Filming the Female Body in Contemporary Ukrainian War Feature Films

• In Event: Struggle for Liberation: Perception of the Russo-Ukrainian War in Ukraine

Abstract

My contribution to the proposed panel will analyze three recent Ukrainian feature films that focus on the war experiences of Ukrainian women: Natalka Vorozhbyt’s Bad Roads (2020), Maryna Gorbach’s Klondike (2022), and Maksym Nakonechny’s The Butterfly Vision (2023). These films have not only established their filmmakers as important commentators on Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine but also attracted significant international attention to the power of contemporary Ukrainian cinema and its ability to capture the apocalyptic nature of the ongoing war without forcing any overly gruesome visuals of violence and destruction on the audience. In my analysis, I will pay particular attention to the filmmaker’s representations of their heroine’s bodies. For my theoretical framework, I will use Kate McLoughlin’s concept of “parapolemics,” a representational strategy that focuses on the “outskirts” of armed conflict and often relies on a synecdochic type of portrayal—a portrayal based on the part-to-the-whole principles of signification. While positioning the dead body as a paramount symbol of a larger conflict, McLoughlin also argues that the surviving body is actually more effective in reporting war and its experience than the corpse because it is endowed with a voice that offers unique interpretations to the events inscribed on it by war. As I will argue in my paper, Vorozhbyt’s, Gorbach’s, and Nakonechny’s representations of their heroines’ bodies are apt illustrations of McLoughlin’s latter claim, which the three Ukrainian filmmakers also use to revise and reconfigure the traditional Ukrainian models of martyrdom crystalized through the images of violated, docile, or self-sacrificing women and their bodies. Not only do their heroines’ bodies and their stories serve as gripping records of unforgettable experiences of outrage, fear, pain, and suffering in the war zone, but they also offer a way to reimagine the transformative experience of a wide range of encounters, exchanges, and entanglements among Ukrainian peoples from different backgrounds that are taking place during the ongoing war and are destined to have lasting cultural, social, and political effects.

Author

• Yuliya V. Ladygina, Pennsylvania State U