FILM REVIEW: Voices from Ukraine's past tell the story of the Great Terror (06/07/98)

FILM REVIEW

Voices from Ukraine's past tell the story of the Great Terror

The following is a review of "Eternal Memory: Voices from the Great Terror" that incorporates segments from interviews with David Pultz, the film's director, and Bruni Burres, the director of The 1998 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which will present the film in its U.S. premiere.

by Adriana Leshko

David Pultz's film, "Eternal Memory: Voices from the Great Terror," is a lyrical and compulsively watchable film that addresses a difficult subject matter - the systematic arrests and executions of innocent Ukrainians (from the early 1920s through the late 1940s) under the Soviet regime - with a visual and stylistic grace that transcends assumptions about the mediums of both documentary and human rights film-making. Perhaps the most important thing that can be said about such a film is that it is an artistic achievement in its own right, a feat of old-fashioned storytelling that hooks the viewer from its opening moments forward.

There is a kind of (certainly misguided) guilt in being enthralled by a film that deals with such horrific subject matter, especially if the content hits a personal chord, as "Eternal Memory" is sure to do for the majority of Ukrainians, young or old. It is, however, a testament to both film and film-maker, that the cast of characters assembled for the film - from respected historians to eyewitnesses and survivors of the terrors - are without exception consummate storytellers whose forthright style lends an unforced intimacy to a narrative which could potentially be swallowed up by its historical context (e.g., the Bolshevik revolution, World War II), or, alternately, fall prey to an over-sentimentalized style that would leave the viewers knowing less than they should about an immensely complex period of world history.

The film, narrated by the incomparable Meryl Streep, navigates carefully between both extremes, balancing analytical accounts of historical events from the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski (former U.S. national security advisor), Roman Szporluk (historian, Harvard University) and Robert Conquest (historian, Stanford University) with first-person accounts of events that mesmerize the viewer with their honesty and intensity.

"Eternal Memory" will receive its U.S. premiere as part of The 1998 Human Right Watch International Film Festival, and Bruni Burres, the festival's director, spoke candidly about the film's unique appeal:

"There's not been a film that we've seen in our festival that's come along and given such a really comprehensive historical analysis along with great storytelling. For me, it exemplifies three of the most important elements of film-making: that it touches you emotionally, that it's of very high artistic quality and that factually it's very strong."

The art of striking such a difficult balance is not immediately obvious upon viewing this film; only upon reflection does it become clear how many elements are at work, and how seamlessly they are made to interact and play off one another on screen. These are ideas and choices that David Pultz, the film's director, clearly spent a great deal of time thinking about:

"What we wanted to do right off the bat, was, although the film begins with an exhumation, it quickly moves into the whole history of Stalinism and the purges and we wanted to put that historical framework first, then fill all that with the personal stories and of course, the personal stories are most important to the emotional resonance of the film. That's where the real human interest of the film comes in, and without that it's really kind of cold history. The kind of film that really turns me off, and sometimes you see it on television, for instance on World War II, is about 90 percent stock footage with a narrator and maybe a couple of historians and that's about it. That kind of film is like reading a textbook."

Without viewing the film, it is difficult to convey just how successful Mr. Pultz is on revising traditional historical film. The viewer is struck by how three simple elements - stock footage, interviews with historians, interviews with survivors - are innovatively recombined so that, for example, Prof. Szporluk's plain-spoken, gruff yet effective oratorical style finds countless unexpected echoes in the male survivor's accounts of their experiences under the NKVD. What emerges, is, as Ms. Burres puts it, " a sense of each individual as an individual, but also a sense that they are all telling the same story."

The first trip by the film-makers to Ukraine was in 1991, just at the time of the break-up of the former Soviet Union, and perhaps because of this "Eternal Memory" conveys an immediacy about the historically removed events it covers that might be impossible to recapture even in 1998; in 1991 people were publicly articulating their stories for the first time - there is a palpable sense throughout the film of dams breaking, of conversations which have taken a lifetime to get to. In 1991 the work of Memorial, a group which focuses on the exhumations and reburials of the mass graves left behind by the NKVD, was still relatively new and the shock of the new reverberates throughout the entire film: newfound voices, newly recovered memories, new opportunities to search for closure which many had long given up on.

The account of Olha Erna, a woman whose story both opens and closes the film, speaks to the emotional as well as physical exhumations which "Eternal Memory" unearths. A soft spoken elderly woman with an almost girlish demeanor, she speaks near the beginning of the film about the night the NKVD took her father away. Although her story is poignant, and her eyes fill with tears at one point, there is a removed, almost incantatory manner to her speech that belongs to a person in a trance-like state; she is not yet fully present in her own story. It is not until the very end of the film that we return to Olha, and hear of her present-day journey to Bykivinia, site of one of the largest mass gravesites, where in all probability her father is buried. Her description of that journey, of the overwhelming emotions it evoked and the support she received from the people around her, all on similar personal pilgrimages, is one of the most haunting moments of the film. Its effect comes both from witnessing Olha's very real catharsis and from retaining the knowledge that this is still, after all, not an ending, that she will never know where her father lies exactly, that her act of writing his name on a plaque adorning a randomly chosen tree remains painfully open-ended.

Adriana Leshko is a free-lance writer living in the East Village in New York. A press associate at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English literature from Brown University last year.