A A labor of love, Ihor Ivanko’s documentary pays tribute to his grandfather Leonid Burlaka, a prolific Ukrainian cameraman during the golden age of Soviet cinema. Having inherited his love of images from Burlaka, Ivanko stumbles upon another heirloom when he discovers reels of undeveloped film at his grandparents’ summer house. These forgotten treasures bear the traces of Burlaka’s life and the remnants of a bygone era of film.
Many of these black-and-white photographs are discolored and damaged, leaving suggestive swirls and patterns; in close-up, these imperfections evoke a form of visual map that bears the marks of time. Through this beautiful archive, we get a glimpse of Burlaka as a student at Moscow’s prestigious VGIK film school, and later as a cameraman on various film sets, including the 1979 TV hit The meeting place cannot be changedThe strikingly handsome man in these fading images has an athletic figure and seems a world away from the older Burlaka, who is now struggling with the onset of dementia.
Film then becomes a means of preserving history on both a personal and collective level. Burlaka’s work for Odesa Film Studio between the 1960s and 1980s encapsulates a unique period in Soviet cinema; paradoxically, these films were made under strict ideological conditions, but they also represented a boom in large-scale domestic production in the region. As a material, however, film is no less fragile than human memory; it too is susceptible to decay and loss. Ivanko’s documentary begins as a portrait of one man, but broadens its horizons to emphasize the importance of film preservation. The survival of a work of art can promise not only the immortality of its creator, but also the continuation of a culture.