Gathering of film amateurs (from private collections)
If you read about films connected to Mariupol, you encounter names such as Leonid Lukov, Maryna Lobysheva, Yevhen Mytko, and Yurii Kovalenko and find references to films such as Padenie Berlina [The Fall of Berlin] (Mikheil Chiaureli, 1950), Broshennye vpered [Thrown Forward] (Viktor Shkurin, late 1960s-1970s) Prikliuchenia Artemki [Artemka’s Adventures] (Andrii Apsolon, 1956), Piraty dvadtsatogo veka [Pirates of the 20th Century] (Borys Durov, 1980) and Malenkaia Vera [Little Vera] (Vasyl Pichul, 1988). The last two are probably the most widely known films to have been shot in Mariupol. But what if we dig deeper in the archives and look beyond the major productions produced by Soviet state film studios? Is the cinema of Mariupol limited to just this short list of films? Perhaps there is more to Mariupol on screen that we have seen until now?
You could say that archival holdings await the right moment and the ideal researcher. For this researcher, the right moment came thanks to the “Un/archiving Post/industry” project, a digitization initiative coordinated by the Centre for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv and the University of St Andrews in Scotland. In the spring of 2020, the Mariupol Local History Museum sent several reels of films produced by local film studios to Lviv for digitization. While Oles Makhanets and his team at the Urban Media Archive tackled the problem of digitising the 35 mm soundtrack film, the Museum started to research the history of amateur filmmaking in Mariupol.
Mariupol amateur filmmakers, Heorhii Kotelnykov, Yurii Tsymbaliuk and Serhii Burov, who had made films at the “Plamia” [Flame] film studio at the Ilych Iron and Steel Works metallurgy factory in the Soviet period, shared their memories with us in recorded interviews (the recordings are accessible on request at the Urban Media Archive). Serhii Burov also guided us to some publications about amateur filmmaking from his own private archive. Among these materials was an article by Burov himself: in 1967, he wrote prophetically about the importance of systematising and adequately storing amateur films that contained footage of historical value in order to preserve this for posterity. As of 2021, archives containing several dozen films were housed by the Ilych Iron & Steel Works metallurgy factory museum and the Mariupol Local History Museum; a number of them can be viewed online. Some video materials, thanks to the efforts of Mariupol cameraman Viktor Dedov, were used in the historical TV program Mariupol. Byloe.
To understand the evolution of the amateur filmmaking movement in Mariupol, let’s try to outline its chronology and unearth the forgotten details of its history.
A Camera Sold at a Fair and Pryazovskyi Ekran (The Newsreel of Pryazovia)
Mariupol’s amateur filmmaking movement can be dated to spring 1950, when Heorhii Kotelnykov1In 1975, Kotelnykov created a radio engineering club affiliated with the municipal House of Pioneers and ran it for forty years., a local resident who worked at a local branch of the Ukrainian State Design Institute Vazhpromelektroproiect, discovered a book on film cameras, tripods, directing and camerawork. A year later, Kotelnykov was walking through the local market, when he noticed teenagers selling a device used for shooting and showing movies. The lens of this device could move right and left by 6 mm and there was room for 35 mm-wide film and two reels under its lid. A bulb from a pocket flashlight had been added to the camera to enable its user to watch films. While Kotelnykov did not buy the camera at the time, five years later he assembled his own version that was based on pretty much the same principles.
In an interview conducted in 2021, Kotelnykov explained his process:“At that time, you could only buy 35 mm photographic film and everything that went with it. So I got the idea to change the frame format. In professional filmmaking, the pulldown is 19 mm. There are four perforations per frame, at 4.75 mm. Let’s say the new frame size is 4.75 mm by 6 mm, which means four tracks on one film reel. We get 1260 frames, and that gives us 78 seconds if the speed of shooting is 16 frames per second. Considering that one shot lasts 4 seconds, this results in approximately 20 shots. Not bad for a home movie.”
