Ways to overcome the screenwriting crisis in Ukrainian cinematography of the second half of the 1920s

Abstract

The relevance of the article. The history of Ukrainian cinematography of the 1920s is generally well studied. The relevance of this work lies in the fact that there are almost no works in Ukrainian film studies that examine the state of screenwriting in Ukraine during its birth and formation. Problem statement. After the end of the Soviet-Ukrainian (“civil”) war, which led to the Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine, there was an urgent need to reorganize the work of the entire cinematographic industry. With the organization in 1922 on the basis of the All-Ukrainian Film Committee of the All-Ukrainian Photocinema Administration (VUFKU), the heads of the new film department began to establish sustainable film production, but encountered the problem of a chronic shortage of film scripts. At this time, the “new” Ukrainian cinematography, for completely external reasons, experienced an acute shortage of screenwriters who had experience in cinematography. Film production, which was growing rapidly and unwaveringly, constantly lacked scripts that would be acceptable from an artistic point of view and at the same time be acceptable to the party bodies from an ideological perspective. Let’s note that there were essentially too many scripts, and film factories were literally “drowning” in the so-called “script flow”. But in this “flow” only a small part turned out to be suitable for implementing from an ideological point of view. Therefore, from the second half of the 1920s, it became increasingly common to talk about a “script crisis”, which was more ideological than creative. When the VUFKU began its work, “Soviet film dramaturgy” actually did not exist yet. Therefore, the directors turned to an old, time-tested source — literature. On the basis of literary works, they sought to make films more or less close to the spiritual and social trends of the time. At the beginning of the 1930s, the controversy surrounding the “screenwriting crisis” in Ukraine stopped. It was then that the management system of the film industry in the USSR was finally transformed. A clear vertical of soviet management with the film center in Moscow is being formed. Ukrainian cinema finally loses its autonomy and Ukrainian film factories start working with scripts approved in Moscow.

Keywords

• Ukrainian cinematography
• screenwriting crisis
• VUFKU
• cinema of the 1920s and 1930s