Leonid Osyka – Kaminnyy khrest AKA The Stone Cross (1968)

Quote:
The Stone Cross (Kaminnyi khrest, 1968), based on two short stories (“The Stone Cross” and “The Thief,” both published in 1900) by Galician novelist Vasyl’ Stefanyk. The Russified Osyka initially proposed an adaptation of an Andrei Platonov story, but Tsvirkunov reportedly told Osyka, “In Ukraine we have our own Platonov, one who is closer to us.” Thereafter, the director found a Russian translation of Stefanyk, coincidentally with commentary by Platonov, believing that with this he had found the “Ukrainian Platonov.” Having discussed Stefanyk’s significance for Ukrainian culture with Osyka, Drach then agreed to write the screenplay. Stefanyk’s oeuvre included 59 short stories, many of them only a few pages long, and which attempted at a description of “slice of life” events in the lives of poor Galician peasants. With his extensive merging of dialect with literary Ukrainian, Stefanyk became an ideal author to adapt in light of the success with this method in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Drach’s narrative merge of “The Stone Cross” with “The Thief” with the same protagonist of Ivan Didukh attempted at a more complete literary form than Stefanyk had originally established with them. Yet, as was Osyka’s penchant for stylistic eclecticism, the two stories remain noticeably cut off from each other. The overarching narrative, however, tells of an impoverished Galician peasant, who is forced in his old age to leave his home and set out with his children for Canada in search of work. The bulk of the story deals with his going away party, at which his entire village makes an appearance. In this first scene, taken from “The Thief,” Didukh discovers a thief in his barn, whom he stabs in the leg with a pitchfork before inviting him to drink with his neighbor. After drinking and discussing the contemporary state of politics and the reasons for Ukrainians leaving their native land, Didukh beats the thief to death. The going-away party is less realist in style, incorporating local song and other elements of ethnographic spectacle and local ritual, as a mobile camera surveys the guests wishing Ivan farewell. As the Didukh family prepares to leave at the end of the party, they change out of their “native” clothing into urban formalwear. The film ends as they pass a stone cross on a hillside.

As was now a standard-bearer of “Ukrainian poetic cinema,” Osyka shot the film in Stefanyk’s native Pokuttia village of Rusiv, using actual residents as extras. In a language that should be familiar, Ukrianian critic Liudmila Lemesheva wrote, “Stefanyk’s fellow countrymen did not perform in this film, but seemingly continued to live their ordinary lives.” In The Stone Cross, Lemesheva posited, “Life, seen and constructed according to artistic rules, coincided with real life.” Yet, as with the claim that associated contemporary Hutsuls with those represented in Shadows, authorities would have been hesitant to agree with such a trans-historical claim because it denied the principle of development. As the Hutsul who wrote to Novyny kinoekrana (cited in Chapter 4) implied, these images were “not us.” Although Lemesheva probably did not intend to imply this, but in her affirmation of the collision of the “constructed” and the “real,” we understand that the “not us” only became “us” when the cameras were rolling.

In attempting to present the realism of “national character,” the first scene of The Stone Cross constituted a realist film, with its emphasis on dialogue and traditional framing techniques. Only the minimalism of the narrative and the seeming lack of character motivation in killing the thief, stand out as elements of experimentation. The film follows a standard narrative development, in which the camera is invisible, and cinematic conventions of continuity are not broken, for the most part. The scene, during which the three drink, particularly accepts realist convention, even while it serves the function of coloring in the film’s nationality with the use of Pokuttia dialect and local costume. Similarly, the thief sings to the others after finished drinking, and the on-screen music is within the narrative, rather than being performed as a self-contained spectacle, as in Pyr’ev’s and Paradzhanov’s work. Osyka fixates particularly on the land, but not for its beauty. In fact, the land is infinitely gray, dry, and only intriguing insofar as it is uniform and inhospitable. But the hero’s tragedy is not the social aspects of poverty itself (what the studio sold the film as to Goskino), but the disconnection between land and human subject, which further posits that human misery emerges out of natural or biological conditions rather than social conditions.

Leonid Osyka - (1968) The Stone Cross.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 16mn
Size: 	1.25 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x576 ~> 768x576
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 100 Kbps
BPP: 	0.203
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/AD1B1BD4915BD7C/Leonid_Osyka_-_(1968)_The_Stone_Cross.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/E3CF3F5A5F84B8C/Kaminnyy_khrest_(1968)_ENG.2.srt
https://nitro.download/view/7E5B5B681082EA7/Kaminnyy_khrest_(1968)_RUS.ANSI.2.srt
https://nitro.download/view/F554416E5143436/Kaminnyy_khrest_(1968)_UKR.ANSI.srt

Language(s):Ukrainian
Subtitles:Ukrainian, English, Russian