Like most filmmakers of his time, Mykola Shpykovskyi did not attend film school. He was born in Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, and studied in Odesa, where he earned a law degree in 1917. Despite this unlikely start to a film career, he eventually became a respected colleague of upstart Soviet filmmakers, poets, and artists, including Vsevolod Pudovkin, Vladimir Mayakovsky (born in Georgia of Ukrainian parents), and Oleksandr Dovzhenko.
In the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, Shpykovskyi lived in Russia and began writing for film publications, including Kino-Gazeta, later becoming editor-in-chief of Soviet Screen. His first film was the half-hour comedy Chess Fever, codirected with Pudovkin and filmed in 1925 under the auspices of the legendary Mezhrabpom-Rus in Moscow. The studio produced some of the USSR’s most popular films of the 1920s and 1930s by encouraging innovative story ideas and experimental cinematography.
Chess Fever chronicles a Moscow chess tournament where a young man becomes completely obsessed with the game. His girlfriend is not equally enchanted, until she meets the handsome Cuban world champion José Raúl Capablanca. The film was highly popular, giving Shpykovskyi the opportunity to continue in his new career.
Having directed another comedy, A Cup of Tea (1927), again at Mezhrabpom, Shpykovskyi returned to Ukraine where he began a short tenure at VUFKU, Ukraine’s state studio. He first directed Three Rooms with a Kitchen (1928), a comedy about the everyday struggles in the lives of the petty bourgeoisie, scripted by Solomon Lazurin, who had been inspired by a Vladimir Mayakovsky script titled, How Are You?
In 1929, Shpykovskyi started to work on a screen version of the satirical short novel Tsybala by the Ukrainian writer Vadym Okhremenko. The resulting film was titled Shkurnyk, The Opportunist in English. It is set during the 1918–21 Civil War between the Reds (Bolshevik revolutionaries) and the Whites (those who wished to restore the old order), with some unaligned bandits thrown in for good measure. The picaresque farce takes place in a part of southern Ukraine where no single element has full control.
The central character, Apollon Shmyguiev, is a portly dumpling of a man, always smiling, always poised to take advantage of any situation to make a ruble. The intertitles scornfully refer to him as “the philistine,” someone with no political beliefs. His station in life is that of a cockroach who prospers by feeding on the crumbs that others let fall off the table. Shpykovskyi shows this graphically at the opening of the film, as a small horse cart transporting food crashes, the horse runs off and the groceries spill out into the street. Apollon just happens to be nearby and gets down on hands and knees to scoop up cans of sugar.
In an absurd touch that becomes characteristic of the film, a camel wanders by from out of nowhere and Apollon grabs it to pull the cart. Then a contingent of Reds arrives and commandeers the cart, the camel, Apollon, and the groceries threatening dire consequences for stealing food. “I’m Red!” says Apollon. Now he’s in trouble, but still somehow manages to sell the contraband sugar under the noses of his captors, as well as get officially recruited into the Red Army unit.
Next he is stopped by a group of Cossacks, who don’t support either side in the war. Still their leader says he’s going to hang all the “comrades.” “I’m neutral!” says Apollon. After he talks his way out of that predicament, he is captured by a White military unit. “I’m White!” says Apollon. Not only does he talk his way out of another hanging, but he ends up as an officer for the Whites! His bag of tricks is bottomless. In a true-to-life touch, hanging on the wall in the offices of the Whites is an anti-
Semitic poster depicting their bête noire, Trotsky, commander of the Red Army.
The Opportunist was never able to reach much of an audience when it was made, despite strong praise from renowned poet Osip Mandelstam, who called it “an achievement of very high quality.” After the death of Lenin in 1924, a growing conservative bureaucracy, with Stalin as its leader, gradually choked off all expressions of the open-minded cultural activities that thrived in the early days of the Revolution. The Opportunist, with the farcical world it depicted where all sides are mocked, was rejected for distribution. Stalin was not noted for his sense of humor.
The main target of the absurdist humor of the film, however, was not the Reds or the Whites or the bandits, but rather the category of capitalists that was created by the New Economic Policy of the Revolution. Proposed by Lenin, the NEP was an attempt to let merchants (“NEPmen”) make a profit to jump start the economy after the devastation of the Civil War had left it in shambles. NEPmen were tolerated but disdained. Profiteers like Apollon were a caricature of NEPmen writ small.
The Revolution was an inspiration especially to Ukrainians, because for the first time in its history Ukraine was freed from tsarist absolutism, the “prisonhouse of nations” that was the Russian Empire. Ukrainians had been forbidden to speak their own language or to read their own history. The Bolsheviks recognized Ukraine as an autonomous republic within the Soviet Union, with language and cultural freedom and the unconditional right to secede at any time. Ukraine opened its first national art institute and its state film studio invited all manner of artists to try their hand at filmmaking.
Even as the conservative Stalin regime consolidated its power, the independence of Ukraine made it a haven for artists whose work might not find acceptance in Moscow. VUFKU invited the poet Mayakovsky to write ten scripts, three of which were produced. When Dziga Vertov was fired from Sovkino in 1927 for making a film—A Sixth Part of the World—that was considered politically unacceptable, VUFKU welcomed him and it became where he made his masterpiece, The Man with a Movie Camera. (Vertov, who had been born David Abelevich Kaufman, changed his name to the Ukrainian words meaning “spinning top.”)
After The Opportunist, Shpykovskyi tried to avoid the ideological condemnation incurred by his previous film, so he made the propaganda film Bread, the story of a demobilized Red Army soldier who returns to his village inspired by the spirit of collectivism and ready to do something about it. The film, which has been compared to Dovzhenko’s lyrical Earth, was released, but it was not well-received by audiences and did not screen outside of Ukraine. The Russian Main Repertory Committee squelched the film as “a typical specimen of abstract and speculative cinema,” bureaucratic lingo meaning, “avant-garde films we are too dense to understand or appreciate.”
By the time of Shpykovskyi’s Hegemon (1931), VUFKU had been reorganized as Ukrainfilm and made subservient to Moscow. The film’s premiere marked the opening of the Kyiv movie theater, Zhovten (or “October”), but also was his last film as director. He returned to Moscow to focus on scriptwriting instead. During World War II, he worked as an editor of the frontline department of the Central Newsreel Studio.
In 1939, reflecting on the heady early days of the October Revolution, Dovzhenko wrote something that might have applied to most of the directors who found some temporary refuge in Ukraine: “I was as happy as a dog let off a chain, sincerely believing that now all men were brothers …; that the peasants had the land, the workers had the factories, the teachers had the schools, the doctors had the hospitals, the Ukrainians had Ukraine … To my way of thinking this proved the complete noncomplicity of Ukrainians with the overthrown [tsarist] regime. This was nationalism. At that time all Ukrainians seemed to me to be especially nice people. It was easy to complain about the years (300!) we had suffered from the damn Russians.”
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Utsav Lal