Opaque Patterns of Cultural Trauma: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the 1960s

• Applicant: Dr. Olga Briukhovetska, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558423102

This project offers a novel interpretation of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the 1960s through the lens of cultural trauma. It argues that this significant yet under-researched cinematic movement served as a symbolic channel for processing repressed traumatic experiences, obliquely addressing major violent events of the early 20th century erased from official Soviet discourse. Scholars have predominantly viewed Ukrainian Poetic Cinema's formalist approach and unconventional storytelling as a means of creating a distinctly Ukrainian space on Soviet screens. Without rejecting the framework of national identity, this project expands this understanding, positing that these films reveal a deeply traumatized community whose wounds were neither healed nor acknowledged, thus challenging official narratives in more profound ways than previously recognized. This study hypothesizes that Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the 1960s employed poetic ambiguity for anticipatory construction of cultural trauma, while simultaneously performing its inherent opaqueness. Through close textual analysis of verbal and non-verbal elements, with emphasis on the latter, the project identifies patterns indicative of traumatic experience. Preliminary research has revealed three such patterns: 'slow violence,' 'dissociative dispositive,' and 'embodied witnessing.' 'Slow violence' refers to prolonged dying that defines or even subverts each film's narrative. The 'dissociative dispositive' encompasses subject positioning mechanisms reflecting traumatic dissociation. 'Embodied witnessing' pertains to non-professional actors serving as living testimony to a silenced traumatic past. This novel approach illuminates the complex interplay of aesthetics, politics, and collective suffering, deepening our understanding of these films. By developing this novel interpretation of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the 1960s, this project has significant potential to contribute to three key areas: 1) film studies, by exploring cinema's unique ability to visualize complex social and psychic processes; 2) Ukrainian cultural history, by illuminating the complex interplay between artistic expression and socio-political repression; and 3) trauma studies, by introducing a new case study of anticipatory cultural trauma construction.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position