukraine’s booming film industry of the 1920s and its close links to Europe and America.”
Photo: Marina Pesenti, Director, Ukrainian Institute London. Photo by Anna Morgan, Ukrainian Institute London.
What’s next?
The Ukrainian Institute London is planning to continue its partnership with the Dovzhenko Centre and screen more Ukrainian films from the past century.
This article was published by Ukrainian Events in London, 8 Jun 2017.
