What comes to mind when we hear about Ukrainian cinema today? I’m certain that for most readers, images related to the terrible war that has been destroying cities and grinding through an incalculable number of human lives for over two years emerge. But if war is a totality that encompasses both the logic of the social and the materiality of bodies, resources, and technology, then how and what can a cultural work be that goes beyond its boundaries?

For instance, it could be a work describing the escapism of people that arises in conditions of any prolonged war, as brilliantly demonstrated by Witold Gombrowicz in his novel “Pornografia”, which narrates the boredom and libidinally-driven entertainments at the height of World War II. However, both Gombrowicz’s novel and artistic explorations of escapism in general still remain an inviolable part of the discourse of war, whether these are texts for which escapism is a passive form of anti-war protest or a form of culture’s coexistence with the giant of war. Or these could be works that consciously avoid the theme of war in an attempt to transgress the boundaries of the totality of horror occurring around, like Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” which was written in the trenches of World War I and in a prisoner of war camp.

In what sense am I speaking about films that go beyond the “war condition”? I’m referring to works that testify to a reality surrounding the totality of war, encompassing both what became the context of its formation and what emerged as an anomaly in the workings of its total mechanisms. Such works are not “anti-war,” but rather ones that avoid the wartime narrowing perspective on reality, and do so in various ways. Sometimes these films are works conceived in pre-war times and realized during wartime, thus combining pre-war meanings and connotations brought by war, and sometimes they are works of wartime but manage to articulate imagery that go beyond its logic. Thus, the films I want to talk about have different formal relationships to war. The first of them, “Infinity According to Florian,” was shot before the war, with its premiere taking place in 2022; a similar situation applies to the second, “La Palisiada.” Meanwhile, the third, “Under the Sign of the Anchor”, was conceived and realized during the full-scale war. One of the films is fiction, while the other two are documentaries. But there is something that unites them: they all, in unobvious ways, sometimes consciously and sometimes inadvertently, testify to post-Soviet reality. And their manner of speech has a rather dialectical form, which allows expressing the tension inherent to post-Sovietness itself, an era so oversaturated with contradictions as if tragedy has inextricably intertwined here with farce.

“Infinity According to Florian” and the Tragedy of a Beautiful Zero

“Infinity According to Florian” is a biographical documentary by Oleksii Radynskyi dedicated to the final years of Soviet and Ukrainian artist and architect Florian Yuriiev, and his struggle against oligarchic raidings for the fate of one of his life’s major works – the building of the Ukrainian Institute of Scientific and Technical Expertise and Information, executed in the style of Soviet modernism and known as the “Flying Saucer”. Throughout the film, we witness a striking contrast: on one side, Florian’s somewhat comical yet endearing personality, reminiscent of an eccentric visionary scientist, radiating a peculiar innocence, and on the other, the harsh realities of the assault on Kyiv’s architectural heritage.

The dialogues between the film crew and Florian reveal the multifaceted nature of his character. His slightly eccentric interdisciplinarity is apparent, reflecting a mind that spans diverse fields of knowledge. At the same time, we see his unwavering determination to fight for his architectural magnus opus, ensuring it doesn’t become merely a small detail in yet another shopping center.

It’s important that the design fell on the last years of the “Thaw”, a period that began with Stalin’s death and was accompanied by mass rehabilitation of the repressed, weakening of censorship in the cultural sphere, and a significant acceleration of scientific and technological progress, culminating in the first human space flight. So the idea of the saucer well reflects the optimism regarding the space program in particular, and the complex, often contradictory role that scientific and technological progress played in Soviet society – a role that would shift dramatically as the society’s faith in grand narratives began to waver.

