OLEKSANDR DOVZHENKO

A note about our Ukranian filmmaker in view of the second alternative screening...

Born in a peasant family as one of its 14 children, Dovzhenko however managed to get enough education to pursue his dream, a teacher’s career. Little is known about Dovzhenko’s life during perilous war and revolution times. We know, however, his vain and hectic attempts to obtain higher education, his participation in Ukrainian movement for which he was incarcerated in a concentration camp and faced several executions by firing squad, one done with blank-fire and several eventually cancelled, luckily. After Bolsheviks won the civil war, friends helped him to get a position in Soviet Ukrainian Embassies in Europe where he also got to know Western culture. He used his knowledge when back in Ukraine, as painter and cartoonist, but mainly as a one of the world’s first filmmakers. In late 20s he shot several films that became popular and respected abroad, especially his classical 'Ukraine trilogy' (Zvenyhora, Arsenal, Earth). They became the heights of Ukrainian Renaissance, subsequently called 'Executed Renaissance' (thousands artists shot; hundreds left art; the rest – dozens – became loyal to party and lost their artistic individuality), a modernist interbellum movement dominated by grotesque romanticism, obsessed by matters of life and death and formal experiments.

Dovzhenko was too well-known abroad to simply be shot. So he was the one who tried to be loyal and suffered from censorship. Several of his projects were suspended and never done. He himself had to move to Moscow; entering Ukraine was under the ban for him. However, he developed a kind of personal relationship with Stalin, having become a sort of confessor for the Soviet tyrant; he was often called in the night to the Kremlin when Stalin had insomnia. Homesickness and dreadful moral dubiousness of his position made Dovzhenko suffer, and that was mirrored in his brilliant and blood-chilling diary. This immensely gifted filmmaker lived in depression and made almost no films since the 1930s. He died relatively young a few years after Stalin, in the process of working on a new film.