VUFKU (All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration) existed for less than nine years (1922-1930), but it managed to release over 140 fiction films, several hundreds of non-fiction films and newsreels, dozens of animations, gain fame of “Ukrainian Hollywood,” and take under its control all aspects of the cinematic process – filmmaking, distribution, film press, propaganda, and education. From over 140 full-length fiction films made by VUFKU, about 60 films are considered lost. A lot of the surviving films have come down to us incomplete (without one or more parts).

The website VUFKU. Lost&Found is the first online collection of Dovzhenko-Centre’s media library and is perhaps the only online resource providing comprehensive information on VUFKU.

The mission of the VUFKU. Lost&Found project is to search and return to Ukraine the lost films of the 1920s. Traces of some of the lost films of that time can be found in international archives. Meanwhile, we are collecting archive materials about the lost films, restoring their contents, learning the context of their release.

These searches and analysis, restoration of films and their return to the cultural circulation require financial support. Donating to our fundraising campaign, which will start in October 2019, you will be able to contribute to the restoration of Ukrainian cinema.

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Exhibition Arrow

AVANT-GARDE: DYNAMICS AND STATICS

AVANT-GARDE: DYNAMICS AND STATICS

Model of Ivan Kavaleridze’s monument to Artem

This zone introduces the viewers to the most radical film experiments of the 1920s, which were carried out at VUFKU by Dziga Vertov, Ivan Kavaleridze, and Oleksandr Dovzhenko. Each of them used a specific montage rhythm – from vibrating and impulsive (Vertov) to slow and smooth (Dovzhenko) to idle and quiet (almost motionless – Kavaleridze).

Justifying his theoretical views, Vertov urged filmmakers to leave the “crutches” of theatre and literature and to work on the creation of a universal film language, understandable on every continent. Staying of Vertov and Kinoks in Ukraine allowed him to achieve his creative ambitions: to make a film without titles, to create a sound film, to “emancipate the movie camera.” During his more than four-year work in Ukraine, Vertov created his three most avant-garde films, The Eleventh Year (1928), Man With a Movie Camera (1929), and Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbass (1930).

Another VUFKU film, which shocked the audience and garnered heavy criticism, was Ivan Kavaleridze’s début film Downpour (1929). Kavalerize tried to bring the statics and monumentalism of a sculpture into cinema. However, neither Downpour, nor Kaveleridze’s legendary Constructivism monument to Artem in Bakhmut have survived to this day. There are around 20 shots from the first one, and the impression of the second one can be made based on the photos and several fragments from newsreel and two films of 1930, Kavaleridze’s Perekop and Vertov’s Enthusiasm.

Oleksandr Dovzhenko worked on the Constructivist combination of avant-garde’s two extreme points – dynamics and statics (especially in Arsenal (1929)). In his films (Zvenyhora (1927), Earth (1930)), Dovzhenko used his unique manner to combine rhythmic associative montage, innovative techniques in the style of German expressionism with frozen close-ups caught by the “prepared” optics of the cameraman and photographer Danylo Demutskyi.