One of the most significant aspects of the film, therefore, is the double meaning in Florian’s image. At first, it may seem that the film discussses a person of an old, even past era in the conditions of complex modernity. This romantic interpretation of the film would portray Florian Yuriiev as a tragic character who has fallen into an era foreign to him, with which he fights, armed with irony and perseverance. Such a Don Quixote-like interpretation seems to lie on the surface, but it carries both a significant simplification of the character’s actual relationship with history and a false understanding of history itself. So it’s worth flipping this idea and assuming that this is precisely the reality that Florian, like all of us, deals with – a pathologically outdated reality that is called modernity only nominally, by the fact of its present actualization in time. Florian is an eccentric embodiment of modernity in contrast to the outdated epoch in which he happened to find himself.

Such a redefinition of the contemporary is compelled by the main character. In diagnosing the present epoch, Florian primarily speaks about it being pathologically outdated. Florian Yuriiev appeals not to ethical matters, but precisely to the fact that, compared to the cultural horizons humanity has managed to reach, the economic basis remains rooted in commercial interests and primitive profit. It is merely a rudiment that claims to be without alternative. Unlike Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism”, Yuriiev does not see capitalism as a constant modernity and believes that its remarkable vitality still does not exclude its historical temporality. Such a position could be called excessively naive, but this historicist optimism can also be explained biographically, as Yuriiev, unlike Fisher, was a direct witness to the fact that a viable non-capitalist (albeit no better than capitalist, but the viability itself is important) form of the social is possible.Florian’s cancer-stricken body symbolizes a fading modernity, trapped in a reality that, while outdated, paradoxically proclaims itself as youth and progress.

It’s worth noting that one of the simple but important techniques of Radynskyi’s film is the creation of a series of contrasts. The key contrast is between the figure of the artist and scientist Yuriiev and the figure of the businessman Vahif Aliev, the owner of the shopping mall that aims to incorporate Yuriiev’s “saucer”, who also mockingly calls Yuriiev his teacher. Evidently, this contrast concerns not only the personas of Yuriiev and Aliev; Radynskyi manages to capture almost archetypal characters, documenting our Kyiv reality. This contrast between the two characters provokes the question: how did it happen that behind the absurd image of the businessman Aliev stands not a comic artistic gesture, but a bearer of power in all its eerie materiality. In fact, the question about this paradoxicality already carries the bitterness of realizing that the dominance of the outdated and absurd (just like Aliev’s character) logic of capital in culture cannot be explained merely by historical coincidences or political fiascos of the left. The contrast conveys Yuriiev’s pessimism about the humanistic project. This pessimism is at once deliberately post-Soviet, the most direct witness to the fiasco of the modern project, but at the same time fundamentally universal. When Florian speaks about humanity, as a scientist he resorts to the obvious trick of stating humanity’s stunning smallness on a cosmic scale, comparing it to a “zero”. And at the same time, as an artist, he resorts to the hope that this zero should at least be “beautiful”. This complementarity of the aesthetic and the mathematical explains Yuriiev’s persistence in his attempts to defend the “flying saucer”, which is a struggle for the beauty of zero in seemingly hopeless conditions.

Thus, Radynskyi’s film reconsiders a familiar situation: where old narratives have failed and new ones haven’t formed, leaving us with a now-ness devoid of modernity. In a sense, Gramsci’s overly famous words that “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” manifest themselves in our time in the post-Soviet space more than anywhere else. Here, there is clearly a social order that has died and traces of whose existence are disappearing every day. And the morbid symptoms that appear here are not only the crude and unrestrained form of capitalism, but above all the revival of authoritarianism and a political culture of deadly hatred.

What paradoxical thing do we learn about post-Sovietness from the film about Yuriiev? That having carried the hope for a “beautiful zero” through the dysfunctional Soviet version of modernity, one has to carry it further into the interregnum of now-ness, utterly devoid of a sense of the contemporary. Florian Yuriiev died shortly after filming ended in 2021, but the spirit of modernity and the aspiration for the beauty of zero cannot be taken to the grave, and it is a great fortune that Oleksii Radynskyi articulated this aspiration in his simple and beautiful film.

