Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans Film Series presents a film screening of WHITE BIRD WITH A BLACK MARK (Bilyi Ptakh z Chornoyu Oznakoyu)
Ukrainian SSR, 1970. 99 minutes. DCP. Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Center, Kyiv.
Directed by Yuri Ilyenko
on Saturday, January 20, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
Humanities Quadrangle, Screening Room L01
320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Free and open to the public | All films will be shown with English subtitles
Ilyenko’s landmark film follows the Zvonars, a family of poor musicians, as personal and geopolitical crises, including partisan warfare, collide across the course of the tumultuous 1940s. Set in the region of
Bukovina, on the border between Ukraine and Romania, Ilyenko’s folkloric vision produces one of the greatest works of the Ukrainian poetic cinema movement.
Sponsors:
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program; European Studies Council; Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Film Archive; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; and Film and Media Studies Program
About the Film Series: In the aftermath of World War II, several European states started reconstructing and reimagining their identities and recent histories by producing a vast number of films that celebrated and commemorated their guerrilla struggles against fascism. These films ranged in scope and ambition from intimate psychological dramas to overblown military spectacles, from elegiac recollections to pure pulp fiction. Similar to Hollywood westerns, partisan films were the defining genre of the socialist film industry for a significant period. Moreover, in the late 60s and early 70s, both genres reinvented themselves and underwent a political revision that ended their respective “classical periods.” Despite being hugely successful in their domestic markets and often cinematically accomplished, many examples of the partisan films never traveled abroad, and most film prints today remain locked up and in dire need of preservation in various national film archives. Aside from a handful of canonical works, the majority of films we will screen have never been shown in the U.S.