Harvard hosts U.S. premiere of long-awaited Ukrainian film about Mazepa
by Yuri Shevchuk
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - "A major achievement of the world-class level!" "Preachy, irritating, too long, unfinished ..." These two opinions sum up the Harvard audience's reception of the long-awaited and much-talked-about film "A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa" (Molytva za Hetmana Mazepu). On August 1, the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI) staged what amounted to the North American premiere of Yuri Illienko's latest film.
Students, professors and the community invited for the occasion to Jefferson Hall at Harvard University had a unique opportunity to view the first big-budget (almost $2.5 million U.S.) picture made in Ukraine since independence before "Prayer" is even released for the general viewer in Ukraine in September.
Despite the very short notice and the relative quiet of the end of summer, more than 100 viewers showed up for the screening. They were Harvard Summer School students, university instructors and academics, intellectuals and representatives of the Ukrainian American community of Greater Boston; some even drove from as far as Connecticut. The cultural background of the audience was also varied - besides Americans there were viewers from Ukraine, Canada, Poland, Italy, Belarus and Egypt.
From its very inception the film was to be a kind of cinematographic match to the emergence of independent Ukraine, the beginning of its long-awaited cultural and spiritual revival. The high stakes were matched not only by its unprecedented budget - the project was singled out for special funding by the Viktor Yushchenko government - but also by its film crew composed arguably of some of the very best Ukraine's cinema has to offer. The director-cum-cameraman Mr. Illienko is world-renowned for camerawork in "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" and his direction of "Swan Lake: The Zone," "Well for the Thirsty," "Straw Bells."
Bohdan Stupka, the principal interpreter of the role of Hetman Mazepa is a world-class actor. Other members of the cast are: Liudmyla Yefymenko (Liuba Kochubei), Mykyta Dzhyhurda (King Charles XII), Viacheslav Dovzhenko (Tsar Peter I), Viktor Demertas (Kochubei), Kateryna Lisovenko (Motria Kochubei), Pylyp Illienko (young Mazepa), Serhii Marchenko (older Mazepa).
The HUSI invited the composer of the score, Virko Baley of Las Vegas, to present the film. Mr. Baley, as if trying to pre-empt the main line of criticism and arguing with as-yet-invisible critics, warned viewers that what they were about to see was neither a historical epic nor an illustration to a history book, and not a narrative in the usual sense of the word. He could not be more right. For better or for worse, "Prayer" is like nothing else Ukrainian cinema has ever produced.
The subject Mr. Illienko has chosen concerns one of the most fascinating periods of Ukrainian and East European history, and the drama of a man of truly epic proportions. Hetman Mazepa, a man of dazzling acumen, polyglot, statesman, military leader, lover, has captured the imagination of such writers as Lord Byron, Alexander Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Juliusz Slowacki, Rainer Maria Rilke, Bertolt Brecht, to name just a few. His ill-fated attempt to exploit the opportunity of the war between Muscovy of Peter I and Sweden of Charles XII and regain the independence of Ukraine inspired generations of Ukrainian freedom fighters.
The film is based on some known historical facts: Mazepa's decision to side with the King of Sweden against Peter I, Charles and Mazepa's defeat in the Battle of Poltava, the bloody massacre of Baturyn, Mazepa's capital, by the Muscovites. Dramatic as they are, these and other events assume in Mr. Illienko's film the larger philosophical dimensions of the general Ukrainian condition. In Mr. Baley's words, they are "stations of the cross" on the way to Ukraine's crucifixion and its hoped-for resurrection. In this struggle, Mazepa becomes for Ukrainians the messenger of liberation, the promise of a regained national and human dignity. For Muscovites he is the devil incarnate, the despicable traitor.
The relations between Mazepa and Peter I are an thematic and emotional pivot of "Prayer." They go well beyond the political; the two statesmen are deeply involved emotionally. This is a particularly riveting and for some a shocking aspect of Mr. Illienko's interpretation. This emotional aspect is the key to understanding the centuries-old relationship between Ukraine and Russia. Not incidentally, love and passion in Mr. Illienko's film go together with death and decay, domination and control, humiliation and murderous insanity.
The film is construed and shot in such a way as to avoid even a hint of gratuitous entertainment. The set is deliberately made to look artificial, the costumes fake and often out of period, the blood is really paint. Its esthetic technique, its visual and acoustic arsenals are designed to shock, to antagonize, to revolt, to make the viewer not just register the action on the silver screen but literally to suffer it, to experience every moment of the at times seemingly endless 152 minutes of the footage. Small wonder that those who expected to be entertained were in for a cruel disappointment. Yet one can argue that for the Ukrainian viewers the desperate need to escape from the grim everyday reality into Hollywood-style pure entertainment does not override the desire to understand exactly why Ukrainians seem so doomed to relive the same national failure over and over again.
Obviously Mr. Illienko could not care less about pure entertainment. Hence the accusation of the "almost amateurish disregard for audience sensibilities" leveled against the director by the magazine Variety, the influential U.S. film-industry mouthpiece. It seems as if the director seeks to employ every means at his disposal in order to antagonize and provoke his viewer into major soul-searching; not to offer him the shallow satisfaction of a proverbial happy ending, but to leave him perturbed, revolted even disgusted. Has Mr. Illienko succeeded in this?
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 25, 2002, No. 34, Vol. LXX
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