The Christmas break is a good time for many to spend on films and television. In August, I wrote about Ukrainian films in the Klassiki collection. Today, I’ll look briefly at Ukrainian films in Box of Broadcasts.
Box of Broadcasts, which comes from Learning on Screen, provides an incredible archive of programmes shown on UK television over the last 50 years. (Do note, though, that it can only be accessed within the UK)
My colleague Dr Kristin Williams, the Head of the UL’s Japanese and Korean Section, had inspired me by making playlists, accessible to all BoB account-holders, of Korean and Japanese films (see more about these here). BoB is not the easiest resource to search, which is a shame given its treasures. There is an advanced search option which looks like this:
While you can do searches like Ukrain* to get results for Ukraine/Ukrainian, etc, the only options to deal with the large number of results you then get are to sort them by relevance or newest or oldest or title – you can’t specify film, for example. So Kristin had advised me to look for specific name of directors and actors instead, and deal as best I could with varieties of possible forms and transliterations of names. Well, I have at least made a start!
First, please log into Box of Broadcasts. You will need to use this link, then find and select University of Cambridge (and then follow the instructions to set up an account, if you are using BoB for the first time). You can then use the link here ( https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/playlists/367026) to access the list I’ve started, called Ukrainian films and filmmaking. It is short, but not for lack of some effort. I tried looking up the films and filmmakers previously featured at the long-standing Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film organised by Cambridge Ukrainian Studies – you can see their page about the festival here – and I’ve used lists of films about Ukraine like this one from earlier this year, but all with very little success.
I suppose it shows that these TV channels need to include far more original Ukrainian material in their programming, and I hope they will. In the meantime, the list is currently made up of the following films made by Ukrainian directors or Ukrainian film studios or about Ukraine or set in Ukraine.
- Arsenal / Oleksandr Dovzhenko
- Arena: Kino Perestroika (featuring Kira Muratova and Sergei Paradzhanov)
- Man with a Movie Camera / Dziga Vertov
- In the Fog / Serhii Loznytsia
- Maidan / Serhii Loznytsia
- Battleship Potemkin / Sergei Eisenstein
- Olga / Elie Grappe
- Storyville: The Earth Is Blue as an Orange
It is obviously not a large haul for quite a lot of searching, but I hope it will give some BoB users some useful options. If readers happen upon others to add, do please let me know at slavonic@lib.cam.ac.uk Thank you!
Mel Bach
europeancollections.wordpress.com 