Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s experiment in film pedagogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines a little-known experiment in film pedagogy by Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, before the beginning of the German-Soviet war (1941–1945, called ‘Great Patriotic War’ in the Soviet Union), in addition to shooting his own films, Dovzhenko attempted to organise and conduct comprehensive training of film production personnel directly on site, at the Kyiv Film Factory (Kyiv Film Studio of Feature Films, now Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Studio of Feature Films). In the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the Party administrative apparatus strictly controlled not only the filming and distribution of films, but also the training of future personnel for film production: film directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, film actors, etc. Dovzhenko’s experiment in film pedagogy made a distinct contribution to nurturing Ukrainian actors for sound-era cinema, fluent in Ukrainian and immersed in Ukrainian culture, despite the wider context of Soviet repression, especially in Ukraine. The article uses sources from a number of archives in Ukraine and Russia, memoirs and rare period publications to reconstruct this episode in Dovzhenko’s career and grant an insight into his pedagogical practice and approach to film acting.