Guest Writer Charles Young takes a look at the Ukrainian Film Club’s showing of Antytila.

I was introduced to wartime poetry the same way as most: corner-cutting secondary school lessons about World War I. On one side lie the Romantics, rallying naively around Rupert Brooke’s drunken characterization of blood as the “sweet wine of youth.” The opposing camp, shell-shocked and dissociating, relay tales of banal mass-deaths and absurd reaches for glory. What now seems glaringly apparent is that a middle ground lies between these extremes, and that if the dilemma of making art in a time of war has any clear solution, it’s in this liminal space. 

A more nuanced view is offered by Antytila, screened last Wednesday by Columbia’s Ukrainian Film Club—complete with a post-film discussion led by club president Yuri Shevchuk—at the Harriman Institute. Compressing many years of humanitarian efforts and all-out war into forty-five minutes, it tells the tale of a Ukrainian rock band—the titular Antityla—and their devotion to defending their country from Russian aggression. 

As we’re initially shown, Antytila’s members are used to the limelight in times of conflict. When Russia began its widely-condemned annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the band’s members began to volunteer for the war effort, delivering supplies and food for Ukrainian military forces. The intervening years were calm but foreboding. When recounting a bucket-list trip to Paris with his wife, Serhii Vusyk, the band’s keyboardist, describes how their touristy adventures were constantly overshadowed by a portentous horror. Soon enough, his gut feeling proved correct. 

Vocalist Taras Topolia recounts waking one night in Kyiv to the sound of Russian shelling. After gathering necessities and seeing off his shocked family, he bikes to the nearest Military Commissariat, where he and other members of the band formally join the military. Some brief training and an ominous skirmish later, the boys are transported to Kharkhiv, where they aid in local relief efforts. 

The episodic violence between each band member’s narration is chilling. Limp, lifeless children are lifted into body bags. Men with blown-off limbs let out agonizing groans as they’re transferred onto stretchers. Every time the war’s phantasmagoric chaos seems inescapable, relief comes not through the typical outlets of a war documentary—meaningless cathartic screams, pensive narration—but through boppy songs by the band. It’s moving to think that music can cut through the Russian invasion’s vitriol and loss of life. Still, it’s a dreamy notion—people are dying, after all.

Throughout the course of the members’ military service, Topolia begins to accept more interviews with international outlets. The band’s celebrity status grows. As it does, you can sense their realization that whatever good their military service is doing, they could do a whole lot more by leveraging their influence to garner support for Ukraine. U2 frontman Bono asks the band to collaborate, an offer they quickly accept—soon enough, the Irishman and Antytila’s military gear-clad members put on an impromptu concert in a Kyiv subway station. The setlist? Most prominently, a tortured rendition of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” in which Topolia and Bono replace “Me” with “Ukraine”—such a jarring displacement would be hilarious if the line’s subject matter wasn’t literally life-and-death.

The film concludes at an Ed Sheeran concert, of all places, during which Antytila’s members join him onstage for a remix of “2Step.” Ed’s verse first: “I had a bad week / Spent the evening pretending it wasn’t that deep,” and so on. Poppy, nondescript lyrics. After the first chorus, it’s Topolia’s turn (in Ukrainian): “Sirens interrupted our sleep / In two suitcases everything is the past, then go go.” That’s his family, escaping Kyiv while the Russian army bombards it. No matter how you look at the song, it’s ridiculous: the disasters of war plastered over by catchy guitar riffs and hummable hooks. But it wouldn’t be right to condemn Antytila the way English teachers mock Rupert Brooke. After all, the band is trying to defend their homeland from a near-universally condemned invasion. 

The upshot of this film left me confounded, scrambling to figure out what it is that I truly value. Is it right to gloss over the horrors of war if you’re doing so with the goal of ending that war? 

Antityla is part of a series entitled Culture vs. War which documents the work of disparate Ukrainian artists amidst the Russian invasion. In the coming months, the series will be screened in its entirety by the Ukrainian Film Club. 

Image via Wikimedia Commons.