Cinenews

December 20, 2011. New York City

Ukraine in Resurgent World Silent Film Movement


Opening press conference of Ukrainian Mute Film Festival. Odesa, June 2010.

Almost from its inception seven years ago, our club has popularized Ukrainian silent films. On many occasions, in order to make them available to American viewers we generated English subtitles and inserted them in such little known silent films of the 1920s as PKP or The Night Coachman. It was only logical that Odesa-based Mr. Ivan Kozlenko, who organized in 2010 the first ever festival of Ukrainian silent films under the title of "Mute Nights. Ukrainian Mute. Festival of Silent Film and Modern Music," contacted the Club with an offer of cooperation. The idea was to re-inroduce Ukrainian silent films into both national and international circulation. The need for such a thing was undeniable given the fact that some of them had been completely forgotten by the cinema-loving public, others, like the three most important documentaries by Dzyga Vertov, Eleventh (1928), Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and Symphony of Donbas (1930) had been appropriated by Russian imperial disocurse completely and without as much as a nod to their Ukrainian provenance. All three were made in Ukraine on the commission from VUFKU (All-Ukrainian Film and Photo Administration). The Club enthusiasticly supported this long-overdue initiative and created English subtitles to a number of other Ukrainian silent films in particular Kavaleridze's Storm Nights and Stabovy's Two Days. For the first time since their production both films underwent a frame-by-frame restoration and will be part of a multi-DVD gift set slated for release in early 2012. For more on revival of Ukrainian silent film read this story in the December 8, 2011 issue of the Ukrainian Week.

 


Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University© 2015. For more information please contact Yuri Shevchuk