The device was used by Kotelnykov and his colleagues to shoot several films, but the amateur filmmakers were not able to watch the footage, either at the time or later, because they did not have the necessary equipment to screen their works. Kotelnykov eventually managed to view his films for the first time at the end of 2021, after the material had been restored by Oleksandr Makhanets. The device itself, a small box made of wood and metal with two handles and a cone-shaped viewfinder, was displayed at the exhibition “Society with a Movie Camera” at the Center for Urban History in Lviv.In the 1960s, Kotelnykov began working at amateur film studios in Zhdanov (as Mariupol was called until 1989), contributing to scripts and stories. The local newsreel (Soviet visual propaganda, celebrating the achievements of communism), Pryazovskyi Ekran, featured his video about Mykhailo Briskin, the USSR race-walking champion and record holder during his 10 km (1941) and 20 km (1944) walk, among other works produced at this time.
The quarterly newsreel Pryazovskyi Ekran was conceived as a chronicle detailing the city’s preparations in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s birth. Each issue of the newsreel contained eight to ten video stories. The first four issues were released in 1969, the fifth, a special one, followed in June 1970, and the sixth was released in 1973. The newsreel relied on material submitted by amateur filmmaking studios to the Zhdanov City Club, an agglomeration of different amateur film groups and factory clubs in the city.
“Briefly about Much”: film hubs, film journalism, and amateur clubs
In 1956, a booklet Nasha Kinohazeta (Our Film Newspaper) was published detailing another version of the history of the amateur filmmaking movement in Mariupol. According to the author of the booklet Leonid Kaliatynskyi, events unfolded like this: in spring 1955, Fedir Spyrydonov, head of the photography club at the Construction Builders’ Palace of Culture, visited the construction trust’s party committee and suggested that they start making films. Spyrydonov brought along his camera and showed those present a video about a visit he had paid to the local zoo. With the committee’s backing, Spyrydonov led some of the first attempts at filmmaking in the city, which eventually led to the founding of a full-fledged newsreel that was released once every one and a half to two months. This newsreel consisted of a selection of short celebratory documentaries devoted to everyday and professional life in Zhdanov. A 6-mm 16 S-1 film camera was used for filming, while the voiceovers were recorded on a tape recorder. The group of contributing filmmakers included Fedir Derkachov, Oleksandr Yeretskyi, Yevhen Rabkin, Ye. Havrylov, H. Metko and the film mechanic Chornenkyi. These films were first viewed by select audiences of local officials in propaganda rooms at construction trust enterprises and the Palace of Culture.
The amateur filmmaking hub at the Azovstal plant was most likely founded in 1957, responding to the appearance of another newsreel, Metalurg Azovstali (Azovstal Metal Worker), curated by Mykhailo Medukhovskyi in the same year. The newsreel was composed of videos chronicling new technologies, metallurgical production and the construction of housing, cultural facilities and public amenities in the city’s Ordzhonikidze district.
Another amateur film studio, ZhMI-film, this time affiliated with the Zhdanov Metallurgical Institute, was created in 1959. Serhii Burov recalled that the filmmakers who trained at this studio (among them, Mykola Ushakov, Hryhorii Fidelman, Oleh Solodukha, Valerii Rodshtein, Leonid Pugach) were mentored by Hryhorii Soroka, who specialised in aerial photography as a special forces serviceman during the Second World War. The studio’s debut 10-minute film consisted of four stories documenting the anniversary of the Mariupol scientist and metallurgist, Ivan Kazantsev, scrap metal collection, the local student cross-country race, and classes in a laboratory.
Urban historian Serhii Burov characterises ZhMI-film as a real filmmaking department, since people who trained the studio went on to open filmmaking clubs of their own elsewhere. Student-made films were screened at industrial enterprises and in municipal cinemas, and they were broadcasted on television in Donetsk.Finally, a film studio was established at the Zhdanov Heavy Machine Building Plant in 1963. Yurii Tsymbaliuk, Vitalii Strafun and Oleh Brailovskyi, film laboratory employees at the technical information department, assembled a group of amateurs at the studio who produced films under the ZhZTM-film brand. The ZhZTM-film group created about a hundred films that were shown in cinemas around the city and on regional television. One of them, Pesnia o gorode, Song of the City (1967), celebrates the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution.
