About Oleksandr Dovzhenko and His Stay in France

The subject of the analysis of this article is the foreign trip and stay in France of Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Yuliia Solntseva in the summer of 1930 and the probable stay of Dovzhenko himself in Paris in 1932. The analysis is written on the basis of articles and reviews, most of which have appeared in the French film press in 1930–1931. The article is aimed at the describing a little-known information about Dovzhenko’s stay in France. The author also is trying to and to submit his exclusive assumptions about his probable second visit to the City of Light in 1932. During his visit Dovzhenko has been accompanied by Parisians Yevhen Deslav and Leonid Mohylevskyi, as well as the artist Mykola Hlushchenko. The description contains a number of events – visits to film studios for the study of sound film technologies, proposals for the production of a French-Ukrainian film, screenings of his films in his presence in the Studio 28 cinema, meetings in the Montparnasse district with leading French filmmakers and with Ukrainian artists of the so-called Paris School, contacts with the former colleagues of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, a probable trip to Amsterdam planned with Deslav. The article contains two hitherto unheard-of reports about Dovzhenko’s second trip to France. The first is based on Yevhen Deslav’s annotation: “I’ve met Dovzhenko in Paris somewhere in 1932 (sic), where he comes to study sound cinema”. The second is the photo of Dovzhenko, posing in the photo salon to the French photographer and film director Elie Lothar. This is the fact, strengthening the hypothesis of the master’s repeated presence in Paris in 1932.