Harvard Film Archive acquires unique collection of Ukrainian films (10/19/03)

Harvard Film Archive acquires unique collection of Ukrainian films

by Yuri Shevchuk

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - This past summer the Harvard Film Archive acquired a private collection of Ukrainian films that is bound to make Harvard a premier center of attraction not only for scholars of Ukrainian cinematographic heritage, but also for a much wider group of experts interested in Soviet history and culture.

The size of the collection - 11 full-length feature films, plus 33 documentaries, propaganda newsreels and shorts, as well as its genre and stylistic variety, and the number of authors it represents - ensures that both curious amateurs and cinema cognoscenti will find something of interest in it.

The acquisition took place thanks to a confluence of two factors. First, the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) has for a long time taken an active interest in the history of Soviet and, within it, Ukrainian cinema.

"The archive," said its curator, Bruce Jenkins, "has a very long tradition of presenting and supporting the work of East European cinema. Our founding curator, Vlada Petric, came in having done extensive work on Soviet and various East European cinemas. For him it was a real priority to integrate those cinemas not only into his teaching and the curriculum, but also into the collection."

The Harvard Cinemateque at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts has periodically screened classics by the Ukrainian director Oleksander Dovzhenko, including his silent chef-d'oeuvre "Arsenal" this past summer, but not much else from Ukrainian cinema.

The second factor has been the growing presence at Harvard since the early 1970s of the Ukrainian Research Institute and the three endowed professorships in Ukrainian studies in the departments of history and Slavic languages and literatures, all of which have encouraged interest in Ukraine both on campus and in wider national and international circles. Courses in Ukrainian history, language, and literature have been a regular feature of the University and Harvard Summer School curricula.

For the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI) screenings of Ukrainian films have become an indispensable element of its cultural program. For example, in August 2002, HUSI organized the unofficial North American premiere of the first big-budget feature film produced in independent Ukraine, Yuri Illienko's controversial "A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa." The event was widely reported in North American and the Ukrainian press, including The Washington Post, and one of Ukraine's largest dailies, Den (The Day).

These two factors came into play in December 2000 when a resident of Montreal, Walter Hayduk, offered to donate a collection of Ukrainian films in his possession to the National Archives of Canada (NAC) in Ottawa. The archives could not accept the gift because it lacked the requisite Canadian content.

Myron Momryk, project archivist of the NAC, instead suggested that the collection be given to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). He approached Jacyk bibliographer and HURI archivist Ksenya Kiebuzinski, who immediately expressed interest in the films.

The films arrived in Cambridge in late 2001. However, HURI did not have the storage facilities that would guarantee the preservation of the collection for the long term. To solve the problem Ms. Kiebuzinski and Halyna Hryn, a HURI research fellow and director of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute, knowing the Harvard Film Archive's interest in Soviet and East European cinema, approached the archive and negotiated a donation agreement between it and the institute.

According to Mr. Jenkins, there was no precedent in the 25-year history of the HFA for such an acquisition. Since there was no formalized acquisition policy regulating the acceptance of such gifts from university affiliates, such as the Ukrainian Research Institute, months passed before the archive put together the requisite protocol and was ready to finalize the agreement. The donation agreement between the HFA and the Ukrainian Research Institute was signed in June 2003.

The donated collection consists of two principal parts: full-length feature films and Soviet propaganda films, documentaries and shorts, often produced for international audiences. The 11 feature films were made between the mid-1930s and the early 1980s. The oldest, "Natalka-Poltavka" (Natalka from Poltava) and "Zaporozhets za Dunaiem" (Zaporozhian beyond the Danube) both by director Ivan Kavaleridze, date back respectively to 1936 and 1937. "Natalka-Poltavka" is, by some accounts, the first film adaptation of an opera produced in the Soviet Union. The most recent film "Povernennia Batterfliai" (Return of the Butterfly) by Oleh Fialko was made in 1982.

