At a High Price: The Private History of 'Poetic Cinema'. In Krytyka, No. 7-8 (201-202), 2014, pp. 12-17.

Serhii Proleiev's article is devoted to understanding the phenomenon of Ukrainian "poetic cinema" through a personal and historical-cultural perspective. The author examines a special tradition of artistic stylistics that originates in the work of Oleksandr Dovzhenko, tracing its influence on the generation of directors of the 1960s and on the formation of the poetic dimension of national cinema.

Proleiev focuses on the dramatic historical context in which this aesthetic arose: from repressions and military upheavals to the cultural heritage of the Soviet period and the struggle for the originality of Ukrainian art.

Special attention is paid to the interaction of artistic experiments, authorial intention and viewer perception, which allows us to show how poetic cinema functioned as a means of cultural comprehension and social memory. Proleiev analyzes key directorial strategies, aesthetic techniques, and artistic symbols that defined the genre's specificity, while emphasizing its role in the development of the Ukrainian national cinematic tradition. The article combines an analysis of both the cinematic language and the figures that defined the development of the "poetic cinema" school with reflections on the value of creativity, memory, loss, and the relevance of the artistic tradition in the present.

The author considers poetic cinema not only as a collection of individual films, but as a complex cultural practice that was formed under the influence of historical, social, and ideological circumstances, including censorship restrictions and personal risks of artists.