Yet again Ukraine is beginning to be conquered by a Ukrainian cultural product from abroad. The point is not even that showings in Poland, at an obscure Ukrainian film festival, or at Harvard, at a soiree of exotic movies, are of little consequence to the international filmmaking community. After all, there is only so much one can do, meaning that accusing others of plotting and scheming would seem strange, mildly speaking. But it is really a shame that the Ukrainian audiences as well as professional filmmakers have once again been shown their place. Not one of honor if truth be told, at the end of the list of countries where the film about Mazepa was shown. In other words, the third-world-county postulate has been carried out to a tee. As for Ukraine’s place, it is not difficult to guess. Obviously, those in charge of the project Mazepa are worth their salt. Illienko’s Prayer for Hetman Mazepa is indisputable home champion in terms of the scandals arising from or in conjunction with it. Yet all this has nothing to do with the cinema as such. It is just that the priorities are misplaced. The authors, after making the film with taxpayer’s money, simply ignore that same taxpayer as the principal viewer. At the same time, one might as well save one’s breath, trying to explain textbook truths to well-educated grownups viewing themselves as arbiters of the Ukrainian filmmaking fate. Also, whether they like it or not, the audiences have the final say. On this particular occasion, we will concentrate on impressions voiced by Harvard viewers.
World class attainment; a drawn-out, moralizing, and incomplete production – these two polarized opinions best describe the US audience’s response to Illienko’s film after it was shown at Harvard in early August.
The screening was organized as part of Harvard’s Ukrainian Studies Summer School Program. Students and the Boston and nearby communities had an exceptional opportunity to watch a movie introduced by the press as independent Ukraine’s first full-length and high-budget (UAH 12 million) motion picture.
The Harvard audience consisted of students, professors, and intellectuals at large interested in exotic productions, and of course people from the local Ukrainian community, some coming from other states specially to watch a film with an established scandalous reputation courtesy of the Internet. Extensively campus-advertised, the premiere attracted students and movie devotees from Canada, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Italy, and Egypt. Although it is to be distributed in Ukraine in September, the passions surrounding it had reached the New World. At Harvard, the atmosphere among the viewers was festive. After all, they were about to watch Ukraine’s first blockbuster supposedly challenging Jerzy Hoffman’s With Fire and Sword and Nikita Mikhalkov’s Barber of Siberia.
Most Harvard viewers expected to see a patriotic epic illustrating a particularly dramatic period in Ukrainian history, with genre requisites like colorful costumes, captivating scenery, battle scenes, love scenes, and more, allowing the Ukrainians in the audience to regain their national dignity, even if for several hours. Virko Baley, author of the score, was invited from Las Vegas. In his brief address before the premiere, as though to forestall a sharp critical response, he advised the viewers to abandon their habitual moviegoers’ criteria, saying what they were about to watch was an unusual, sophisticated, shocking film meant not to entertain but evoke empathy and painful reflections on existentialist dilemmas of Ukrainian realties. He warned that Illienko’s Prayer for Hetman Mazepa was not a historical film nor was it an illustration from the Ukrainian past.
Indeed, one would be hard put to find historical facts in the movie. It does not have a plot in the ordinary sense, with a starting point, intrigue, culmination, and finale; it does not offer any linear development of the personae or a temporal and spatial narrative sequel. Instead, it exploits the surrealist aesthetic most extensively, as evidenced by the very format of sleep (those familiar with Luis BuЦuel and his films will agree with me) and the absence of boundaries between delirium and reality, rational thinking and madness, tragedy and comedy, the sublime and mundane, poetic and disgusting. Surrealism also betrays itself in wall paintings, portraits, setting (production designer: Serhiy Yakutovych), pieces of furniture reminiscent of Salvador Dali, and carnal emphasis: sex, nude flesh, torture, manslaughter, etc.
Illienko consciously builds his scenes, setting, and costumes so as to dissuade the viewer from believing in any historical verisimilitude. In fact, certain elements are purposefully kept grotesque (some of his characters wear Roman togas; Mazepa and Peter I exchange boots and socks in a scene of reunion between a Ukrainian hetman and Russian tsar which is not entirely platonic and looks more like a transvestite date somewhere in New York). The feeling is that Illienko wanted to raise, then drop and tear to pieces all the old symbols and beliefs Ukrainians have always applied to outstanding historical figures. This explains the outrage of Ukrainian traditionalists and all those requiring the cinema to be an implement in raising a new generation (very much in the Soviet ideological spirit).
There is no denying that the film is shocking. Yet I think that it is not the erotic – rather, pseudoerotic – scenes, because there is plenty of naked flesh, and it often seems asexual, reminiscent not of carnal pleasure but of death, decay, and decomposition. Nor is it bloodshed or heaps of dead bodies or heads rolling, because a moment later the audience realizes that the blood is just paint, the dead bodies dummies, and that the heads have just been detached from dummies and hastily made up. Likewise it takes much imagination to find pornography in the Prayer... What is actually shocking is Illienko’s determination to discard all the traditional taboos and self-identification models inherited by the Ukrainians; the way he puts forth, most provocatively, the Ukrainian dilemma: Will there be Ukraine or ruin?
