MEMORY, IDENTITY, AND THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY: STEFAN LACNY RESPONDS TO MARTA HRYNIUK’S & NICK THOMAS’S WEIGHTLESS

Marta Hryniuk and Nick Thomas’ 2023 documentary Weightless follows young anthropologist Khrystyna Bunii as she travels through the Carpathian mountains of western Ukraine conducting research among the Hutsul highlanders. The Hutsuls, one of three highland groups native to Ukraine’s Eastern Carpathians (alongside the Lemkos and the Boikos), are known for the distinctiveness of their traditional folk culture, elements of which are seen throughout the film. Recorded in the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the film documents Bunii’s experiences going from village to village, conversing with local highlanders and digitising their family photo collections. The resulting exchanges and images form the basis for the work’s explorations of the region and its complex, often painful past. Bunii and even the directors themselves feature openly as participants as well as narrators, combining observations of the Hutsuls with reflections on family histories and the national past.

Weightless is a film framed around historical memory. As such, it is fitting that the documentary focuses on the Hutsuls, a group to whom Ukrainians have often turned when reflecting on their own national history and identity. The centrality of the Hutsuls in cultural works exploring Ukrainian selfhood may appear paradoxical after a brief consideration of the highlanders’ history. Today the Hutsuls are regarded as a subset of Ukrainians and possess a folk heritage that shares commonalities with that of neighbouring Ukrainian regions. Yet even a century ago the national allegiance of this remote highland people was far from settled. Since the late nineteenth century, the Hutsuls, who are believed to have diverse ethnic origins, have repeatedly found themselves at the crossroads of rival national and imperial projects (Polish, Ukrainian, Habsburg and Soviet) that have each at times sought to embrace Hutsul culture and appropriate it for their own political ends. Furthermore, well into the twentieth century, members of the Hutsul community had a variety of political allegiances ranging from advocates for Ukrainian independence to supporters of Polish statehood as well as those defining themselves more in regional terms.

Despite this contested heritage (or perhaps because of it), Hutsuls have become the object of much Ukrainian cultural production. During the 1900s, prominent Ukrainian writers including Ivan Franko, Mykola Kotsiubyns’kyi and Lesia Ukrainka summered in the Hutsul region, conducted ethnography there and penned literary works set in the Carpathians. Later in the 1960s, directors of the Ukrainian poetic cinema movement looked to the Hutsuls in search of a Ukrainian identity untainted by Soviet rule, producing Hutsul-themed films such as Sergei Paradzhanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965, itself adapted from a novel by Kotsiubyns’kyi). Weightless continues the tradition of Ukrainian artists turning to the Hutsul region to depict its inhabitants and, in the process, to ask fundamental questions about themselves.

Through images of long-concealed family photographs and recorded folk displays, the documentary showcases the originality of Hutsul traditional clothing, songs and musical instruments, interspersed between picturesque views of the Carpathian landscape. Yet Hutsul life is far from idyllic. Wide shots of wooded mountain slopes are overlaid with the distant sound of chainsaws, highlighting the problem of illegal logging that threatens the highlanders’ native natural environment. As Bunii waits at a bus stop, the camera reveals a poster advertising rafting, drawing attention to tourism in the region, which (now as at previous moments in history) presents both an economic lifeline to the Hutsuls and a threat to their traditional livelihoods. Perhaps the most animated we see any local in conversation with Bunii is an elderly lady bemoaning the financial precariousness facing young Hutsuls, who must either make a meagre living on the land or leave to seek greater stability in the city.

At the heart of Weightless are Bunii’s attempts to talk to villagers about the repression inflicted on their region under Stalinist rule. Having been divided between Poland and Romania during the interwar period, the Hutsul region was annexed by the USSR following the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, then invaded by Germany in 1941 before being recaptured by the Red Army in 1944. Over the next decade, the Hutsuls endured harsh persecution for their perceived opposition to Soviet power, and some highlanders fought with Ukrainian nationalist forces (UPA) against Soviet troops into the 1950s. The scars from this violent past emerge gradually throughout the film. In conversation with Bunii, elderly Hutsuls refer to Soviet torture, guerrilla warfare and even personal experience of deportation to Siberia. Reminders of these Kremlin-directed terror operations strike a poignant note today in light of Russia’s ongoing aggression that continues to claim the lives of Ukrainians from across the country.

Strikingly, however, the Hutsuls are deeply reluctant to discuss their historical experiences. Despite her efforts to overcome ‘superficial’ narratives about the region and to allow the Hutsuls to express themselves in their own voices, Bunii finds the highlanders unwilling to talk about Stalin-era repression in anything beyond factual terms. At moments, the researcher expresses her frustration at the villagers’ reticence through her voiceover contributions and her voice messages sent to directors Hryniuk and Thomas, in which she is left speculating as to the reasons for their silence.

In part, as Bunii suggests, this is attributable to the lasting effects of the trauma inflicted by Stalinist repression. Another factor, however, lies in the Hutsuls’ wary attitude towards outsiders. Given the numerous attempts of lowlanders from multiple nationalities and ideologies over the last 150 years to co-opt Hutsul culture and speak on their behalf, we can understand how the Hutsuls in Weightless remain stubbornly resistant to attempts by outsiders (including other Ukrainians) to tell their story or impose historical narratives onto them. In this sense, the film exposes the gap of communication and understanding that persists between Hutsuls and Ukrainians from the lowlands. Bunii looks towards the Carpathians to explore the role played by the region in Ukraine’s recent national history. For the Hutsuls, by contrast, remaining largely silent beyond their own community about historical oppression becomes itself an expression of dignity and selfhood.

GUEST CURATOR’S BIO

Stefan Lacny is a Lecturer in Russian Culture, Language and Translation at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. He has recently completed a PhD in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral research examined Soviet cinematic depictions of Poles and Ukrainians from 1925 to 1941, in the context of the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939. His interests include Soviet nationalities policies, Stalin-era formulations of Soviet Ukrainian identity and the significance of borders in the Soviet cultural imagination. His article "(Re)discovering Ukrainianness: Hutsul Folk Culture and Ukrainian Identity in Soviet Film, 1939-1941" was published this year in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.