In 1965, the amateur filmmaking movement expanded to the Zhdanov Coke Chemical Plant. In April 1965, the newspaper Molodye Sovremenniki [Young Contemporaries] published a photo captioned “Newest film edited by members of the amateur filmmaking studio: designer Halyna Yablonska, workers Viacheslav Khmelov and Veniamin Karputs, secretary of the factory Komsomol committee Anatoly Senatosenko”.
The employees of the Zhdanov Coke Chemical Plant debuted with the films Dni nashei zhizni [Days of Our Life, c.1965], Idushchie Vperedi [Those Marching Ahead, c. 1965], Ya liubliu tebia, More [I Love You, Sea, c.1965], V kolkhoze podshefnom [On the Collective Farm We Took Under Our Wing, c.1965]). Later, at the Palace of Culture of the Coke Chemical Plant, a film essay was hosted about the senior gas worker Serhii Kovalchuk, and two more movies, Kakoe ono, more? [What Is It Like, the Sea?, 1966] and Goluboi Dunai [Blue Danube, 1966] were made.
In the mid-sixties, a film studio opened at the Ilyich Iron & Steel Works. It brought together filmmaking amateurs working at the plant who were at that time affiliated with different filmmaking entities, including the film group at the Laboratory of Scientific Management, a studio at the Palace of Culture of the Zhdanov Ilyich Iron & Steel Works, the People’s Film Studio Ogonek (Flame), a film and the press centre at the Chormetinformatsiia Institute of the USSR Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy. For many years, Mykola Chukhlib served as the director of the film studio at Ilyich Iron & Steel Works and Tamara Tretiakova worked as its editor, cutting thousands of metres of film. The creative œuvre of the studio includes Dorogoi dedov i ottsov [In the Footsteps of Our Grandfathers and Fathers, 1967], Ilichevskii kharakter [The Illich Character, 1973], Na ognennom rubezhe [On the Edge of Fire, 1973], and Nasledniki Makara Mazaia [Makar Mazai’s Descendants, 1985]. Members of the local film studio regularly visited colleagues at feature and popular science film studios and they participated in regional and republic-level competitions as well.
As early as 1964, S. Volkov called for a public organisation that would unite groups of filmmaking amateurs in an article with the rather blunt title “We Need a Film Club”, published in the Mariupol newspaper Priazovskii rabochii (The Pryazov Worker). In 1967, nine amateur filmmakers’ groups were organised into the Zhdanov City Club. This unified entity fostered connections among amateur filmmakers from various groups and laboratories: the club organised meetings, movie nights and exhibitions for the public; selected films for regional competitions; and facilitated the exchange of filmmaking experience. In addition, new filmmaking groups continued to appear at the ship repair plant, the Azov Sea Shipping Company and the fish cannery, where the amateur filmmaking studio was run by Nadiia Zaitseva.
Nobody Left Aside
Many residents of Mariupol had film cameras, but were not affiliated with filmmaking clubs. By 1972, they had access to the rapid film and photography development services at 18 Kharlampiiivska street. Thanks to these services, home movies produced by amateur filmmakers could become feature films as well as documentaries. Families, colleagues and neighbours performed in roles as actors, and became screenwriters, directors and camera operators too. Heorhii Kotelnykov, the founder of the amateur filmmaking movement in Mariupol, for example, shot films together with his friends on the coast of Azov Sea, drawing end credits on vacationers’ backs with medicinal mud. And forty years after Oleksandr Chernov’s film, Vasya Rygel protiv TsRU [Vasia Rygel against the CIA], was shot, audiences in Lviv, Mariupol, Pokrovsk and Kramatorsk were able to watch the ordinary engineer’s struggle against American agents as part of the “Home Movie Days” organised by the “Un/archiving Post/industry” project.
