Ispirato dai racconti dello scrittore ucraino Vasyl Stefanyk (1871-1936), questo film è il cinema poetico ucraino al suo meglio – estremamente laconico come il suo svolgimento , ma intensamente psicologica e sconvolgente nella sobrietà del suo messaggio. Girato in un bianco e nero suggestivo, porta alla mente Akira Kurosawa. Oggi “Stone Cross” rimane poco conosciuto e ancor meno apprezzato sia in Ucraina che all’esterno . Un vero gioiello del mondo del cinema d’arte si tratta di un picco del cinema ucraino che non ha uguali.
Abstract
This article focuses on A Stone Cross (Kaminnyi khrest), a 1968 film by the Ukrainian director Leonid Osyka based on the work of the Ukrainian modernist writer Vasyl’ Stefanyk, including the eponymous short story. While this film is regarded in the countries of the former Soviet bloc as one of the highest accomplishments of the poetic cinema movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, it has so far received little attention in the West. The present article examines the film-maker’s choices made in adapting the literary texts, and especially the film’s visual language, including its choice of setting, camerawork, editorial style and use of professional and non-professional actors, and the way these choices contribute to the work’s overall dramatic impact. A key theme in this film, which narrates a peasant family’s decision to emigrate to Canada in the late 1890s and the severance of its symbolic ties with the traditional rural community, is the deep identity crisis precipitated by the social upheavals of modernity and the universal existential implications of its theme of ‘petrified liminality’. The film’s restrained, sombre style is contrasted with the colourful exotic world presented in Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, the best-known work of Ukrainian poetic cinema, and the experimental minimalist approach of the 1960 Japanese film Naked Island, which strongly influenced Osyka during his student years.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1386/srsc.2.3.269_1#.U9KoKkDXuUk
Original title: Kaminnyi Khrest
Copyright: the Oleksander Dovzhenko Film Studio, Kyiv, Ukraine, 1968.
Format: feature narrative
Carrier: DVD
Color: black and white
Length: 77 min.
Original language: Ukrainian, with admixture of the Pokuttia dialect.
English subtitles: yes
Film crew
Director: Leonid Osyka
Script writer: Ivan Drach
Director of photography: Velerii Kvas
Production designer: Mykola Riznyk
Original music: Volodymyr Huba
Sound editor: Sofia Serhienko
Produced by the Oleksander Dovzhenko Film Studio, Kyiv, Ukraine.
Film cast:
Danylo Ilchenko as Ivan Didukh, Boryslav Brondukov as the thief, Kostiantyn Stepankov as Mykhailo, Vasyl Symchych as Heorhii, Antonina Leftiy as Antonina, Ivan Mykolaichuk as Mykola, Borys Savchenko as Dmytro, K. Mateik as baba Ivanykha, Oleksa Atamaniuk as Andriiko. Residents of the Pokuttia region as extras.
Synopsis
A Galician peasant Ivan Didukh in a desperate attempt to get his family out of abject poverty decides to leave his ancestral home and seek a better live in Canada. On the eve of his departure a thief gets into his house. Following the old custom Ivan calls on his neighbors to sit in judgment of the criminal. A surreal feast ensues. The thief asks Ivan Didukh for and get his forgiveness. The village judges nevertheless sentence him to death. The departure for Canada being tantamount to his own death, Ivan holds a farewell party that feels very much like a wake for him and his family. In his own memory he erects a stone cross on a hill. In a larger sense, Ivan Didukh’s stone cross is the monument to thousands of his compatriots who had and still all too often today are compelled to leave their homeland.
Inspired by stories of the Ukrainian writer Vasyl Stefanyk (1871-1936), this film is Ukrainian poetic cinema at its best – extremely terse and laconic in outward expression, but intensely psychological and shattering in the understated delivery of its message. Shot in a striking black-and-white, it brings to mind Akira Kurosawa. Today “Stone Cross” remains little known and even less appreciated both in and outside Ukraine. A true gem of world film art it is a peak of Ukrainian filmmaking that has no parallels.
This film has been restored and digitally re-mastered as part of the 8-disk DVD gift set “Ukrainian Film Classics. Ivan Mykolaichuk,” issued by the National Oleksander Dovzhenko Center in 2010.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ufc/films/library_stone_cross.html
