«heroic age» of Ukrainian cinematography. During the post-war 1922-1925 years their heroic efforts created the Ukrainian film industry: Petro Chardynin, Vladimir Gardin, Heorhii Tasin, Heorhii Stabovyi, Borys Zavelev, Oleksii Kalyuzhnyi and talented cinema manager Petro Neches, the first director of Odessa and Kiev film studios.
We sincerely hope that the restoration and updating of the silent Film within contemporary Ukrainian cultural field will modify the stereotypical image of Ukrainian culture (both in and outside Ukraine), will help transform national memory and overcome social amnesia typical for post-colonial culture, which suffered from a loss of several strata of cultural experience, but still doesn’t demand their actualization.
Silent film is in a sense a metaphor of the trauma in Ukrainian culture; it symbolizes the painful loss of the culture’s voice (language) and the inability to speak because of selfabandonment. The age of Ukrainian avant-garde, the emergence of which in the context of rustic, stateless, and censored culture was itself a paradox, requires a thorough and methodical investigation. 29