Good morning 🐣

Art has always played an important role in war…

It can be used to help start wars, such as the infamous German propaganda films by Leni Riefenstahl, or to lampoon those who warmonger, such as Charlie Chaplin’s comedy classic, “The Great Dictator.”

It can be a major target during war, being either looted and sold on the black market or purposefully destroyed, as seen by the Taliban’s destruction of the massive Buddhas of Bamiyan.

And it can be made long after the final bullet has landed, as a way of processing the horror. (See above, Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” and below, a panel from Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, “Maus”)

In fact in the twenty or so years I’ve attended Comic-Con in San Diego, amidst all the superheroes, anime, and “Star Wars” cosplay, one of the very best panels I ever saw was “Art and the Holocaust.” You can actually view subsequent versions of it on YouTube from the 2020 and 2021 virtual editions of the convention. A survivor of that horror was able to give context to the art created before, during, and after the genocide.

And history — as always — repeats itself…

Located halfway between Kyiv and Chornobyl is the town of Ivankiv, Ukraine.

Population: ten and a half thousand.

Their Historical and Local History Museum was built at a medieval archaeological site and has featured exhibits on Chornobyl, Afghanistan, and World War II alongside natural science specimens and ancient relics.

Some of its crown jewels though are works by the local folk artists Maria Prymachenko and Hanna Veres.

Hanna Veres (1928 – 2003) belonged to a family of artists that passed down their knowledge from generation to generation. Her mother taught her and she in turn taught her own daughters. Veres specialized in textiles, especially embroidery, and became a national treasure in a country that places great value on such art. (Decorative towels and cloth, called rushnyk, are apparently given as gifts at significant life moments in Ukraine, including weddings.) She was awarded the Shevchenko National Prize in 1968, the highest award in Ukraine for the arts, and her work, as seen above, was exhibited in Toronto and Montreal. Two Ukrainian films — “Lyada” (1974) and “A Flax Blooms” (1980) — were even dedicated to her.

Maria Prymachenko (1909 – 1997) was a self-taught artist known for her bold colors and expressive style with references to the countryside and fairy tales, as seen above and in the following paintings. Polio at a young age affected her physically for years until two operations in Kyiv finally allowed her to stand on her own. When war came to Europe in 1939, she lost her partner and her brother. But like Veres, Prymachenko went on to foster a multigenerational family of artists and was awarded the Shevchenko National Prize. Many of her works explicitly advocate for peace, especially in the face of nuclear war. Before the war, she received a gold medal for her work at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, where it is said that Pablo Picasso called her “an artistic miracle.” You can find more of Prymachenko’s work on WikiArt.

In the beginning of March, near the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum had been destroyed in a fire started by the Russian attacks. It was thought that twenty-five of Prymachenko’s works had been lost forever, but it was later reported that local residents saved at least some of these pieces. No word on the fates of Veres’ art or anything else that was housed in the museum.

A month or so later, as Russian soldiers continued to devastate the country with complete disregard for human life or dignity, 84-year-old artist Lyubov Panchenko was pulled from her home in Bucha when it was hit by shelling. She was already weak from her hunger strike in protest of the invasion and soon died. An artist and fashion designer, Panchenko was a member of the Ukrainian Women’s Union in the ’60s and a part of the Sixtiers, a group dedicated to reviving Ukrainian culture and language after it had been suppressed by the Soviet Union. She was strongly outspoken against totalitarianism, defied the KGB, and raised money to help political prisoners serving sentences for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” You can find more of Panchenko’s work and other members of the Sixtiers on the Ukrainian Institute’s site.

As Russian soldiers loot and destroy museums and other cultural centers, curators and librarians rush to save Ukrainian (and ironically in some cases even Russian) cultural heritage. Movie studios refuse to release their films in Russia or do business there. And people debate whether Russian filmmakers and their works, though not directly involved in their government’s war, should be excluded from the broader global film community.

Ukrainian writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets spoke with Gal Beckerman at The Atlantic about what it means to make art during wartime:

War is happening — not only war but war crimes, some that seem impossible to describe, people killed in such incredible masses, people who are innocent. When stuff like this is happening, society begins to polarize, which is absolutely natural. And patriotism grows. But artists have this power to stay critical, clear, ironic, even in these kinds of moments — to save this possibility of critical vision and understanding.

Now watch this 👀

“Donbass” is set in the mid-2010s, when Russian-backed separatists declared independence from Ukraine in the country’s far eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, an area that is still drawing the greatest concentration of fighting in the current war. Though a work of dark satirical fiction, the film is partly inspired by and even directly quotes from real amateur videos, guiding us through a series of over a dozen vignettes, each leading into the next.

We begin with a group of crisis actors preparing for their latest round of Russian propaganda, then move onto scenes of bureaucratic lies and disdain, soldiers on the front lines, extortion, and family divisions. It sounds bleak, but it’s an amazing film, showing the war from so many diverse angles. It gives us an intimate look at a pained and outraged crowd as they verbally and physically assault a Ukrainian prisoner of war, followed by a sham wedding under the new state of Novorossiya. The “bride” and “groom” step on an aforementioned embroidered rushnyk, laughing all the way, as their comrades wave separatist flags that look eerily like the old Confederate battle flag flown during the U.S. Civil War. While the people suffer on both sides, the so-called revolutionary leadership shrugs.

On demand at Laemmle Virtual Cinema • Watch the trailer on YouTube

Adapting her own original play, Natalya Vorozhbyt’s “Bad Roads” is composed of four short stories also set in the same time and place as the previous film:

1. a drunk school principal drives up to a military checkpoint and is unsure which side is even manning it;

2. three teenage girls are waiting at a bus stop for their soldier boyfriends to come home, shot almost entirely at dusk in silhouette;

3. a hard-to-watch segment involving a female journalist taken captive by a soldier; and

4. a slightly surreal story in which a woman runs over a poor rural couple’s chicken and tries to make it up to them.

It too deals with the intense power of propaganda and the lingering tension waiting to spill into violence.

On demand at Laemmle Virtual Cinema and streaming at Film Movement • Watch the trailer on YouTube

Lastly, I’d be remiss not to mention the TV sitcom “Servant of the People” and not just because it stars the current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who plays a high school teacher whose private rants about government corruption are surreptitiously filmed by his students and blow up on social media, causing him to be unexpectedly voted into the highest office. As the newly elected President of Ukraine, Zelenskyy’s character tries to run the country and clean it up while fending off the oligarchs. The show was a hit not just in Ukraine, but Russia and beyond, and it’s easy to see why: it’s really good! It’s funny and biting.

In one episode, he’s educated on how to greet world leaders, who are played by stand-in actors. When the stand-in for Russia’s Vladimir Putin walks in, Zelenskyy stands up like he does for all the rest, but the Prime Minister says, “Why is Putin here? Putin, beat it! Make it snappy! Quick! I don’t want to see you again.” He’s followed by the stand-in for Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus. Zelenskyy starts to stand, but the Prime Minister says, “No need to get up.”

There are even fantasy scenes where Ancient Greek scholars talk about him, or he has a conversation with Abraham Lincoln. It’s silly, but like the other two films, it provides a window into the Ukrainian spirit and fight for something better even when surrounded by so much bullshit.

Streaming on Netflix and for free on YouTube

Until next time! 👋

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