Say it ain’t so, Joe… Congratulations on Your Promotion (1932)/In Spring (1929), Silent Film Days Bonn 2023

S. Pel’tik

This year’s festival announced its support for Ukraine and included a number of films made when the country was part of the USSR during the early days of Stalin’s reign. These two were made during his first five-year plan a time of increasing hardship with forced collectivisation and a continuation of the “Dekulakization” of the countryside – forcing the so-called “wealthier” farmers off their land. There were thousands of revolts against the process but all were suppressed and thousands died in the process as the Moscow government prioritised Ukrainian grain for export and not domestic consumption with a famine, the Holodomor, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands a day*…

So, it’s against this backdrop that we have to view any films made during this period, one that is just part of the ongoing struggle between Russia and the Ukraine.

Congratulations on Your Promotion (1932), with Meg Morley

Directed by Їvha Hryhorovych, the only Ukraine-based woman directing films during this period, others having gone to Moscow, this film is a remarkably accomplished study of women and children in a school trying to balance education with the Communist Party’s stipulations about extra-curricular activity.

A. Zajčenko

Hryhorovych graduated from the VUFKU Odesa Film School in 1928, and her independent filmmaking career began in 1929, at a time when the USSR government decided on priority production of agitprop and educational films in support of collectivisation and industrialisation. Every film made during this time was heavily reviewed and censored . Compulsory primary education was introduced in 1930 aimed at "educating a generation capable of ultimate establishment of communism" and the regional soviet government decided on setting up a children’s film section of the Ukrainfilm production company.

This was the backdrop for Hryhorovych’s Congratulations on Your Promotion (1932), for which she also wrote the script promoting the Soviet educational reform and the polytechnicization of school education. Despite of this tight brief, she manages to make an emotionally satisfying film that is full of rich characters whose main concern is each other. This is not a didactic film but one that examines how positive process can be made, fulfilling the criteria set but not ignoring the difficulty of the project and the joys of understanding, patience and collaboration.

We begin with two children taking advantage of a sunny day after school, Alyosha (A. Zajčenko), “a passionate fisherman…” and Katya (V. Javorskaja) who, as we shall learn, likes to stick her nose into other people’s business… A third, Vanya (S. Pel’tik) is in a nearby shed, inventing things, his nickname is “Edison” and it is fascinating in itself that the great patent collector’s fame had spread so far and persisted.

The friendly face of collectivisation: K. Dombrovskaja

At school, this inventor is struggling as the Headmistress Nina Petrovna (M. Sidorova) makes clear and outside of school, he is a member of the Pioneer Organization of Ukraine, an organisation for Soviet Ukrainian children aged 10 to 15. The leader (K. Dombrovskaja), who I think is Alyosha’s mother, can also see his dissatisfaction as they head out to help count the grain.

 

He's a lazybones, he neglects his studies and the extra work!

Vanya takes off and the Pioneers discuss it, Alyosha suggesting he needs help with his work whilst Katya is more forthright.  Vanya takes a jump into the river and causes concerned teacher Akim Avanovich (A. Charlamov) to make sure that he’s alright, the lad was just taking a break from the Pioneers but the two talk and the old man realises he needs some help.

Katya disapproves of what she sees as favouritism and when she is humiliated in class by teacher Akim – who proves she doesn’t know all of the answers – she bites back, accusing him of being “old fashioned” in an article penned in her exercise book: “this is not a pre-revolutionary school… nowadays you should teach the children something rather than expelling them from class…” Katya, of course, wasn’t even born before the revolution.

V. Javorskaja, showing Katya's nosiness

She falls out with everyone and spies on Vanya at Akim’s house but what she doesn’t know is that the boy is demonstrating an idea he has for mechanising farming, exactly what Stalin ordered. Akim’s offers to help but stresses that the youngster needs to learn the basics as well and support the Pioneers if he’s to be a man…

 

Even visionaries need to work hard and collectively. Vanya has left the Pioneers but he comes to realise the value of collaboration as do they all…

 

Meg Morley accompanied with lines that merged seamlessly with the dialectic whilst also recognising the collective’s dramatic tension and the passion of children upon whom the whole future was to rest. There was something deeper too as none of us can really watch a film of this situation without considering the outcomes…

 

In Spring (1929), with Misha Kalinin and Roksana Smirnova

In Spring (1929) was based in and around a Kyiv earlier in the period of forced collectivisation/industrialisation and was following a lighter propagandist remit to Hryhorovych. Filmmaker Mikhail Kaufman’s fast-paced spectacle shows the people as much as the landscape and the industry and their spirit says everything both historically and in terms of the daily lives. The work is as hard as it ever was and yet there’s joy amongst the enterprise and cycle-riding, sometimes backwards too.

 

Kaufman was Dziga Vertov’s brother and had been cameraman on Man with a Movie Camera; the two falling out over the final cut. Here he shows the same deft touches, the ability to make connections and convey dozens of micro-narratives within an over-arching “symphony” of the city and surrounds. The angles are acute, the cutting highly energised and the overall effect is remarkable focused on the one city. Man With a Movie Camera covered four cities, Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv and Moscow, and there’s definitely more of a narrative coherence here, as the city wakes up from Winter slowly and with no little effort.

Writing in Sight and Sound, Pamela Hutchinson quoted a number of very positive contemporary reviews including this from Mykhailo Makotynskyi, the president of the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration, “If I were a poet, I would have written lyrics for this movie… I have watched hundreds of thousands of metres, but I’ve never felt anything similar to this impression.”

 

I’d previously seen the Ukrainian musicians Roksana Smirnova and Misha Kalinin accompanying this film at Hippfest earlier this year. Now, as then, they created a deceptively spaced soundscape interchanging leading lines between Roksana’s piano and Misha’s effects-laden guitar. The connection between the modern invention and the century old film not only served the traditional purpose of accompaniment but obviously re-contextualised the essential continuities of a society now under so much threat. A heartfelt, beautiful and moving act of connection and, as the Bonn Festival stated, we are all as one with Ukraine even lacking these musician’s personal connection.

 

* A 2015 study from the Ukrainian Institute of Demographic and Social Studies, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, estimated around 3.9 million Ukrainians died during the Holodomor of 1932-33.