The collection also comprises such cinematographic jewels as Sergei Paradzhanov's "Tini Zabutykh predkiv" (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1964), and Ivan Mykolaichuk's "Vavilon-XX" (Babylon-XX, 1979). In the opinion of the American composer Virko Baley, a connoisseur of Ukrainian cinema who for the last four decades has been intimately involved in the Ukrainian film industry, composing scores for films such as the Cannes-awarded "Swan Lake: The Zone" (1989), "[the donated collection of] films consists of some of the best that the '50s, '60s and '70s produced. The Kavaleridze films have a certain classical standing in the musical comedy genre." Eight of the feature films are in 35mm format and can be shown on the large screen, three are in video format only.

Valuable as these 11 feature films are, it is anybody's guess what part of the collection will ultimately prove of greater interest to Harvard students and scholars. The documentaries and shorts offer an insight into the Soviet past and the workings of the communist propaganda machine. They are historical documents whose value is bound to increase with time.

Thematically they fall into several categories. The first consists of films presenting the official party view of historical events, such as, "Babyn Yar: Lessons of History," a Soviet account of the extermination of Jews at Babyn Yar; the "Lviv Sobor of 1946" about the liquidation of the Ukrainian Catholic Church by the Soviets; and "Soviet Volyn," featuring interviews with 'heroes' of the Soviet guerrilla movement in northwestern Ukraine during World War II. The second includes documentaries on Ukrainian culture, art, literature, and music.

The subjects of these films, for example, the poets Maksym Rylskyi and Pavlo Tychyna, composer Hryhorii Maiboroda, the renowned folk art of the Petrykivka school of painting, and the painter Svitlana Semeniuk, are all approached from an unmistakable socialist realist point of view.

A third category of films features Ukraine's architectural and natural sights. Here one finds such titles as "The Pochaiv Dormition Monastery," "Where Summer Meets Autumn," and "The Miracle of the Volhynian Forest."

Appreciating the educational value of the collection, HURI assumed not only the cost of shipping the films to the HFA's Conservation Center in Watertown, Mass., and the transferring and rehousing of the films into archivally safe cans and boxes, but also the hiring of two interns to inspect and to translate the Ukrainian titles of each film.

The scope of the collection provided more than enough to keep Harvard Summer School students Oksana Tatsyak and Anna Chukur very busy outside the classroom, meticulously processing each film at the nearby Conservation Center under the supervision of Film Conservator, Julie Buck. The two, both graduate students studying Ukrainian literary modernism at the University of Toronto during the regular academic year, were particularly well-suited to the work and were able to complete the project in two months.

Exciting as the acquisition of the collection might be, there still remains the question of copyright - an aspect of the story that will require patience, perseverance and time to resolve. The donation agreement stipulates that the Harvard Film Archive "will not project the films publicly without permission of the copyright holder." To find the copyright holder for every film in the collection may prove quite challenging.

According to Mr. Jenkins, HFA "started to work in a very systematic way, almost film by film, and approach copyright holders and say 'we'd like you to consider waiving fees in the future for us to have [the print of your film] shown in the classroom, as well as at the Cinemateque.'"

This does not mean the collection is currently beyond the reach of interested viewers. The films can be viewed by individual faculty members and scholars or by a small group in an educational setting.

The first such screening took place at the Carpenter Center as part of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute program of special events. On June 27, HUSI students saw Ivan Kavaleridze's 1937 screen adaptation of Mykola Lysenko's classical opera "Zaporozhian Beyond the Danube." In a gesture of appreciation for HURI's role in the acquisition of this collection and the institute's mission to promote Ukrainian studies, the Harvard Film Archive agreed "to waive the standard screening fee in perpetuity for films that are shown as part of HURI programs."

There is much hope among the people involved in this acquisition both at the Harvard Film Archive and the Ukrainian Research Institute that this donation will encourage other donors like Mr. Hayduk to come forward with Ukrainian films in their possession and add to the existing collection at Harvard.

Yuri Shevchuk is a freelance journalist and a regular contributor to The Ukrainian Weekly, who is based in Toronto.

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