“La Palisiada” and the Chronic Meaninglessness of Speech

La Palisiada by Philip Sotnychenko became perhaps the most prominent independent film of 2023, with the genre defined by the author himself as “post-Soviet noir”. The film garnered considerable attention, including from Western media and festivals: notably, it won the Best Director award at the Sarajevo Film Festival and the FIPRESCI prize at the 52nd Rotterdam International Film Festival. While Sotnychenko’s film nominally centers on the story of the last death penalty in Ukraine, it uses this historical event as a lens through which to explore a broader theme: the aesthetic reconstruction of the Ukrainian nineties. This era was characterized by a peculiar amalgamation of Soviet and Western cultural artifacts, set against a backdrop of economic depression and rampant organized crime. The peculiarity of such an aesthetic reconstruction lies precisely in the fact that it is one of the first precedents of recreating the aesthetics of the 90s from a certain distance, as most cultural artifacts dedicated to this era were realized by those who lived through that period. Nevertheless, the remarkable attention to detail in this reconstruction immediately stands out.

Thus, it is a noir-ironic tale about the 90s where the key characters are two investigators working on a case that will lead to the last death penalty in Ukraine, just on the eve of its abolition. However, the main part of the film is preceded by a rather long scene set in our time, where we observe a quarrel between a young woman and her boyfriend, ending with the unexpected murder of one of the partners. As is characteristic of films consisting of two very different parts, the main key to understanding “La Palisiada” intuitively seems to be the connection between these parts. Indeed, it is the contrast and continuity between these very different parts that hint that they might turn out to be lacunae of meaning. However, there is something that unites these parts, and it’s worth dwelling on this. The thing is, there are two versions of the film: the director’s cut, which was shown at festivals, and the commercial version, which was shown in Ukrainian cinemas. The only difference between them is that in the director’s version, all characters speak Russian and Ukrainian, and sometimes Surzhyk, while in the commercial version, Russian and Surzhyk speech is overlaid with Ukrainian dubbing.

As mentioned earlier, the film received considerable attention, but an important nuance is that this attention went to the director’s cut, which places a significant stake precisely on reconstructing the aesthetics of the transitional post-Soviet period. However, if we are in search of the film’s critical potential, it might be worth focusing on the commercial version and particularly on the highly atypical dubbing. So we can assume that it is a separate character in the film, which unites the prologue with the main part of the film and significantly affects the semantic dynamics of the film.

The first question that arises is: is this voice a directorial compromise with the specifics of current cultural policy (i.e., with the requirement to dub bilingual films in Ukrainian) or rather an artistic decision? Rumor has it that the truth is somewhere in between: the appearance of the voice is indeed a direct consequence of attempts at state regulation of cultural processes, but its very sound and the metallic coldness of intonation is the director’s choice. That is, this key invisible character is the result of mutual compromises, even mutual indecision. Culture managers do not dare to engage in full-blooded censorship, shamefacedly limiting themselves to half-measures, while the director adapts to them, turning his own compromise into an artistic device that carries the greatest critical potential in this work. The ambiguous status of this voice highlights its dual role: it’s both an integral part of the film and an external intervention by an abstract cultural administrator. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the true origin of this voice was, but what matters is that it becomes a source of the film’s semantic dynamics, provoking viewer discomfort. This discomfort from the superimposed monotonous voice on the characters’ live speech makes the aforementioned gap between living reality and monotonous dubbing obvious even to a viewer who, for certain reasons, might sympathize with the course of bureaucratic revisions of Ukraine’s past.

The viewer has a chance to rest from this discomfort only in moments when the characters are silent, as the voice intrudes even into the most sentimental scenes of the film (such as the sad dialogue of one of the main characters with his daughter), hindering the affective closeness of the viewer with the character. If we take this effect beyond the film, we face the fact that the post-Soviet cultural memory of the past finds itself in a state of crisis as soon as the speech of modernity intervenes, especially if this speech is the anonymous voice of bureaucratic instructions. In fact, this crisis is a neurotic revision of culture, whose aesthetic image still carries something nostalgically familiar, at least as long as it remains silent. At this point, the revisionist intention of ideology desperately demands that the past correspond to the current agenda. So, perhaps, our memory of our own past can avoid contradictions with these demands only by being a series of visual images into which speech has not yet intervened.

