Leonid Osika’s Movement for Ukrainian Cinema
The movie theaters of Lviv and Kiev go out « Fireplace Cross » – a reference film of Ukrainian poetic cinema. Last year, the tape celebrated its 55th anniversary and has been actively involved in curatorial shows around the world in recent years.
The film adaptation of two novels by Vasyl Stefanyk tells about the peasant Ivan Didukh, who decides to emigrate from the land on which he did not work. The second feature tape of Leonid Osika reflected the first wave of Ukrainian emigration. It becomes special relevance from the standpoint of today, when a full -scale invasion of Ukraine from Ukraine from Ukraine is ongoing due to a full -scale invasion.
“Fireplace Cross” – It is a major work about the Ukrainian identity crisis that describes existential mourning on the native land.
Film Criticine UP. Sonya culture She translates special stories around the film and quotes the works of influential movie scholars.
In the history of the Ukrainian cinema « Fireplace Cross » Leonid Osika and the movie « Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors » Sergey Paradzhanov estimate as leading samples Ukrainian poetic cinema. However, while Paradzhanov captured the world cinema and actually fits into the world movietonthe aspen film did not gain such attention at his time. The exotic style of Paradzhanov was for the viewer at that time more attractivethan a black and white reflection of aspen about social death.
Frame from the movie
However, right now in America at the prestigious Bampfa Cinema Center passes A series of curatorial shows Ukrainian Cinema: Poetry and Resistance, Where also the « Fire Cross ». The guest curator became the head of the Dovzhenko-Center archive Alexander Telukwho announced this retrospective of the reference classics as follows: « From lyrical to epic genres, from deep social conflicts to the joy of freedom, this program also expresses the character of the Ukrainian people”.
The « Fireplace Cross » is opened by the exposition of the Carpathian landscapes that Ivan Didukh walks. It is presented as « strange both with nature and with work », against the backdrop of these spaces, it is depicted helpless. All his life, Didukh gave hard work in a non -germinating field, for which he was in the people – nicknamed – Broken.
At this time, at the intersection of two centuries, the first wave of emigration continued in Ukraine. At that time, Ukrainians mostly emigrated to the United States, Brazil or Canada, but after the 1905-1907 revolution, Siberia. The first wave is characterized as mass and labor, through « overpopulation of Ukrainian territories » and the pressure of empires on both sides. Such people are the main character who could not stand and decided to sell everything and emigrate.
However, on the eve of the departure to the house of grandfather, a robber, over whom the custom is arranged by cruel violence, is overcome. It changes all the idea of the hero and his further experiences about emigration. Realizing that he will never return, Ivan establishes a cross on a field that has cultivated all his life. On a great farewell, he collects the inhabitants of the village, and this event is more like a funeral than to ordinary wires.
The Fireplace Cross is a film adaptation of two works of Ukrainian classic Vasyl Stefanyk « Thief » 1900 and « Fireplace Cross » 1899, and in this order they appear in the film. This is the second picture of the classic of Leonid Osika poetic cinema, and is undoubtedly a powerful drama about the crisis of identity against the background of emigration.
Frame from the movie
One of the most famous scientific essays about the movie is « Visual Language and Performance of Identity in the » Fireplace Cross « Leonid Osika: Roots and Eradicating« , written by a movie expert Vitaliy Chernetsky. Before disassembling the tape, he notes that aspen as a young director was not afraid to encroach on the adaptation of such complex literature. He was 28 years old at the time of creation of the film.
In general, Stefanyk was an early pioneer of expressionist writing, which became fashionable in Europe later. His style is characterized as « Painful, shaded, dark. There is a great emotional compassion for his characters but little joy in their traditional life. « At the same time Stefanik universalized existential suffering in some ways in some ways. This explains not only his information abroad, but also the relevance of his works, to which Osika addressed in the 1960s and can turn to the Ukrainian viewer in the 2020s.
The prominent Ukrainian poet and screenwriter of the movie « Fireplace Cross » Ivan Drach in his memoirs mentioned that Stefanyk had a clear visualization of the future work.
Frame from the movie
Eventually a talented team was assembled, which filmed such an unusual chamber movie at Dovzhenko Film Studio.
