The book «Cinematic Revision of the Donbas 2.0»

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The book Cinematic Revision of the Donbas 2.0

for Dovzhenko Centre, an art venue and the National

Film Archive in Kyiv

The purpose of this publication is to show the construction of the image of the Donbas through film. Since the Soviet period of Ukraine this large coal mining region has been associated with the slag heaps, heroic labor and industrial landscapes. This book consists of articles about a feature, propaganda and documentary movies analyzing the perception of the Donbas. In this context we concluded it would be interesting to counterbalance this narrative. We decided to find and show some non-industrial images of the Donbas, so we spent a lot of time for research in the national cinema- and photo archive, looking for photographs that show the everyday and cultural life of the region during the 1930s - 1980s. That’s how appeared the visual chapter with vernacular, mostly anonymous photos.

The most conceptual in this project is the cover. It’s completely black, without any text or graphic elements, edges of the book are also painted black. Thus, the closed book looks like a coal briquette or a black box. These two visual associations reveal the idea of the Donbas ambiguity: a typical coal mining image of the region and an unknown land with its own unique everyday and cultural life, which is still hidden in a black box and awaits to be discovered.

Since the book is academic non-fiction and film criticism, conceived primarily for reading, we chose a more discreet and old-fashioned style for the internal block: an old school antique font for the body text and placement of the references on the wide outside margins