Ukraine has a cinematic history both impressive and shadowy. So much of it has been obscured by affiliation with the USSR—which had a perpetually changing, confused, often punitive attitude towards whether non-Russian cultures and histories should be acknowledged onscreen at all, or subjugated to the notion of “party unity.” (Of course, Ukrainian cinema today is largely concerned with being re-invaded by its former minder, since KGB-trained Putin covets all former Soviet territories.) Ukrainian films were frequently banned for arbitrary supposed ideological-infractions, even after they’d been approved at the script stage and won initial acclaim. The same filmmakers might get the go-ahead for a new project—and the same process would happen all over again.
A crystallization of that absurd cycle was Yuri Ilyenko’s 1971 widescreen maximalist epic White Bird Marked Black, set in the Carpathian Mountains between 1937 and 1947. It was eagerly endorsed by officials for production, then nabbed a top prize at the Moscow Film Festival. Incredibly, it was subsequently banned by the Ukrainian Communist Party, as “the most harmful movie ever made in the nation” yet. For decades on end, censorship and propagandic aims served as a circular firing squad: the only certainly was that everyone would eventually get shot.
Alas, the extraordinary White Bird is not in BAMPFA’s new series “Ukrainian Cinema: Poetry and Resistance.” But another title by Ilyenko is, alongside nine additional features that stretch from the silent era to the late 1960s. Starting the three-week schedule off this Fri/21 is the most famous of the bunch, Oleksanddr Dovzhenko’s 1930 Earth, long considered one of the greatest films ever made. Even though its portrayal of forced farm collectivization was heavily romanticized to conform with Soviet political messaging, it arrived during a time of reactionary backlash against the prior decade’s artistic innovations in all media. So while amply praised abroad, Earth was branded “counterrevolutionary” and its maker a “petty-bourgeoise artist.”
The series will end on Sunday, April 13 with Dovzhenko’s Arsenal from the year prior. The second panel in his “Ukrainian trilogy,” it’s another nonlinear panorama of dramatic vignettes, stylized tableaux, documentary footage, and more, this time with more emphasis on war and armed revolutionary struggle.
The same year saw the release of In Spring (playing Fri/28), a first directorial feature from Mikhail Kaufman, who’d just had a creative split from brother Denis aka Dziga Vertov while photographing the latter’s legendary The Man With the Movie Camera. (A third sibling, Boris, left the USSR and became the esteemed regular cameraman for Jean Vigo, Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet and others.) The stylistic overlap remains considerable, however, in thisdazzling kaleidoscope of life, industry, religion and sport, with Kaufman refusing to let any dogma get in the way of his sheer exuberance. He lived another fifty years—and was never allowed to direct another film.
One of the last gasps of artistic freedom in an increasingly moribund era was Ivan Kavaleridze’s 1935 Prometheus (Fri/11), an adaptation of a mid-19th-century poem. Banned after brief release for expressing alleged “bourgeoise nationalist” ideas, it is odd, choppy, mannered, often stilted—but god knows knows what interference it underwent, since Stalin himself apparently took great offense.
Several later features demonstrate show the turgidity (and rigidity) Stalin left as as a legacy amongst Soviet artists, something not shaken off until years after his death. After Dovzhenko’s 1956 death, his widow Yuliya Solntseva (who decades earlier had played sci-fi camp icon Aelita, the Queen of Mars) continued to direct his screenplays. The results were sometimes lyrically inspired, as in the 1964 Enchanted Desna. A more pedantic mixed bag was 1958’s Poem of the Sea (Thu/3), a talky ode to industrial progress with some imposing set pieces. Likewise straddling a stolid agenda and the urge for wilder artistic flights is Ukrainian Rhapsody, a kitsch 1961 wartime musical romance. Only its occasional visual adventurousness portends the later breakthrough of director Sergei Parajanov, who was not from Ukraine but considered it one of his “three motherlands.”
Said big break came four years later with Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (Thu/10), an unprecedented phantasmagoria of folklore, spectacle, and ritual that would set the template for Parajanov’s mature works—and make him one of the last, longest-running victims of Soviet political persecution. (He died at 66, his health withered by four years’ imprisonment in a labor camp.) It was based on a story by Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi, who also provided the basis for Mark Donskoi’s 1957 At Great Cost (Sun/30)—a period fleeing-lovers tale just as hokey as Rhapsody but considerably more fun.
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A pervasive fog lifted—at least for a few years, until the Soviet tanks rolled into 1968 Prague—with movies like Ilyenko’s 1965 A Spring for the Thirsty (Fri/11) and Leonid Osyka’s 1968 The Stone Cross, both striking B&W rural parables. The former so offended authorities that it went unreleased until 1987, being guilty of “ideological perversions” (whatever that means.) These films and others heralded a wave of Ukrainian “poetic cinema” centered in Kyiv’s Dovzhenko Studio. They endure as the greatest screen achievements of their place and era, though, of course, most were banned at the time.
In addition to guest musicians (for the silents) and speakers, the BAMPFA series will encompass a free “Ukrainian Film Symposium” day on Sat/12, with six visiting scholars delivering addresses on specific related topics. For full schedule and other info, go here.
Other new arrivals this week:
Eephus
I’ve never been much of a fan for baseball, or for its movies, most of which tend to be either too sentimentally “inspirational” (i.e. Field of Dreams) or crassly juvenile (Bad News Bears) for my tastebuds. (An exception: Bull Durham.) But this debut feature for its director and co-writer, who did the impressive cinematography for last year’s likewise inventive Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, manages to sidestep those usual traps and come up with something fairly original. It takes place during one long October Sunday that happens to be the last day local amateur teams can use a suburb’s longtime public-park diamond—it’s about to be bulldozed to construct a new school.
