Dovzhenko Film: The Eve of Ivan Kupalo (1968) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Dovzhenko Film Studios

Ukrainian born novelist and short-story writer Nikolai Gogol is synonymous with Soviet, American and contemporary Russian as well as Ukrainian horror with his story Viy adapted numerous times for the screen including Italy into Black Sunday as well as Russia before becoming a 3D film in the mid-2010s.  The author of everything from The Lost Letter, The Night Before Christmas, Taras Bulba and Dead Souls, Gogol’s works invariably fueled an entire subgenre of Soviet era films both Russian as well as Ukrainian such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and were steeped in cultural folklore, iconography and amassed well over 130 films.  Compared to Edgar Allan Poe for his use of realism and name dropped in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Gogol’s works continue to inspire film adaptations on both sides of the border and even further branched out into South Korea at one point. 

 
Around the 1830s came Evenings on a Farm in Dikanka from which the short story The Eve of Ivan Kupalo originated.  The second story in the text, it was a surreal Faustian horror tale of sorts about a poor farmhand who makes a pact with a demon to ensure marriage to the woman he loves who also happens to be his employer’s daughter.  Steeped in gastronomic Ukrainian customs including complex wedding rites and a demonic gift floating down a river, the story which begins as a romantic comedy that eventually ends up in horror served as a primary influence on the 1940 Walt Disney film Fantasia with elements shaping the design of the Night on Bald Mountain sequence concluding the film.  As with many Gogol tales, it was ripe for screen interpretation and around the mid-1960s a formal Ukrainian film adaptation would gradually take shape.

 
Beginning with the emergence of the Ukrainian poetic cinema movement, the quintessential screen example came in the form of Georgian-Armenian born experimental filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a Dovzhenko Film production whose elliptical and fleeting imagery of the Ukrainian avant-garde still haunts cinema screens to this day.  Kicking off a whole movement that found itself in a Sisyphean battle against Soviet censorship, one of the characteristics of Parajanov’s phantasmagorical film that still hammers home Ukrainian iconography and cultural customs is Yuri Ilyenko’s striking, hyperkinetic and at times hallucinatory cinematography.  With camerawork so alive and full of movement akin to the works of Mikhail Kalatozov or, decades later, Gerald Kargl, it signified the distinctive look that would define Parajanov’s epic of Ukrainian magical realism. 

 
Now that same year as Parajanov’s film, Yuri Ilyenko decided to break into film directing as well with the Soviet surrealist film A Spring for the Thirsty.  Due to censorship from the then-Communist Party of Ukraine, it was never released until 1987 some twenty-two years later.  Eventually named the 21^st Best Ukrainian Film ever by the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre, the uphill battle of releasing A Spring for the Thirsty didn’t deter Ilyenko from mounting his next project three years later: an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s St. John’s Eve from Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka i.e. The Eve of Ivan Kupalo.  A Sovscope 2.35:1 widescreen magical realist fantasy-horror film lensed by Chasing Two Hares cinematographer Vadim Ilyenko with an evocative atmospheric score by Leonid Grabovskiy, it functioned both as a romantic dramedy-horror film as well as an embroidery-like tapestry of Ukrainian mythology and spiritualism. 

 
Now as with A Spring for the Thirsty the film was withheld from release until decades later in 1989 but nevertheless was met with glowing reception when it was first unveiled.  Called by film critic John Powers ‘one of the four or five most visually amazing movies I’ve seen’ and further cited by filmmaker Robert Eggers as a primary influence on his film version of Nosferatu, it is not unlike Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors a sensorily overwhelming audiovisual experience.  Rarely seen outside of its country of origin it is an overwhelming whirlwind of Ukrainian surrealist imagery that unfolds like an ancient puzzle of folk horror.  In recent years however, thanks to the Dovzhenko Film Centre and to film producer and son Pylyp Ilyenko, 35mm prints have begun touring the United States while a new digitally restored widescreen master has been uploaded to the Dovzhenko website for rental.  Looking at it now, it is one of the unsung triumphs of Soviet Ukrainian era poetic romantic folk horror with a Faustian leaning.  As with Parajanov’s film shot by Ilyenko, it unfolds like a blustery dream blowing through you with its Earthy village imagery of Ukrainian life and as such it takes you on a distinctive folk horror journey.

--Andrew Kotwicki