Series Site
March 21–April 13, 2025
The historian Timothy Snyder considers Ukraine to be part of the “bloodlands,” a blighted region in Eastern Europe that was invaded and occupied by the major totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The symbolic value of a land or landscape that, alongside its splendor and generosity, has also displayed a capacity for resilience and resistance has been no less evident to Ukraine’s poets, artists, and filmmakers. Starting with Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), Ukrainian cinema has demonstrated a profound connection to nature and the land, a connection at odds with the coercive project of Soviet modernization, which sought to sacrifice Ukraine’s natural wealth to the idea of progress.
This program offers an overview of Ukrainian Soviet film history from the perspective of Ukrainian landscapes depicted by filmmakers. Mikhail Kaufman’s In Spring (1929) explores how the Kinoks’ gaze may admire not only machinery but also Ukrainian urban poetry. Ivan Kavaleridze’s Prometheus (1935) considers the common fate of Ukrainian and Caucasian peasants in the era of serfdom. Mark Donskoi’s At Great Cost (1957) continues this exploration of Ukrainian history and its modernist reinterpretation. Finally, the directors of Ukrainian poetical cinema of the Thaw period—Yurii Illienko, Leonid Osyka, and, of course, Sergei Parajanov—juxtapose the motifs of the Ukrainian landscape with the rediscovered idiom of Ukrainian folklore and the radically innovative cinema language of the 1960s.
From lyrical to epic genres, from the deep social conflicts to the joy of liberty, this program also expresses the character of the Ukrainian people, who continue to resist Russian imperialism in the ongoing war.
—Oleksandr Teliuk, Guest Curator