Global Bipolarity, Multiple-Versioning, and Provenance Uncertainty: Recuperation of a Soviet-Ukrainian Documentary Catalog from the VCR

A Works-in-Progress talk with Nicholas Avedisian-Cohen and Anna Sidun

This case study reports on a fruitful recent foray into the film archive. It explains the description and arrangement of a series of Ukrainian documentaries from the 1970s and 1980s, leading up to and during Perestroika. The discovery of these Soviet films in a North American repository is timely in the current geopolitical moment, when so many episodes out of the Cold War seem to be being restaged.

These documentaries may appear even more intriguing to historians of non-fiction film working with film archives because of what can be gleaned about their provenance, reflecting obscure routes of transnational circulation in the non-fiction film market.

As transnational records they also present a complex and still murky history of re-versioning: documentaries shot in the Soviet Ukraine by a film studio in Kiev, with spoken Ukrainian dialogue, developed as composite prints in Russian laboratories, and then exported with an added audio track of English-language narration literally speaking over the original, dimmed, Ukrainian. Our presentation showcases recently digitized excerpts from some of this documentary catalog and narrates how the material has been approached within the contemporary historical and political climate.

About the speakers

Nicholas Avedisian-Cohen is an archivist and researcher with Archive/CounterArchive, an inter-institutional initiative to preserve Canada's audiovisual heritage. He has worked at Yale Film Archive, the Hugh Hefner Moving Image Archive at USC, the Echo Park Film Center, the Paley Center for Media, and the Eye filmmuseum Nederlands amongst other heritage institutions.

Anna Sidun (she/they) is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History and Film Studies at Concordia University in Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). They moved to Canada from Ukraine and hold a prior degree in Education. Their work has been published in CUJAH, Concordia’s undergraduate journal of art history.

About the series

The Works-in-Progress (WIP) series is meant to showcase new and developing projects by members of the Fine Arts graduate community and beyond, creating a space for interdisciplinary critique and feedback. Encouraging the engagement of workshop participants, the emphasis is on research methodologies and future directions. We aim to create a space for alternative methodologies and practices, investigating research trends in the humanities such as visual anthropology, digital ethnography, field recording and sound experiments, approaches to information technologies, and other on the ground research practices.

About the VCR

The Visual Collections Repository (VCR) supports research and teaching for the Faculty of Fine Arts by providing visual resources, media services, programming and training opportunities for students, faculty and researchers.