In fact, the importance of this element lies not only in the fact that with it the film builds up the muscles of critical expression, but also in that this externally imposed element is miraculously mounted into the structure of the film. The source of the wonder of this integration lies primarily in what “La Palisiada” actually is. In one of the last scenes, the definition of “La Palisiada” sounds as a “figure of speech,” and even more importantly, as “speech redundancy.” The dubbing voice is both a “figure of speech,” because by equating it to a full-fledged character in the film, we literally give this “speech” a “figure.” Similarly, by irritating the viewer with inappropriate intervention in the characters’ speech, the voice manifests itself as “speech redundancy.” In other words, the element brought in by the author’s compromise with the functionaries becomes an exact embodiment of the film’s central concept. Such an incredible coincidence is a phenomenon of the kind that builds the ironic narrative of culture, the comedy of life, unplanned by the author.

One of the key mysteries of the film is the connection between speech (redundant, neurotic) and death, as both the prologue episode and the second part of the film, which culminates in the death penalty, end with it. In the case of the first part of the film, excessive speech seems to legitimize the terrible crime of murder, and not even because the speaker is wrong, or his words are false – what turns out to be irritating is precisely the neurotic excess, the loss of appropriate laconic form of speech. The ending of the film only confirms this hypothesis: the excessive speech of the original soundtrack and dubbing ends only when death puts a period, the last execution of a convict in Ukraine.

Ultimately, being a reflection on the excess of speech and death, this film quite unexpectedly becomes what was expected of it, namely a sketch of the realities of the post-Soviet era – an era of excessive speech, which lacks both the substantiveness of meanings and aesthetic laconicism. In other words, Sotnychenko’s film (if we consider its compromised dubbing) diagnoses the superficial demagoguery of the post-Soviet era, when the disappearance of the Soviet censorship system leads not only to a diversity of types of public speech but also to an unlimited circulation of verbal flow, generated by the absence of any consistent theoretical foundation for this speech.

Regarding the theme of death, in Soviet times it had an obvious connection to public speech: from revolutionary terror to systemic repressions of the stagnation era. The culture of violent death did not leave these long-suffering lands along with Soviet censorship, however, it certainly changed the algorithms of relations with public speech. The current war, which is initiated in the morbid speech of Putin’s ideology and materializes in a spontaneous whirlwind of death, is the culmination of post-Soviet relations between public speech and mortality. However, this relationship is fundamentally two-sided: the whirlwind of death not only arises as a result of morbid speech but also provokes such speech itself. Thus, the traumatic imprint of war on Ukrainian culture generates a new re-sentimental wave of excessive speech, which can be observed, in particular, in the cultural interventions typified by “La Palisiada’s” dubbing controversy.

“Under the Sign of the Anchor” Even in Other Waters

In the heart of Kyiv, a city landlocked and far removed from any coastline, stood the Kiev Higher Naval Political School. Taras Spivak’s debut documentary “Under the Sign of the Anchor” explores this intriguing institution, tracing its journey through Ukraine’s transitional period. The film has already garnered recognition, winning the Best Short Documentary award at the Docudays festival – undoubtedly a successful start for this young director.

Spivak weaves together archival footage from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the early years of Ukrainian independence. The film follows the school’s evolution from training political officers for a distant fleet to its transformation into the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, a modern university. “Under the sign of the Anchor” also chronicles the symbolically named aircraft carrier “Kiev”, where the school’s cadets served, and its journey through changing times as flagship of the Soviet Northern Fleet.

This film is entirely woven from numerous other video materials referring to various artifacts that, from one angle or another, testify about the last years of the Kiev Higher Naval Political School’s life. These include documentary-propaganda films of that time praising the academy, video recordings made by the students themselves, full of childishness and descriptions of their ongoing lives, documentation of the phantasmagorical transformation of a Soviet aircraft carrier into a Chinese attraction, and the pompous videos of the “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” explaining the liberal arts institutions’ first stages of existence in occupying the walls of the former naval school.

