Conserveries Mémorielles (Sep 2020)
De la paix à la guerre, de la fiction au documentaire. Alexandre Dovjenko et Youlia Solntseva
Abstract
Aleksandre Dovzhenko's artistic trajectory underwent a critical change during the Second World War. For private as well as public reasons, the by then famous Soviet director refused the mission ascribed to feature film directors -- that is contributing to general mobilisation of the country from the rear areas, in the evacuated studios. Based on a heterogeneous set of sources (personal notes, private correspondence, documents pertaining to the production of films, and finally the secret police's surveillance file), the article explores the dynamics of « self-mobilisation » of both Dovzhenko and his spouse and co-author, Yulia Solntseva. The study does not engage in an analysis of the two full length documentaries that they created about the fighting in Soviet Ukraine. Instead, it examines the impact of the war on the directors' whereabouts and on Dovzhenko's feelings about his duty as a mobilised artist. It pauses on the very peculiar way Dovzhenko decided to work with newsreels cameramen, which all of them pointedly noted in their later memoirs. Finally, Dovzhenko's distance from the shooting scenery and the process of reconstruction of the Ukrainian Newsreels Studio deeply affected the production of the second fresco about the Ukraine in war, namely Victory on the Right bank (1945).
