Between Ukrainian cinema and modernism: Alexander Dovzhenko's silent trilogy.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Along with Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko is regarded as one of Soviet cinema's golden or heroic age masters. Through the silent cinema's early aspirations and aesthetic's converging ground, this work looks at Dovzhenko's Soviet Ukrainian trilogy (<italic>Zvenyhora., Arsenal, Earth</italic>, 1928–1930).
More than a few critics have labelled these films at the height of Dovzhenko's directorial career and at the silent cinema aesthetic's apogee. In theme and subject matter, the three masterpieces, <italic>Zvenyhora, Arsenal</italic> and <italic>Earth</italic> present Ukrainian cinema's birth. Historically, the films are foundational in speaking about Ukrainian culture, collectivization and struggles for social revolution and national emancipation.
Contextualizing Alexander Dovzhenko's silent trilogy, this examination focuses on a more often quoted than known film trilogy through lenses of lesser known buried histories: Ukrainian Modernism, the early twentieth century Ukrainian literary and fine art debates, Neo-Classicists, peasant writers (Pluh), Futurism, the politico-literary organization VAPLITE, Berezil Theatre, the Ukrainian struggle's historical background and importance of Ukraine's poet laureate, Taras Shevchenko, ‘Ukrainian’ literature and aesthetics, the 1917–21 Ukrainian Revolution, Borotbyst Party, Skovoroda, Byzantine iconology, Eastern European philosophy and modernist aesthetics.
Redressing idealization regarding the Soviet heroic film period's utopian Marxism and ‘Union’ ideology from the context of a former Soviet republic and the silencing of that country's histories, this study presents a textual analysis of the silent trilogy in wider parameters of the Ukrainian Cultural Renaissance (1917–31).
This work places itself in liminal territories in recent heterodox disciplinary sets (i.e. Cinema Studies (visual cultural studies), Slavic Studies (Ukrainian Studies), Art History (Byzantine iconology/other's modernisms). It excavates misaligned fault lines to critique historic Soviet film paradigms. It conducts syncretic micrologic examination and takes a step into the less-trodden territories of silenced histories and what exist now as a grouping of little understood nations.