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| Images courtesy of Mosfilm |
While actress and film director Yuliya Solntseva was
undeniably Russian, her husband and creative partner was Ukrainian film
directing titan Aleksandr Dovzhenko and initially they began as wartime
documentary filmmakers with 1943’s Ukraine in Flames before mounting her
first standalone feature as a director with 1958’s Poem of the Sea. A 35mm production that is regarded as the
first of what would or wouldn’t become the director’s ‘Ukrainian Trilogy’, it
was intended to be a Dovzhenko film but he passed away in 1956 right before
cameras were set to begin rolling leaving the duties up to his widow
Solntseva. Working from Dovzhenko’s
preproduction notes and sketches, she rose to the occasion and three years
later would make not only Soviet but global cinema history with her Cannes Film
Festival award winning favorite Chronicle of Flaming Years.
It is 1941 and the Great Patriotic War has begun with Ivan
Orlyuk (Nikolay Vingranovskiy) a kolkhoz farmer from the Dnieper region drafted
into the army to engage in fierce battles on the Dnieper River front. Largely told from his first-person
point-of-view perspective, he endures a great many hardships including but not
limited to slain comrades in the heat of battle, Nazi occupied Ukraine, a
burned village and a life-threatening injury he barely survives. However, after an intense endurance including
but not limited to the massacre of a school classroom by the Nazis, Ivan
eventually makes his way to Berlin. When
victory is declared, Ivan returns home to meet his fiancée Ulyana (Svetlana
Zhgun), leading them towards involvement in the liberated land’s first sowing.
Phantasmagorical, confrontational and often technically
astounding, Chronicle of Flaming Years made cinema history by being the
very first Sovscope 70mm film made in the Soviet Union and it’s director Yuliya
Solntseva became the very first woman to win the Best Director prize at Cannes
1961. Co-written by Aleksandr Dovzhenko
and eventual War and Peace director Sergei Bondarchuk who provides
omniscient voiceover narration, the experience of Chronicle of Flaming Years
is a sensorily overwhelming one from sight to sound. Lensed in 2.20:1 65mm by two cinematographers
Fyodor Provorov (Viy) and Aleksei Temerin (The Enchanted Desna),
the vistas unfolding of battle and eventual liberated landscape are jaw
dropping in scope. Then you have The
Enchanted Desna composer Gavriil Popov’s sweeping score which gives
Solntseva’s project a David Lean kind of grandeur.
An ensemble piece interspersing many characters and actors
including on the battlefield, in the classroom and in SS uniforms, the film
eventually boils down to Nikolay Vingranovskiy as our central protagonist
navigating the war torn landscapes in Ukraine.
Equally strong in the supporting role is Svetlana Zhgun who becomes the
love of Ivan’s life. Co-starring Boris
Andreyev the hero of Ilya Muromets as well as A Big Family actor
Sergei Lukyanov and The Cranes Are Flying actor Vasiliy Merkurev, Chronicle
of Flaming Years though largely trained on Vingranovskiy nevertheless
becomes something of a saga. Mostly
though, the eyes of Solntseva and her two cameramen are the real stars of this
opulent 70mm war epic with the camera itself pulling off astonishing technical
feats. Take for instance a scene early
on of a soldier getting wounded in battle and going into shell shock. As he nears towards the camera, it begins
spinning while he remains frozen in frame and it does not appear to be an
optical effect. Chronicle of Flaming
Years is loaded with eye-defying imagery that ranks among the best 65mm
photography ever done in the history of the format.
Released in Soviet 70mm cinemas in May 1961 before
eventually making it’s way to the United Kingdom as a special Cinerama
presentation that ran theatrically for as long as five weeks, Chronicle of
Flaming Years was an almost instantaneous critical and commercial
success. A triumph of big-screen
filmmaking which gives viewers an insight into what life was like during and
after the Second World War on the grounds of Ukraine near the Dnieper
River. Sprawling and grandiose yet
intimate and focused on two principal characters navigating the Hell and
horrors of war back into ordinary rural life again, the film finally did see a
limited United States premiere around 2017 at the Museum of the Moving Image as
part of a retrospective encompassing Poem of the Sea and The
Enchanted Desna yet home video distribution here remains up in the
air. Perhaps Criterion or Deaf Crocodile
can turn this around so filmgoers from all over the world can see one of the
greatest Eastern European female filmmakers who ever lived arguably at her
artistic peak here.
--Andrew Kotwicki
