Kyiv - A City Symphony: An examination of the conventions of poetic documentary and how they can create a representation of the city of Kyiv, Ukraine.

Abstract

This research is an examination of the definitions, theories, and film processes of poetic forms of documentary. Poetic documentary shares many characteristics with European avant-garde film movements in the 1920s, where experiments with cinematic techniques including the close-up, montage editing, and sound explore associations and patterns that involve temporal and spatial juxtapositions. It is argued by filmmakers and film scholars that this approach to filmmaking results in sensuous knowledge and a unique experience of reality, notions explored in this exegesis by focusing on film representations of a modern European city. The aim of this practice-based research is to expand upon the approaches of poetic documentary to explore the possibilities of creating a valid representation of the city of Kyiv, in contemporary Ukraine, as a chosen cultural site of interest (between 2016 - 2022). The notion of ‘place’ provides a conceptual foundation for this research and insight into humanistic geography has been essential for identifying the ‘meanings’ attached to places, that give them value. These meanings emerge from complex relationships between us, our environment, our physical and sensual experience of place. The research problem has been approached in a multidisciplinary way, exploring ethnography to provide a model for the mapping of these related concepts to develop a methodology and to consider which methods were useful to the filmmaker. The motivations and practice of a documentary filmmaker in many ways parallel the work of ethnographers who participate in the lives of others, and this research has a correlation with the rich history of ethnographic cinema and the study of cultural identities. The design of this practice-based PhD is underpinned by a connective model of research design where historical and theoretical concepts have been explored and expanded upon to produce new knowledge in the form of film experiments, the outcomes of which are two films, Vision of Europe (2017) and a city symphony Kyiv - City of Possibilities (2022). I argue that by sharing my self-reflexive creative processes, in conjunction with the analytical processes, this research contributes to new knowledge in this area of film studies and articulates the connections between poetic documentary, aesthetics, and representations of place.