Out of the Vault: The Enchanted Yuliya Solntseva

July 21–August 27, 2023

Presenting prints from the BAMPFA collection, this series highlights the work of Yuliya Solntseva, as both an actress and a director, including collaborations with her husband, the Ukranian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko.

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The Enchanted Desna
The Story of the Flaming Years
Poem of the Sea
Aelita, Queen of Mars

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The Story of the Flaming Years
Yuliya Solntseva
USSR, 1961
Friday, July 21 7 PM
Adapted from a script by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, The Story of the Flaming Years sets an elegiac tone for Yuliya Solnetseva’s tribute to the Ukrainian peasants’ struggle against the Nazi invaders through extraordinary montage sequences and double and triple superimpositions.
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Ukraine in Flames
Yuliya Solntseva, Yakiv Avdiienko
UkrSSR, 1943
Sunday, July 23 5 PM
This extraordinary montage film, weaving images taken by twenty-four frontline cameramen, plus captured Nazi footage, was praised by film scholar Jay Leyda as “an astonishingly personal movie . . . an inspiration to every artist who works in the documentary film.” With John Gianvito’s Fugue.
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The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom
Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky
USSR, 1924
Copresented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival
Sunday, July 30 4:30 PM
Judith Rosenberg on Piano
Yuliya Solntseva plays the eponymous tobacco vendor who unwittingly attracts the love of three men: a hapless scribe straight out of Gogol, an overstuffed American capitalist, and a wayward cinema cameraman.
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Aerograd
Oleksandr Dovzhenko
USSR, 1935
Sunday, August 6 5 PM
“Frankly operatic in its portraiture and poetic stylization, this Soviet masterpiece began as propaganda but veers closer to pagan fantasy than any of Dovzhenko’s other sound films” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader).
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Shchors
Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Yuliya Solntseva
UkrSSR, 1939
Sunday, August 13 5 PM
While Stalin commissioned this epic on the “Red Commander of the Ukraine,” Mykola Shchors, “as in all [Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s] best work, Shchors leaves in the memory burning images of death and of passionate life” (Jay Leyda). With an extract from Solntseva’s film remembrance of Dovzhenko, The Golden Gates.
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Poem of the Sea
Yuliya Solntseva
USSR, 1958
Wednesday, August 16 7 PM
“Poem of the Sea, which tells of the construction of an artificial sea, necessitating the flooding of a village, is remarkable for its confidence, grandeur and glowing beauty” (Ronald Bergan, Camera Lucida). With an extract from Solntseva’s film remembrance of Dovzhenko, The Golden Gates.
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Aelita, Queen of Mars
Yakov Protazanov
USSR, 1924
Copresented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival
Sunday, August 20 5 PM
Introduced by Booth Wilson; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
Soviets in space, as class warfare extends to Mars, in this exhilarating silent saga, a Russian Metropolis famed for its outlandish Constructivist production design. Starring Yuliya Solntseva, it is “a major early achievement in futuristic cinema” (Variety).
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Earth
Oleksandr Dovzhenko
UkrSSR, 1930
Copresented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival
Sunday, August 27 5 PM
Judith Rosenberg on Piano
“Earth is Dovzhenko’s pictorial love song to nature, a radiant canvas for flowing wheat fields, oceans of crops, and idyllic close-ups of produce and foliage” (Jeremy Carr, Senses of Cinema).
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The Enchanted Desna
Yuliya Solntseva
USSR, 1964
Free Admission
Sunday, August 27 7 PM
Based on a quasi-autobiographical script by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Yuliya Solntseva’s The Enchanted Desna was described by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as “among the most ravishingly beautiful and poetic spectacles ever made.”
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Out of the Vault: The Enchanted Yuliya Solntseva

July 21–August 27, 2023

The actress Yuliya Solntseva, best known for the steely allure of her Martian princess Aelita, was the wife of the Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko and a brilliant director in her own right. Solntseva assisted Dovzhenko on all of his classic films and, after his death in 1956, brought several of his unrealized screenplays to the screen. The films of Dovzhenko and Solntseva obviated their considerable politics in favor of visual poetry, and many of these works were paeans to the earth and sky, and the human agenda, of Dovzhenko’s native Ukraine. Dovzhenko owned his own symbology—sunflowers, apples in the rain, and ways both brutal and serene of showing the cycle of death in life. Solntseva redoubled both the sensuality and the symbolism in her work after his death. Her surreal transitions, horizontal swipes and pans, led one observer, Gilbert Adair, to coin the word horizontigo to describe their unsettling effect in widescreen.

Presenting rarely screened 35mm prints from BAMPFA’s collection, this Out of the Vault series provides an opportunity to celebrate Yuliya Solntesva as an actress and director, as well to see a selection of her collaborations with her husband, Oleksandr Dovzhenko. Prior to meeting her husband, Solntseva acted in two silent films, The Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom and Aelita, Queen of Mars. Our print of Aelita has vinegar syndrome; we are grateful to the Walker Art Center for loaning theirs. Solntseva’s last acting role was in Dovzhenko’s Earth, during which she also began assisting him on his films, including Aerograd and Shchors. We also screen Ukraine in Flames, which Solntseva codirected under the artistic supervision of Dovzhenko. Two of her own films, The Story of the Flaming Years and The Enchanted Desna, were presented in the 1969 San Francisco International Film Festival in a tribute to Dovzhenko organized by Albert Johnson. Both of our prints have some fading, particularly The Enchanted Desna, yet it retains Solntseva’s extraordinary stylistic flourishes, even in our reduction print from 70mm; we present it in a free screening. The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center in Kyiv has kindly lent us a digital copy of Poem of the Sea, which, with these two films, is part of Solntseva’s so-called Ukrainian Trilogy. We will present extracts from Solntseva’s The Golden Gates, a film of fragments. The title, taken from an unrealized novel by Dovzhenko, refers to the medieval entrance to Kyiv.

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Curated by Kathy Geritz, expanding on a 1992 series cocurated with Judy Bloch. Part of Out of the Vault, an occasional series featuring films from our collection, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. With thanks to Aliona Penzii, Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center; Patricia Ledesma Villon and Justin Ayd, Walker Art Center; Max Carpenter, guest curator, MoMI; John Gianvito; and Judith Rosenberg.