ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN - ВУФКУ

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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Made by CASE digital studio

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN

Installation Film/Propaganda

This room, a cinema vocabulary of the Soviet propaganda, is the mirror-world of the visual culture of the 1920s. It is a call to reflect on the nature of a cinematic image and the typical Soviet ideological language.

Film is an illusion, and its creation is a manipulation. Even a documentary does not reflect the reality and is a result of numerous manipulative techniques with the picture and sound which are usually hidden from the viewer on the other side of the screen.

Each of the eight cubes presents this or that figure of speech, indicative of the Ukrainian cinema of the 1920s. “Revolution,” “Montage,” “Industrialisation,” “Collectivisation,” “Corporeality,” “Woman,” “Education,” “Enemy” were the key topics that received a new aesthetic and ideological meaning in the Soviet propaganda.

These concepts and phenomena limited and locked the person in the framework of certain norms and propaganda images, thus shaping the horizon of their vision and thinking.