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This article was first published on August 19th, 2024.

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The History of Ukrainian Documentary Cinema (Part I: 1893 to the 1960's)

Frame from 'Man with a Movie Camera' by Dzyga Vertov (1929) – an experimental classic that has often been voted as one of the greatest documentaries of all time by film experts.

The Revolution of Dignity is widely considered the starting point of the revival, or “new wave”, of Ukrainian documentary filmmaking. The need to film events on the Maidan, particularly the crimes of the security forces of the then-president, and the rapid growth of national consciousness catalysed the development of young artistic associations and productions. Their work laid the foundations for a new era of Ukrainian documentary cinema, which continues to this day.

As a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the demand for documentary films continues to grow. Ukrainian filmmakers document combat actions, chronicle civilian life, and share their families’ stories. They work with archives, exploring the experiences of previous generations. Simultaneously, film festivals in Ukraine are developing as platforms for finding audiences and sponsors. One of the largest is the Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival.

In this article, we look at how Ukrainian documentary filmmaking has changed over the past century and discuss its current state with young directors whose works were presented at the Docudays UA festival in 2024. These include A Picture to Remember by Olga Chernykh, Under the Sign of the Anchor by Taras Spivak, Intercepted by Oksana Karpovych, and Elevation by Maksym Rudenko.

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The origins of of Ukrainian documentary cinema

Like in other countries, Ukrainian cinematography started with documentary chronicles. In 1893, Yosyp Tymchenko, an inventor from Odesa, created a mechanism that became a precursor to the cinematograph. To explore the device’s capabilities, he filmed two one-minute pictures: Spear Throwers’ and Horsemen. However, Tymchenko’s invention did not interest entrepreneurs, and he lacked the funding to produce it himself. Since he couldn’t obtain a patent for the cinematograph, he focused on other scientific fields. Despite its revolutionary nature, his discovery did not gain the same popularity as the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph after 1895. Tymchenko’s apparatus was long part of the collection of the Moscow Museum of Applied Knowledge (now the Polytechnic Museum) under the name “The First Cinematograph for Filming, Printing, and Showing Films”, but its current fate is unknown.

Yosyp Tymchenko. Source: Wikipedia

Kinetoscope: A cathode-ray tube designed for reproducing television images. It is used in television receivers, monitors, indicators, and other radio-electronic devices.

A few years later, in 1896, Kharkiv photographer Alfred Fedetskyi created the first documentary film in the Russian Empire (which, at that time, occupied the territory of Ukraine — ed.). It was 1.5 minutes in length. From his window, he filmed a procession of Orthodox believers carrying the Ozerianska Icon of the Mother of God to The Pokrovskyi Monastery Cathedral in Kharkiv. This and other subsequent films by Fedetskyi were short in duration and had descriptive titles, such as Cossack Horsemanship of the First Orenburg Cossack Regiment, Review of the Kharkiv Station at the Moment of Train Departure with Officials on the Platform, Folk Festivities on Horse Square in Kharkiv, and so on.

Alfred Fedetskyi. Source: polish-kharkiv.com.ua.

Unlike Tymchenko, the documentarian succeeded in commercialising his work. His first public film screenings were held at the Kharkiv Opera House in December 1896. To advertise his photo studio, Fedetskyi organised film shoots and screenings, and he also conducted one of the first live-action film shoots in the Russian Empire — a magician’s performance on a theatre stage. Similar experiments with imagery were being conducted in France at the time by Georges Méliès, the father of live-action cinema — a type of cinematography built around the performances of live actors.

Development of newsreels in Ukraine

At the beginning of the 20th century, newsreel filming became common. This was because French film equipment companies Pathé and Gaumont viewed the Russian Empire as a promising market for films and equipment, as well as for providing cinematographic services. Photo studio owners, film entrepreneurs, and photographers became the first documentarians. Danylo Sakhnenko, a film mechanic and correspondent for the Pathé newsreel, began working in Katerynoslav (now Dnipro) in 1908. In early December, he filmed his first newsreel story, “The First Case of Cholera in Our City”. Between 1908 and 1915, Sakhnenko shot more than twenty documentary episodes in Katerynoslav. He is also considered the creator of Zaporizhian Sich, the first Ukrainian live-action film.

Frame from the film Zaporizhian Sich. Source: gorod.dp.ua.

At that time, film content was already being censored. For example, the film The Beilis Case (1913), produced by Pathé, was banned in the cities of the Russian Empire. The film was about the scandalous Kyiv trial of Menachem Beilis, a Jewish man who was falsely accused of ritual murder.

