The Pleasures and Problems of Leonid Osyka’s Zakhar Berkut: Poetic Cinema and Its Limits

Abstract

This article discusses the aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts of Zakhar Berkut, a 1972 film by the Ukrainian director Leonid Osyka, one of the leading figures of Ukrainian poetic cinema. An ambitious adaptation of a canonical nineteenth-century historical novel by Ivan Franko, it was conceived as the first big-budget Ukrainian historical film since World War II. An unusual and controversial hybrid of poetic cinema techniques and mainstream filmmaking oriented towards a mass audience, it became the last work of Ukrainian poetic cinema released before a severe state-sponsored crackdown brought the heyday of this film school to an abrupt end.