Speaking of poetic cinema in the context of thaw, it should be remembered that it is not just about weakening censorship, which allowed Ukrainian cinema to be more free. The thaw period – It is about expanding communication or simply mutual inspiration between Soviet and foreign directors.
The poetic cinema, which is inherently overflowing with symbols and metaphors, is supported in the adaptation of aspen by a great influence of Western cinema. In particular, Italian neorealism, from which the « Fireplace Cross » inherited chamber and statics. And sometimes on the contrary, the misessens and the work of the camera are attributed to cinema Surrealwhich is reflected, for example, on social funerals.
Aspen and his operator Valery Kvass also used visual quotes. In particular, in the procession of blind musicians and in the crowd of peasants in the snow, the famous works of painting Peter Bruegel of the Elder are guessed.
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In his article, Chernetsky gives a very interesting note that the « Fire Cross » was partially created under the influence of one famous Japanese cinema-the « naked island » of Kaneto Shindo in 1960. This low -budget minimalist movie had a similar plot: it is a story about an isolated cloudy pair that works in vain on a small island.
« The Schindo film received the Grand Prix at the 1961 Moscow International Film Festival, in particular, thanks to the participation of Visconti in the jury, it was discussed by Soviet film critics and novice directors (including aspen, then a student Film institute Vidik). The motive of work in isolation, large plans and panoras on rocky, relentless soil, undoubtedly, link these two films. «
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But the unique Osika movie makes it a narrow political context. Made with such drama as an artist anticipatedthat the number of waves of emigration will only increase over the future decade.
Ukrainian poetic cinema was used to perceived as a nationally canonical cinema. Still, aspen is a little more than just a poetized love for earth and folklore.
The three -part construction of history and the symbolism of the film often raised questions in academic circles and attracted a lot of attention, because everything works for the transfer of metaphor of emigration as death. However, how does Ivan Didukh perceive this death, what is this fear?
Frame from the movie
Ukrainian film scholar Olga Bryukhovetska She wrote An interesting article about the Fireplace Cross, where it looks at the film outside the characteristics of Ukrainian poetic cinema. After all, according to Bryukhovetskaya, the movie « undermines the textbook discourse of the « Human Break », the singing. « Olga explains that the meaning lies in the combination of two short stories in such order as in the movie.
The payback referred to in the « thieves » has a great impact on the second part – the « Fireplace Cross » – in how Didukh perceives his death, what is the meaning he puts in the fact of his departure.
Frame from the movie
The most famous reading of the film is limited to the most accentuated symbol in the movie, directly by the fireplace cross, which the grandfather puts on the ill -fated mountain. It is the absolute end of its existence in the native land, which acquires beautiful ritual features, and it is a certain finding of comfort in the romanticization of death. However, given the previous history, all romance disappears. Here’s how Bryukhovetska writes about it:
« The textbook interpretation of the story and the movie, which Ivan Didukh perceives departure as his own death and therefore puts a cross in itself, undermines a novella about a thief, which shows the opposite situation. It has a real death, but there is no symbolization, it is absolute death. »
The grandfather saw with his own eyes what real death looks, without ritualization or memory, and this undoubtedly shapes his experience. The idea of dying a stranger is much more frightening to him than the fact that he traveling abroad towards the emigrant challenges. It is a crisis of identity, in which the fear of the fact that the name of the grandparents will be forgotten and will mention them no more often than that thief.
Frame from the movie
The catharsis of such a terrible awareness is in the famous scene of the wires, where the camera is removed by people at the eye level and, while in constant motion, gives a very worrying position:
”This removed look makes a spooky impression of the gaze at his own funeral« , – writes Bryukhovetska.
Frame from the movie
Despite all this mental pain, Ivan still goes to a foreign land. The realization that somewhere in his native land there is a society that buried it alive – perhaps the most vulnerable insight that Ivan Didukh has dropped into his life.
It is here that an interesting and, undoubtedly, relevant movie rhetoric. Is it better to stay at the illusory level of romanticization of death, limited to the symbolic cross? Do you come into the territory of realization, what really does this death mean? Didukh is honest with himself and courageously finds ConsignmentHu in the second version, the planned embodies.
