ZVENYHORA — PEREKOP SERHIY TRYMBACH Zvenyhora is an expanse in whose depths a treasure is concealed. The treasure of mythic import that will aid in the rebirth of the Ukraine that was. In Zvenyhora there lives a Grandfather who is as eternal as the steppe. Still other characters from history make up this traditional park of legend. First there are the Cossacks and their enemies: the Polish nobility and clergy. Their visions, tales, and dreams give rise to an image of a Ukraine now gone. Here also the history is revealed to some degree by means of a surrealistic epistle, staged as a dream, the facts being constantly subject to doubt. Moreover, in this reality — and its most available, most natural cultural association Gogol’s juxtaposition of the epic past with the present agrarian state — we are shown the arduous routine, the labor for daily bread. The development and dynamic of history are absent here: subordinated to the natural, seasonal, cycles of agricultural endeavor. Switching on the “historical current” would demand a demolition of that routine, an interruption of its natural cycle.
The Ukrainian discourse is symbolized in the eternal grandfather’s two grandsons — the agrarian and the progressive-revolutionary. Pavlo, the unreconstructed nationalist, is convinced that nothing need change; Ukrainian substantiality need only be drawn out of its hiding place and the present, traditionalist manner of life maintained. He sees great dangers in civilization in general; in technology in particular. In the closing frames he sends out his grandfather to throw a grenade under the train bearing the blossom of Bolshevism.
The other grandson, Tymish, has gone over to the insurgent, Bolshevik side. It irritates him to see his counterpart Pavlo caught in the daily routine. Bearing in his heart the iron will of progress, his task is to pull this world down to ruin. The picture of farm life is exchanged for panoramas showing industrial fabrication, the camera panning upward, up and beyond into the new vertical of history. The grandfather, the eternal national spirit, will — and must — take his place in the very train which carries them all toward a brighter tomorrow.
Thus, Zvenyhora unfolds its layers of the collective unconscious: that which Ukrainians lived for, images with which they could identify closely. This technique produces a stream of images smacking of pure surrealism: is this not precisely what André Breton called, “pure psychic automatism… to express… the real functioning of thought”? The picture opens as a free-flowing tide of associations, characteristic of a then-current, and delusional, grassroots consciousness. The filmmaker inserts his own subversive view into the matter. Take,
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