Film screening of the amateur films by "Doodle-Biddle-Buddle"

Welcome to a film screening of the amateur films produced by the "Doodle-Biddle-Buddle" creative team in the 1970s in Lviv. In addition to the screening, there will be a talk with the maker and an amateur film director Volodymyr Duda. The event will take place as part of [un]archiving program.

We hardly know anything about Lviv practices of amateur film making in the second half of the 20th century. Many films have been lost forever, otherwise, they are improperly stored because no value is attributed to them. 30 years after the fall of the Berlin wall not only brought the liberation from totalitarianism but also the oblivion. A huge layer of culture of amateur film-making has been threatened, but the interest to this topic is resuming today. Fast changes in technology of producing motion pictures, outreach of video, and further shift to digital formats offer a new perspective on the 1970s amateur films. Members of informal group "Doodle-Biddle-Buddle" included Volodymyr Duda, Pavlo Horbachevskyi, Lubomyr Hlibovych, and Yuriy Yatsynych. They were musicians at Lviv Philharmonics, while making films in their free time. The films by the group were presented to the Urban Media Archive by Volodymyr Duda during the International Home Video Day in 2018. Thus, the digitized films from the far past have a chance to get a new life.

The movement of amateur film-makers in the former Soviet Union started in the late 1950s. In 1957, a section of amateur films was created as part of the Union of Cinematographers. Portable film cameras started being industrially produced. Amateur film studios were developing at various institutions. The practice of creating interest groups for film fans and of amateur film production or even TV production studios at enterprises went massive, while a cine camera became a common attribute not only in cities, but not infrequently in rural areas. The genre of amateur films and television products developed on the basis of the rules coming from official media as they tried to control this kind of art. However, despite the fact that the practice was under close supervision, there has always been a chance to create something special reaching beyond the canons of official film aesthetics. It best describes the works by the "Doodle-Biddle-Buddle" art group that were common and easy to understand, on the one hand, but macabre and even non-conventional, on the other hand.

[unarchiving] is the project of informal presentations of sets and collections of the Urban Media Archive to promote and mainstream the problems of archival heritage in the community. We are committed to shape new attitudes on archiving and present historical collections in an unusual perspective. The events from the series include public viewing and listening to visual, audiovisual, or audio pieces that could use a different format from academic settings and create an atmosphere of free reflection and discussion, as well as combine popular formats and archival historical collections. It will be the nights of cine-music or photo-music, film screenings, photo presentations, and other events representing a dialogue of the present day and the past times.