Following “La Palisiada”, “Under the Sign of the Anchor” speaks to the viewer in multi-layered speech, but here, this speech is not the result of some coincidence; on the contrary, Spivak plays on how diverse the speech circulating around several campuses and symbols can be. Through the fact that throughout the film these fragments occasionally interrupt the chronology of events, it may seem that this multitude of views are directed towards each other through the temporality of history, but then comes the understanding that these views, on their way to intercept, enter some interference zone without a chance for any point of contact. This impossibility of contact despite a radical closeness, both discursive within the boundaries of this film and physical within the boundaries of those campus buildings in question, is also characteristic of the transformations of the era captured in the film as a whole. After all, the collapse of the Soviet system, once called by Putin a “geopolitical tragedy”, in fact turned out to be a semiotic tragicomedy in which people, both old and young, suddenly anecdotally forgot about the ensemble of symbols that only yesterday formed their reality. And “Under the Sign of the Anchor” beautifully captures this very semiotic tragicomedy, being primarily a film about the symbols of Soviet imperialism that does not deny them their nostalgic sentimentality. Something similar was once captured by Alexei Yurchak in a well-known study with the striking title “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More”, in which a reflection is built around the paradox of the simultaneous imaginary inevitability of the Soviet system and its internal fragility, which led to its momentary collapse. However, while Yurchak, primarily as a historian and anthropologist, speaks about the ambiguity of late Soviet citizens’ perceptions, in Spivak’s work this ambiguity dwells in the material walls and buildings and in the paradoxes of the interaction of this materiality with the power of the symbolic. Indeed, isn’t it a semiotic miracle when the same people are walk through the same buildings, buta of plaques on the buildings now testify that the rules of the game are radically different, even if yesterday their change seemed unthinkable?

In one of the film’s Soviet propaganda clips, a striking metaphor describes an aircraft carrier as a “concert hall in a raging sea storm”. Taking this metaphor beyond the Soviet context, one hears something that well describes the reality in which post-Soviet Ukraine found itself. Having experienced the challenges of modernity and rejecting them as extremely dangerous, we decided to limit our reality to a concert hall, but this did not save us from the storm. But perhaps this metaphor is heard simply because post-soviet noise and its layering of speech. A layering of speech in which non-contacting views intertwine into the polyphony of one turbulent epoch.

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So what do these new Ukrainian films speak about, consciously or not? About a world where there is a place for new archaism, redundancy of meaningless speech, and stubbornly fragile symbols of imperialism. These phenomena in their radical, and even quite aesthetically monstrous, concentration are characteristic of contemporary Russia. But at the same time, they are also characteristic, in a more or less diluted form, of other societies with collapsed modern projects. The films I wanted to talk about also testify to the sad history of that modern project that was never realized in Soviet Ukraine, and we know only about individual artifacts that remind us of this unrealized perspective. One of these artifacts is Kyivnaukfilm, a Ukrainian Soviet studio of scientific interdisciplinary cinema and thoughtful animation, whose work is continued by the Kinotron group, which includes Oleksii Radynskyi and Taras Spivak. Another is such renaissance characters as the hero of Radynskyi’s film, Florian Yuriiev, who devoted his life to the synthesis of sciences and arts, whose work was not duly appreciated by post-Soviet market culture. Among the unmentioned characters today, it’s worth naming Viktor Glushkov, the founder of the Kyiv Institute of Cybernetics, a key figure in Soviet information technology. His projects, now referred to as the “Soviet internet”, were intended to introduce flexibility and efficiency into the Soviet economic planning system, but were underfunded, partly due to the Soviet leadership’s focus on developing the military machine.

Why did these artifacts, despite their institutional significance, remain mere fragments instead of transforming the broader social context? The story of this impossibility is one of being caught between two outdated forces: the stagnating Soviet system and the primitive market logic, both colored by national characteristics. By telling stories of the past and present, as seen in these films, cinematic language goes beyond the boundaries of war, exploring the hidden corners of reality where this war became possible.