Running a wide age gamut (with 95-year-old famed documentarian Frederick Wiseman as one local elder who serves as scorekeeper), the exclusively male area residents who show up for this last hurrah are ordinary guys about whose backstories we learn almost nothing. Yet, there’s a droll authenticity to their often-cranky interactions, underlined by a wistful reluctance to part with the one reliable escape route many of them have had their whole lives. Even when it gets dark and so many balls are lost there’s a shortage, the diehards don’t want to leave the field.
This near-plotless-yet-busy script by Lund, Michael Basta, and Nate Fisher (who figures in the large, starless ensemble) threads together little incidents, flareups, anecdotes, rivalries, distractions, and so forth into a tapestry that feels effortless. It develops a certain melancholy, despite very seldom straining to make any point at all—or even to specify the time (incidentally, the 1990s) and place (somewhere in Massachusetts.) You might call it Altmanesque, except Lund comes up with his own stylistic feel that doesn’t feel particularly indebted to anyone else. I’ll admit Eephus—named after a rare pitch type of near-mythical slowness—would likely have meant more if I had more affinity for the sport it revolves around, or the prickly masculinity with which it’s populated. But it’s a unique, pleasing achievement nonetheless. It opens at SF’s Metreon Fri/21.
Magazine Dreams
A very different, anti-“team spirit” realm of athleticism is on display in writer-director Elijah Byrum’s drama. It’s had an unfortunate history, having premiered at Sundance in early 2023 just before star Jonathan Majors was arrested for physically assaulting an ex-girlfriend, resulting in a misdemeanor conviction and his mandatory participation in a year-long domestic violation intervention program. His high-flying career (which had included local favorite The Last Black Man in San Francisco, roles for Spike Jones, and in the “Marvel Universe”) immediately crash-landed. Needless to say, Magazine Dreams—which had this very talented actor all too discomfitingly cast as a roid-raging loner beset by issues with women and society in general—now looked like a project that might never be taken out of deep-freeze.
It’s finally seeing commercial release, but remains problematic for reasons beyond the actor’s tarnished reputation. Dreams means to be a portrait of all-American outsiderdom and angry, insecure masculinity in the realm of Taxi Driver (and, more recently, The Joker.) It has a certain raw conviction, not least from Majors himself, whose physical commitment alone is on constant display in this story about a compulsive amateur bodybuilder. But unsettlingly vivid as his character Killian Maddox is, he also remains an unsympathetic cipher that the film seems more willing to exploit than explore. For over two hours, we watch him live with his frail Vietnam vet grandfather (Harrison Page), toil as a bagger at a grocery store, endlessly work out and shoot steroids, idolizing from afar a celebrity bodybuilder (a fictive figure played by Mike O’Hearn, himself a famous fitness model.)
Killian hopes to compete in a major physique contest. But meanwhile, he can barely deal with everyday life—he’s perpetually hostile, easily angered, seemingly low-I.Q., possibly schizophrenic (it’s briefly mentioned he’s “heard voices” in the past,) When he finally gets up the nerve to ask his crush and coworker (Haley Bennett) out to dinner, his behavior so alarms her, she quits her job to avoid ever seeing him again. Attracted to the expected alt-right/ammosexual nonsense online, he’s a ticking time bomb, all right… but why? For all Majors’ and the film’s surface conviction, it never gets under its antihero’s skin. He seems incredibly damaged (and dangerous), yet in the end, there’s zero insight.
Magazine Dreams ends up just being an overlong bizarro character study of a person we’d no doubt cross the street to elude, he’s so conspicuously nuts. The bulging, shirtless spectacle of his outward dysfunctionality isn’t enough to sustain 124 minutes, Yes, we get that he’s a symptom of some larger societal malaise. But Bynum really ought to have at least attempted a diagnosis. The film opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/21.
Young Hearts
Moving from the bilious to the very sweet—almost cloyingly so—there is this Belgian-Dutch coproduction, whose wide-eyed twink protagonists aren’t just Killian’s opposites, but exist in a universe almost hermetically sealed from conflict. Nonetheless, 14-year-old Elias (Lou Goossens, who looks even younger, as well as a whole lot like John Francis Daley from Freaks and Geeks) manages to create some for himself. Part of a large, happy, accepting nuclear family unit in the Belgian countryside, he’s negotiating early adolescence in typical style—complete with a tentative girlfriend in classmate Valerie (Saar Rogiers)—until he meets floppy-haired new student Alexander (Marius De Saeger).
Alex is nice, cute, and from big-city Brussels. He’s being raised by his father, his mother having died, but he’s very well-adjusted in every respect. That includes his matter-of-fact response when asked if he’s ever been in love: Yes, he has, with a boy.
This is both exciting and terrifying for Elias, who’s suddenly consumed with hitherto unfamiliar thoughts. Soon he’s practically throwing himself at Alex, while simultaneously fearful anyone else will “find out” about these feelings or their nascent relationship. Indeed, virtually every character here is more emotionally mature than our hero—you’d almost think he’d invented homophobia in his head, everyone else is so much more evolved in their attitudes. Young Hearts certainly needn’t have been tragic, but at times it does feel soft-edged, almost to the brink of denying common realities.
Still, little gay boys and girls deserve some screen wish-fulfillment just like straight ones do. This pleasant, nicely crafted junior romance provides an encouraging vision of coming out as a flightpath in which the only resistance you encounter might be that you’re generating yourself. It opens at SF’s Roxie Fri/21.
