/lit/ - Literature

Dovzhenko consciously and politically constructed his ‘filmmaking team’. Through a planned ‘collective creativity’, he synthesized and drew from the cultural renaissance’s leading groups. Punning on a current novel by Ukrainian neo-romantic writer, Yuri Yanovsky (Maistr Korablia, Master of the Ship, 1928) in which the young Dovzhenko figures as the main character, Yakiv Savchenko, would comment about Dovzhenko as a “Maister Syntezy” (Master of Synthesis)[142]. Savchenko would also similarly speak about Dovzhenko’s drawing from the cultural renaissance as a larger project of fulfilling early cinema’s ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (work of total art) synthetic ambitions. In later lectures at the Moscow Film School, VGIK, Dovzhenko would discourse on cinema as a syncretic aesthetic.