During the Ukrainian War of Independence (1917–1921), many newsreel recordings were made in Ukraine, often commissioned by various governments. During the year of independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1918–1919), documentarians managed to capture several significant events, making films such as Kyiv During the German Occupation (commissioned by the Central Rada government), Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi Attending a Prayer Service in a Kyiv Church on the Feast of Saint Volodymyr (commissioned by Skoropadskyi’s government), The Entry of the Directorate (commissioned by Symon Petliura’s government), and Burial of Young Heroes of Ukraine. Under the command of Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian political and military leader and well-known anarchist, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine also had its own cinematographer.

The Ukrainian War of Independence: The key driving forces of this revolution were the Ukrainian people and their political elite, who applied ideas of political autonomy from the Russian Empire to the realisation of their own state independence. A national movement started developing in all regions of Ukraine. Ukrainian government bodies, political parties, and public institutions were created and operated, and culture was being revived. The revolution resulted in the establishment of the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic, which lasted until 1921.

After the Ukrainians’ defeat in the Ukrainian War of Independence, most of the territories of modern Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities considered cinema the most important of all the arts, as it could most easily convey communist propaganda to citizens without a proper education. Thus, documentary films became a form of official news information. In the early 1920s, films about the reconstruction of the country after the Ukrainian liberation struggles of 1917–1921 were popularised. Some of these films were titled Restoration of Water Supply, Buildings, and Trams by the Odesa Provincial Communist Department; The Restored Jute Factory; and Revived Agriculture of Ukraine. From 1922 to 1930, three film studios — in Odesa, Yalta, and Kyiv — operated under the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration. These studios became the training grounds for a new generation of Soviet filmmakers.

The Great Avant-Garde in Ukrainian Documentary Cinema

One of the young documentarians who made a name for himself while working at these studios was Dzyga Vertov, an avant-garde director and the founding theorist of Ukrainian documentary cinema. In 1919, he created the “Kinoky” (Kino-Eye) association along with his wife, editor Yelyzaveta Svilova, and his brother, cinematographer Mykhailo Kaufman. The name was derived from the director’s belief that the camera is more objective than the human eye and can therefore better capture reality.

Dzyga Vertov. Source: ikitb.knukim.edu.ua

To create “pure cinema”, the “Kinoky” group rejected the influence of traditional arts such as literature, theatre, and music. Their platform for creative exploration became the “Kino-Pravda” party newsreel (1922), where young documentarians honed their artistic visions and practical skills. While producing 23 episodes chronicling the early years of the USSR, Vertov first employed techniques and methods that would later become integral to his cinematic language.

In 1927, after a conflict with “Sovkino” — the state joint-stock company that held a monopoly on film distribution in Soviet Russia — and accusations of formalism, Vertov moved from Moscow to Odesa. He completed Man with a Movie Camera at the Odesa Film Studio in 1929. This scriptless film-manifesto depicts a day in the life of a big city across six different episodes. For the filming, Vertov used experimental techniques such as animation, fast and slow motion, “hidden camera”, double exposure, and archival footage. Man with a Movie Camera‘ set standards in documentary filmmaking, editing, and cinematography and is still widely studied in film schools. Vertov shot his most outstanding films at the Odesa and Kyiv film studios, capturing Ukrainian realities of the period.

Formalism: An artistic concept in which the value of a work is determined by its form rather than its content. From the second half of the 1920s in the USSR, where socialist realism prevailed, any experimentation with form was interpreted as formalism — a characteristic of avant-garde art.

Another of Vertov’s fundamental achievements in documentary filmmaking was the creation of the first Soviet sound film in 1930, Enthusiasm: (The Symphony of Donbas). This film captures the industrialization of the Donetsk region while also highlighting the struggle against religion, the elimination of illiteracy, and the nationalisation of enterprises. The soundtrack includes noise from industrial objects and the activities of people nearby. Charlie Chaplin, whose career was negatively affected by the advent of sound cinema, called Enthusiasm “one of the most moving symphonies I have ever heard”.

In the 1930s, the development of Ukrainian culture was curtailed, and mass repressions began. Studios in Ukraine started to be forced to operate under the “Soyuzkino” film association in Moscow.

Ukrainian documentarians during and after World War II

During World War II, the USSR formed camera crews to document the main events at the front line and quickly relay them to newsreels. Over 300 documentarians joined the Soviet military. In addition to official reports on battles, Soviet film periodicals showcased combat and civilian life, the work of the home front, and the reconstruction of regions liberated from the Nazis. They also created themed issues dedicated to specific events or individuals, including partisan groups.

In 1942, to mark the anniversary of the so-called Great Patriotic War (a propagandistic term for the German-Soviet war — ed.), Ukrainian documentarian Mykhailo Slutskyi filmed One Day of War, involving 160 cameramen along the entire front line. The assignment for the film outlined specific scenes that needed to be captured: combat operations of various scales and involving different types of weapons, river crossings under bombardment, German aircraft flying in anti-aircraft fire zones, destroyed enemy equipment, and the process of bombing it. This film became more of a propagandistic interpretation of reality rather than an example of objective documentary filmmaking.

The most monumental documentary films depicting military actions on Ukrainian territory were overseen by famous Ukrainian director and writer Oleksandr Dovzhenko. By 1939, his portfolio included silent films (Zvenyhora, Arsenal, and Earth) and sound films (Ivan and Aerohrad). With his wife and assistant Yuliia Solntseva, Dovzhenko received a government assignment to film the Red Army’s “liberation” campaign in western Ukrainian lands that had been part of Poland. This led to the creation of the documentary film Liberation, which presented the Soviet occupation of western regions of Ukraine in a favourable light for the USSR. The film depicted portraits of hungry and impoverished children to support the thesis of cultural and economic oppression by Poland. Dovzhenko contrasted daily life in Soviet Ukrainian cities with the region under Poland, exploring the role of individuals in wartime and reflecting the character of the entire nation through the personalities of his characters. Influenced by Dovzhenko’s filmmaking, other directors subsequently created propaganda films such as Soviet Lviv, Pearl of the Carpathians (1940), and Along the Soviet Danube (1941).

Oleksandr Dovzhenko. Source: Ukrinform (Укрінформ)

The documentation of the “reunification of brotherly Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples into one state” lasted for two months. The premiere of Liberation took place in 1940, but it was later withdrawn from circulation. This was most likely done to avoid reminding the population of the inconvenient truth about the Soviet Union’s collaboration with Germany to divide Poland according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. A similar fate befell the film Bukovyna, a Ukrainian Land, which Dovzhenko co-created with Solntseva in her directorial debut. The plot tells how the people of Ukrainian Bessarabia and Northern Bukovyna began to experience a “better life” after the arrival of the Soviet army. The film serves as an example of Soviet documentary propaganda that manipulated collective consciousness and created a strictly positive image of the Soviet army and political leadership.

The pinnacle of Dovzhenko’s documentary-propaganda activity came with two films:

Ukraine in Flames (1943) and Victory on Right Bank Ukraine (1944). While working on the former, Dovzhenko was also completing the screenplay for the cinema novel “Ukraine on Fire, which was later criticised by Stalin for its “anti-Leninism, defeatism, revisionism of national policy, and encouragement of Ukrainian instead of Soviet patriotism”.

Frame from the film Ukraine in Flames by Oleksandr Dovzhenko

For Ukraine in Flames, also created in collaboration with Solntseva, Dovzhenko served as artistic director and narrator. The film was edited from archival footage taken by 24 Soviet operators and video chronicles captured from Germans. Upon release, it was translated into 26 languages. Ironically, the English title of the film (Ukraine in Flames) serves as a bitter reminder of the war’s effects on Ukraine. The film largely avoids glorifying the achievements of the Soviet state, focusing instead on the suffering of the Ukrainian people during the war. It is a sound film enriched with Dovzhenko’s reflections and lyrical digressions.

Frame from the film Ukraine in Flames by Oleksandr Dovzhenko.

In Victory on Right Bank Ukraine, the narrative focuses primarily on portraying the USSR as the saviour of the Ukrainian people. Before starting work on this film, Dovzhenko collaborated with camera operators who had fought in partisan units. Based on their accounts, he produced Compilation of Stories in 1943 about the partisan movement in Ukraine. Dovzhenko was dedicated to preserving the historical memory of Ukraine’s involvement in the war and advocated for the establishment of a museum commemorating it.

From 1943 to 1953, there was a sharp decline in the number of films produced in the Soviet Union. This was due to the post-war economic crisis, the repression of artists, and the “fight against cosmopolitanism”.

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Please join us next time for part two, which will bring us through the 1960s up to today!

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The 916th day of a ten year invasion that has been going on for centuries.

One day closer to victory.

🇺🇦 HEROYAM SLAVA! 🇺🇦