In 2021, an amateur filmmaker who used to work at Zhdanovvazhmash asked the Mariupol Local History Museum to lend him a movie projector so that he could screen his home movie archive at home. Unfortunately, he had no interest in donating his personal archive to the museum. Hopefully, home movie archives such as his will one day be seen by a wider public. After all, such screenings used to take place in the past, for instance in 1988, when city cinemas screened films shot by local amateur filmmakers as part of the celebrations to mark the Day of the City.
Audiences of the 1988 screening and similar events often responded with reviews, voicing issues inspired by the films and responding to what they had seen. For example, in 1988, the electrician V. Popova’s review entitled “Chtoby dushy ne pokrylis pyliu” [Lest Dust Covers Our Souls] was published in Priazovskii rabochii [The Pryazov Worker]. In her response to the film Kuda my idem? [Where Are We Going?, 1988], the reviewer furthered the discussion of ecological issues outlined in the film and she concluded her text with a call to action: as she argued, everyone should participate in the decision-making that affects Mariupol’s ecosystem. This publication points to the emergence of more critical attitudes to issues addressed by amateur filmmaking, a process that was also inspired by the greater openness that accompanied the perestroika and glasnost reforms of the late 1980s.
Translation of the review in the clipping:
“Lest Dust Covers Our Souls”
Priazovskii rabochii
(The Pryazov Worker)
Issue 223 (November 22, 1988)
Recently I happened to watch the documentary Where Are We Going? that was screened in all local cinemas. The film was shot at the Ilyich Steel and Iron Works by the well-known film enthusiasts S. Litvinenko, N. Chukhlib and Yu. Tsymbalyuk. To be honest with you, I was terrified by the image of our dust-covered city on the screen. I’m sure other viewers would have felt the same way.
Giant factories. Our famous Azovstal plant and the equally powerful Ilyich Iron and Steel Works. Tall chimneys touching the sky, spewing out grey, white and black smoke. This multi-coloured smoky fog envelops the city, as if squeezing us in its embrace.
The Kalmius river. Its waters are no longer transparent. It has become lifeless. And the sea! Our Sea of Azov, once so beautiful! Are we going to lose this miracle?! During the summer season, we sometimes get angry with visitors to the city: “Public transport is crowded, there is nothing left in the shops! It’s because of them that the sea is dirty! The city is overrun with tourists!..” But what about us? Shouldn’t we look at ourselves? It’s convenient to shift the blame onto others. The colour of our sea already resembled rusty iron this summer. Shouldn’t we feel ashamed? Or have we grown too callous to care? Seeing our city in this state is enough to make one cry.
There was a moment during the screening when I thought: “Why are they showing this film? What is it going to change? Will we start breathing fresh air tomorrow? Will the sea become cleaner?” But the important thing about the film is that it asks an important question: “Isn’t it up to us to act?” And it is up to us, both ordinary residents and local leaders like the members of our city committee, district and executive committees, as well as directors of factories and other enterprises. I am sure that townspeople will fully support the municipal authorities in their effort to protect the environment.
The film urges us not to stand to one side. At the end, we hear the following words: “Stop and think! Where are we going?” The desperation in this phrase scared me!
The film does make us stop and think. What’s next? We need to act! After all, so many things depend on us. Our city is in our hands and needs their strong and kind touch. If we do nothing, one day a layer of dust will cover our very souls.
V. POPOVA, electrician at the Zhdanovlift Specialized Construction Department.
Sources:
1. Priazovskii rabochii (The Pryazov Worker). — 1959. — November 4.
2. Priazovskii rabochii (The Pryazov Worker). — 1988. — November 22.
3. Komsomolets Donbassa (The Komsomol Youth of Donbas). — 1967. — June 29.