Oleksandr Teliuk (QMUL) - 2025-26 Students
o.teliuk@qmul.ac.uk

Soviet Ukrainian Film Stock: Between Military Modernisation and Archival Decolonisation

This thesis explores the cinematic, cultural and technological history of Ukrainian Soviet film stock in the context of Soviet modernisation. The manufacture of domestic raw photographic material was initiated in the USSR during the abrupt transformation in the late 1920s. The Shostka film stock factory, which was known after the 1960s under the trademark SVEMA (СВЕМА), became a primary producer of Soviet photographic material, exemplifying the tensions between the technological advancement at the peripheral level and the vast Soviet film industry development during the pre-WWII and Cold War periods. This study examines the Shostka film stock case from technological, archival and decolonial perspectives. First, it demonstrates that new knowledge on film technical objects and technological infrastructure has the capacity to enrich and reshape our understanding of film history narratives. Second, this research addresses the idea that archival rereading of pre-digital film history can contribute to a material understanding of film, as well as problematising the role of film preservation infrastructure. Third, it examines how the Soviet practices and discourses surrounding film stock manufacture in Ukraine were structured through colonial military, extractivist and cultural domination. Drawing on these theoretical considerations and unfolding archival sources, the text evolves from analysing Ukrainian and Soviet film stock technologies in the 1920s–1950s to exploring the practical challenges of film preservation and the decolonisation of archives in the present day.

Principal supervisor: Dr Grazia Ingravalle