Mazepa sleeps and has a dream. It is presented like a farce where all the characters, including the hetman, act like madmen. They often speak their lines with an emphasized theatricality and the viewer feels they are making fun of him. There seems nothing sacred for Illienko; no relic can escape his dissecting critical eye, his scathing irony. Naturally, those accustomed to cinematographic didacticism and dictates felt cheated, left totally exposed to a Ukrainian postmodern world of moral and ideological relativism.
Despite the film’s duration (152 min.) and poor quality soundtrack, most people in the Harvard audience watched it to the end. The very first questions posed Virko Baley afterwards showed that it had touched a nerve. Some accused the director of tampering with history and lacking didacticism and entertainment. Others felt that it was provocative and interesting.
Remembering the adage of vox populi vox Dei, I asked some of the viewers to share their impressions.
Roman SZPORLUK, Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History, Harvard: “The Prayer... is a product of creative imagination, it is a reflection on certain lasting topics and regularities in Ukrainian history, the way we perceive it. In particular, it concerns the problem of national solidarity and dedication to a common cause. One ought to remember Mazepa’s words when he ruefully, albeit without surprise, listed the regiments that never appeared on the battlefield or which sided with the enemy. The same idea, even more dramatically, is rendered in Charles XII’s monologue when he says that he is king of Swedes, not mercenaries without national identity.”
Michael FLYER, Oleksandr Potebnia Professor of Ukrainian Philology, Harvard: “The film director offers meditations in the form of a number of dreams relating to important Ukrainian historical topics and those concerning national identity. Among them is the theme of power (who actually wields it, who can freely use it, and who is destroyed by it) and the related topics of subordination, lust, jealousy, love, and hatred. Illienko sees the dynamism of the Mazepa-Peter relationship as a mutual reflection of the heroes; both are given to narcissism, thirst for power and independence. The homoerotic leitmotiv in the film is a way to comment on the mutual attraction of two powerful men, the need to physically dominate and humiliate the enemy, which for them was the final proof of their own viability as rulers. In this competition, Ukraine is portrayed as a woman and the target of their lust. She is a defenseless prey and a power-thirsty predator at the same time.”
Maria BACHYNSKY, a viewer from Boston: “I didn’t understand what the movie was all about. On the one hand, it’s supposed to be about historical events; on the other, it’s very moralizing. Naturally, it draws very clear parallels between past and present realities. Illienko’s film made me very angry. The first thing is that it has to be edited. It’s incomplete and drawn-out. The director doesn’t seem to assume that his potential audiences may have any degree of intellect. I felt as though they had hammered the same idea into my head twenty-five times over. Too bad the film is presented as a great attainment of the Ukrainian cinema.”
Virko BALEY, author of the score, Las Vegas: “The relationship between Hetman Mazepa and Peter I is one of the central themes. Each tries to use the other for his own ends. The film also reveals a very important parameter of their relations. I think both admired the other. This assumption is most likely historically true, something people often forget these days, especially in Ukraine. I believe that Peter I loved Mazepa, he really did. And so the hetman’s betrayal, apart from the political implications, was also a profound personal insult. Part of the film’s idea is that things can happen in politics which we are inclined to regard as grand historical developments, but which are actually personal conflicts among those with power.”
Lubomyr HAJDA, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute: “I think that the Ukrainian viewer is not prepared for this film and this is my principal critical remark concerning the Prayer... Illienko’s Freudian, surrealistic approach to the image of Mazepa is not entirely unfounded, although I’m not quite sure that it’s the best film about Mazepa for Ukrainian and even non-Ukrainian audiences. Non-Ukrainian audiences, lacking specific knowledge about the historical context will find this film incomprehensible. Ukrainian audiences may take an interest in it, and Ukrainian intellectuals and the cultural elite might even applaud it, but the general public won’t understand it and could even reject it. It would be best if this film were the third or fourth of a Mazepa series, so people would have watched more realistic portrayals of the hetman and his epoch. I think that Ukrainian audiences expect something like Jerzy Hoffman’s With Fire and Sword or Mel Gibson’s Bravehart.
Federigo ARGENTIERI, professor of political science, John Cabot University, Rome: “The film is not anti-Russian. It is aimed against Russia’s hegemonic, imperialistic encroachments on Ukraine. Obviously, it addresses the current situation in which Moscow must have had to put up with the loss of the Baltic states and now tries to get Ukraine under greater control.”
Anna MULLER, student at the Ukrainian Studies Summer School, Gdansk, Poland: “While postmodernism is taken for granted in American and Western culture as a whole, in Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine and Poland, this trend is rather new and considered avant-garde. Sometimes you have to desacralize certain things to properly assess them.”
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A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa was shown at Harvard courtesy of the score’s author Virko Baley and producer Ihor Didkovsky (Kyiv). It was a de facto premiere on American soil prior to its formal distribution in Ukraine.
