Beyond the Battlefield: Maryna Er Gorbachโs ๐ฒ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ and the Remaking of War Cinema
Date and Time
Location
A lecture by Yuliya V. Ladygina, Jacyk Distinguished Fellow at HURI and Associate Professor of Slavic and Global and International Studies at the Pennsylvania State University
Chaired by Oleh Kotsyuba, Director of Print and Digital Publications at HURI
[Image from Maryna Er Gorbachโs Klondike (2022)]
This event is organized by HURI as part of the Petro Jacyk Seminar series. This lecture is the first of a three-part film screening series.
About the Lecture
Since 2014, Russiaโs war against Ukraine has unfolded not only across territory but also through images, information, historical narratives, and competing claims to political reality. Drawing on her ongoing book project on contemporary Ukrainian war cinema, Dr. Ladygina will argue that cinema no longer simply represents war but has itself become part of an expanded battlefield. She will show how Ukrainian films participate in struggles over testimony and evidence, historical memory and political legitimacy, cultural sovereignty and the authority to define reality. The lecture will trace how this changing relationship between warfare and representation is transforming the boundaries of war cinema, extending the genre beyond combat into media networks and archives, landscapes, domestic spaces, and individual bodies.
Dr. Ladygina will develop this argument through a close reading of Maryna Er Gorbachโs Klondike (2022), set in the Donbas in the summer of 2014 against the backdrop of the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. Turning away from the spectacular violence conventionally associated with war cinema, Er Gorbach centers the everyday, embodied experience of her pregnant heroine, Irka. Dr. Ladygina will examine how the filmโs distinctive treatment of domestic space and landscape, sound, and the female body makes visible forms of violence, agency, survival, and resistance that conventional images of combat often leave unseen. She will then consider how Klondike, while firmly grounded in the specific experience of Russiaโs war against Ukraine, reaches beyond Ukrainian national cinema to challenge established conventions and expand the boundaries of the war film itself. Finally, the lecture will turn to the filmโs international circulation and the ways in which Klondike itself entered the informational and cultural struggle over how Russiaโs war against Ukraine would be understood beyond Ukraine.
About the Speaker
Yuliya V. Ladygina is Associate Professor of Slavic and Global and International Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on Eastern European literatures and cultures, with particular emphasis on cultural memory, transnational exchange, and the intersections of literature, film, and politics. She is the author of Bridging East and West: Olโha Kobyliansโka, Ukraineโs Pioneering Modernist (University of Toronto Press, 2019). Currently, she is completing her second book project, Screens of Defiance: The Reel Story of Russiaโs War against Ukraine, which examines how Ukrainian filmmakers have documented, interpreted, and challenged Russiaโs war against Ukraine since 2014, revealing how contemporary conflicts are fought not only on the battlefield but also through media, memory, and competing narratives of history and identity. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of War and Culture Studies, Slavic Review, KinoKultura, Studies in World Cinema, and Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture.