Karl Marx’ oft-cited quip about how history repeats itself, “first as a tragedy, second as a farce,” could easily apply to Special Operation, Oleksiy Radynski’s cunning archival documentary about the Russian occupation of Chornobyl’s Nuclear Power Plant. In the wake of the full-scale invasion of February 24, 2022, Russian troops overtook Chornobyl and its surroundings, using the fragile environment as a strategic cloak for their ultimately unsuccessful blitz on Kyiv. This military presence added another layer to the painful history of the iconic site of the greatest nuclear disaster in the history of mankind. The nuclear meltdown of 1986 once served as a key symbol of the impending Soviet collapse, and now its recent invasion by Russian soldiers marks a haunting new chapter in the raptured geopolitical equilibrium between Europe and Russia, with Ukraine as the perpetual warzone stuck in their middle.
Doom-laden and surrounded by constant speculation, Chornobyl is latched into our public imaginarium. Craig Mazin’s 2019 British miniseries about the nuclear disaster was an instant hit on streaming service HBO. Last year, Ukrainian developer GSC Game World finally released S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, the highly-anticipated second installment in their cult survival horror shooter in which players roam a mythical version of Pripyat. Many gamers have visited this ghost town before, as the most iconic mission of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) arms you with a sniper rifle and tasks you to sneak into the Polissya hotel to assassinate a Russian ultranationalist leader. Of course, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and its literary source material Roadside Picnic (1972) by the Strugatsky brothers, served as prescient texts that established the mythology of a Nuclear zone of interest, way before the no. 4 reactor exploded.
What makes Special Operation so remarkable is the ways it deftly avoids all this sensationalized imagery of Chornobyl. Sourced entirely from CCTV cameras that bore witness to the Russian occupation of the power plant, Radynski’s haunting archival film is a work of stark documentary realism. The near-static imagery simply records the occupation of Chornobyl as it unfolded over the course of five weeks. Special Operation reveals that all this footage mostly amounts to non-action. It shows the Russian military waiting around, using the power plant as a buffer zone from which they launch their attacks on Ukraine’s capital city. It’s exactly in the absence of action that the film finds its textual significance, as it underlines the creeping mundanity that permeates the modern war machine. The most suspenseful mise-en-scène derives from the ways the CCTV cameras — secretly operated by surviving Ukrainian engineers of the occupation — pan, track, tilt, and zoom to slyly record the Russian presence. These recordings have become important pieces of evidence representing a war crime of nuclear terror. In the hands of Radynski, they second as a powerful cinematic tool to reflect on the political hierarchy of images, and the complicated dynamic between hyperrealistic imagery and documentary’s creative treatment of reality.
The vertical orientation of Special Operation’s surveillance footage is an invaluable follow-up to Radynski’s Chornobyl 22 (2023), a short that combines testimonial accounts of Chornobyl inhabitants with secretly filmed smartphone footage that frantically records the movement of the Russian infantry. Both films are prime examples of the directors’ intelligent treatment of archival material. As part of Kinotron Group, Radynski is one of the most astute contemporary nonfiction filmmakers working in Ukraine right now, often turning toward found footage to create critical documentaries that question the fraught relationship between centers of power and their subjugated peripheries. For instance, his recent archival short Where Russia Ends (2024) is still travelling the festival circuit, and is an evocative post-colonial critique of Russia’s imperial rule over its Indigenous people living in the outskirts of its vast domain.
Special Operation premiered in the Forum Expanded section of this year’s Berlinale. A couple of months later, Radynski joined me for German Pilsner and a long conversation in Wiesbaden, where he served on the jury of goEast Film Festival’s main competition.
Hugo Emmerzael: For the longest time, I had an inexplicable fascination with Chornobyl. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game series, Andrei Tarkovsky’s ubiquitous film, and Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers only fed into my obsession with the nuclear disaster site. Did this exoticized image of Chornobyl in the public imaginarium weigh down on you when you were approaching the subject matter for your films?
Oleksiy Radynski: To be honest, I wasn’t really thinking about those things when I was making Special Operation, even though it’s impossible not to deal with such associations. I wouldn’t say I had a fascination with Chornobyl, but for some reason I don’t completely understand, I also felt deeply connected to that place. Since my first visit there almost 20 years ago, I could increasingly spot all the imagery that we already know from Chornobyl to an absurd extent. For instance, I remember when we were walking around Pripyat for the first time, noticing that some of the objects surrounding me were actually pre-arranged, probably by photographers from the west, who came there to shoot all the standard stuff, like abandoned toys in the playgrounds.
HE: It’s like the simulacrum of Chornobyl is more real than the place itself.
OR: The place became a total simulacrum of itself, long before I started working with it in a conscious way. So early on, I learned to ignore the pressure of Chornobyl’s iconic imagery. When we were editing Chornobyl 22, we even deliberately killed every shot that included any famous or recognizable object, like the Ferris wheel in Pripyat. Of course, we made an exception for the sarcophagus of the nuclear reactor, but this confinement is relatively new and is not really a part of this genre of Chornobyl porn. In the case of Special Operation, it was a bit trickier. What the Russians did when they occupied this place was basically a recreation of the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. computer game in real life. While recording testimonies of survivors of this Russian occupation, some people told us their stories of being kidnapped outside of Chornobyl, brought into the zone, and then thrown out of the car by the Russians, forcing them to survive within the parameters of the zone, which is basically the premise of the game.
HE: On a surface level, I’d say the CCTV footage of Special Operation also resembles classic video games, with its fixed angle third person perspectives.
OR: After our Berlinale premiere, many viewers told me that the film looks like a computer game. Perhaps it’s because I stopped playing video games a long time ago that I don’t really see the resemblance that strongly. But to go back to your initial question about Chornobyl’s iconic imagery, in the case of Special Operation we didn’t really face any challenges as to how to depict this environment. The visual language of CCTV images is so special and specific, that you first and foremost have to adapt to that. The first question that arises is: who is the subject behind every shot? And this is not so much the individuals you see on screen — essentially the player in the game — it’s rather the observer, basically the security guards who recorded the footage. We were working with the gaze of someone who is observing the events, but cannot really intervene. The only thing they can do is zoom in and zoom out, pan the camera, and tilt. This in itself becomes an intervention — the fact someone is surveilling this, and backing up these images for future use.
HE: In the case of Chornobyl 22, you combine testimonial accounts with jarring footage of witnesses secretly filming the Russian army as they move along the zone. How did you come about this form for the film?
OR: As it often happens with my documentaries, Chornobyl 22 for the longest time was not intended to be a film. The initial departure point was to record witness interviews with survivors of the occupation of Chornobyl, all for the sake of war crime documentation, so the Russian perpetrators can potentially be tried in the International Criminal Court of The Hague. We went through a special training, so that these interviews could be used as evidence in court. One of the people we spoke to in this capacity said: “if you’re interested in what the Russians have been doing here, I’ve been an informant for the Ukrainian army. I’ve filmed the Russians convoys with my phone, in order to send the videos to my contacts in the armed forces of Ukraine. I still have all of it on my hard drive.” It turned out that he had around 40 gigabytes of phone footage. He literally risked his life to clandestinely film these convoys, with the sole purpose of telling the Ukrainian Army which Russian vehicles went in which direction. It’s a miracle that he survived, as his facility was searched. If the Russians would even find a single video on his phone, he would be killed. Once we got our hands on these countless hours of Russian military vehicles, it occurred to me that all these materials could also be developed into a film project. His footage is so extraordinary but also mundane at the same time, helping us to avoid all of these pitfalls of making the typical Chornobyl film that you referred to.
HE: Did you obtain the material for Special Operation in a similar way?
OR: Some other interviewees were engineers at the nuclear plant. They backed up some recordings of the CCTV cameras that the Russians failed to switch off. When I learned about this, I obviously wanted to see the footage, but by that time all the material had already been transferred to the law enforcement of Ukraine, as it became part of the forensic evidence in the criminal case against the Russians.
HE: So how did you manage to obtain the footage in the end?
OR: It took us more than a year. By that time, Chornobyl 22 was already released. I think the buzz of that film helped us with the negotiations with the law enforcement, which like in any country was super tight on security — sharing forensic evidence isn’t something they take lightly. All our research was done as part of The Reckoning Project, produced by Lyuba Knorozok and co-founded by an amazing journalist and friend, Nataliya Gumenyuk. This generated a lot of media attention, and gave us good standing with the prosecutor general, as we were sharing our data with his office. So at some point, they took this unprecedented step and started to allow us to access the footage from the CCTV cameras. All of this basically stemmed from mere curiosity and a bit of adventurism, because I had no idea if what I was going to see would actually make sense at all. You know that quite often surveillance cameras film virtually nothing. I just needed to see if the moments that the cameras did film something were of interest. So I showed up to the prosecutor’s office, where they screened the material on their laptop. I had to come there for the next three months, as I could only watch it in their presence.
HE: What immediately struck you when you saw the footage for the first time?
OR: When I actually saw what was there, I knew all of this was not in vain. These Chornobyl engineers were really doing their best to document the situations they were witnessing, revealing all this weird shit that the Russians were up to. The backed-up material starts on February 24, which is when the Russian tanks roll in. You can see that the camera operator is completely overwhelmed and lost — he doesn’t believe his own eyes. He doesn’t really focus on anything, because something unbelievable is happening: Russians in their tanks are at the fucking nuclear plant! It’s one of those moments where you’re able to convey some sort of human emotion, without the use of facial expressions, but rather through their gaze in terms of what is being recorded. Then, of course, the more I watched, the more interesting it all became. The footage became very different and uneven — sometimes for days on end, essentially nothing would happen, until something incredible happens again.
HE: At times it felt like I was watching some paranoid political thriller of the 1970s, with Russian taping the cameras off so they wouldn’t be filmed. And then all these clinical shots observing all this inaction, reminded me of the more restrained films by Tsai Ming-liang. As there’s so much space to project on these seemingly empty images, it makes me wonder where your mind went in terms of cinematic language?
OR: I have to admit that in terms of cinematic language, my mind of course went to Harun Farocki, whose specter in the material was difficult for me to ignore. First of all, he had made several films based on surveillance footage. He also coined the term “operational images,” which is an incredibly productive and eye-opening concept that explores images made by machines that are mostly — but not exclusively — intended for other machines. A lot of these operational images are created without the participation of humans. The footage from CCTV cameras is an example of an operational image, too — even if the humans were involved in their production. I was lucky enough to be in one of Farocki’s workshops, and this had an immense influence on my films. So when I first encountered this trove of footage, the most immediate and frankly banal thing that came to my mind was the realization that this already looks like a Farocki film. I also immediately knew what I should not and would not do, which is to make another Farocki-esque film out of this.
HE: So what did the editing process of this staggering amount of footage look like in the end?
OR: We ended up with over a thousand hours of material from around 10 cameras that recorded from February 24 to March 31, 2022. The editing process in itself was relatively easy, because I knew we were not going to mess with the chronology of the events. It was clear that the film should simply start with the arrival of the Russians and end with their departure. Where the workflow became more unusual was with regard to sound. The CCTV footage itself was completely silent, so we were joined by the great sound artist Vladimir Golovnitsky from Lithuania. He was quickly attracted to the project, and even agreed to our very unusual workflow. Normally, you only start with the sound design after you have already locked the picture of the film. In our case, Vladimir suggested that he would work on the sound while we were still editing. We had about seven times where we sent the cuts back and forth, which allowed us to update our editing, based on his rough drafts of the soundtrack.
HE: The way you designed the sounds the CCTV cameras make when they zoom, track, pan, and tilt places a major emphasis on the fact that these otherwise invisible engineers operate the camera. How did you come about the exact right sound to convey all of that?
OR: All credit should go to Vladimir Golovnitsky here, as we were actually discussing this a lot. What he did was an obvious yet amazing decision. He went to a store in Vilnius that sells security cameras and got one for himself. He picked the camera whose model most closely resembled the one in use in Chornobyl, installed it in his home, and recorded its actual movements for our soundtrack.
HE: In a private conversation, editor Taras Spivak told me that you often cracked up while editing Special Operation, which made me see more clearly the unexpectedly strong comedic elements that are in the film. Can you tell me more about the humor that creeps into this surveillance footage?
OR: It’s true that there’s a strong slapstick element to the footage we received. I hope the captured engineers were also occasionally laughing while they were operating the CCTV cameras, even in such stressful moments. With the ways they deliberately zoomed in to expose certain comic elements more clearly, I hope they had at least their fun. Because some of the things that happen here are actually funny. All the business with the people from the Russian state TV coming to create their own propaganda material is especially comic. I wasn’t sure whether audiences would pick up on such humorous elements, as they are presented in near-static five-minute shots, and yet, people were laughing at our Berlinale screenings. To be honest, I don’t think it would be funny if it was filmed in any other way. These clinical shots give a deadpan quality to it.
HE: On a more global note, the cinematic output of you and your collective Kinotron often stems from various archives and other sources of found footage. For instance, the short film Where Russia Ends is composed entirely of re-discovered films produced by the now defunct KyivNaukFilm studio. How do you see the relation between the films you make and the many archives you work with?
OR: You could answer this question on several levels, one of them almost elementary, which is that every film you make is in itself an archival film. Even if you shoot yourself, or have someone else to shoot for you, you end up with an archive of footage. So, literally any editing process is the process of dealing with an archive. Of course, this is a superficial answer, and surely there are major differences between the things you film yourself and the material you find that has been filmed a long time before you — still, the similarities here are more important than the difference. For in order to do anything with your footage, you have to create a distance between yourself and the material.
HE: The KyivNaukNilm material that forms the basis of Where Russia Ends is quite exceptional. What’s the story behind that archive?
OR: Sometimes, in the life of a filmmaker, things just occur to you and you simply have to deal with it. So at some point, our collective Kinotron came across an enormous dumpster of 35mm footage that was sitting in the abandoned attic of a bankrupt film studio. It turned out to be 11,000 film reels of the KyivNaukFilm studio. Literally no one cared about these reels, which contain all kinds of footage stemming from the ‘60s up until the early 2000s. There were also unedited rushes for films that were either censored or never completed or simply lost. We are trying to make the most use out of this now — I used this material for Where Russia Ends and Taras Spivak found two reels in that attic that spawned his short Under the Sign of Anchor.
HE: Where Russia Ends roams the periphery of Russia’s empire. I see a connection here with many of your other films that explore the tense dynamic between the center and the periphery in Ukraine. Where does this fascination with peripheral phenomena come from?
OR: I agree with your definition of the periphery here, and about the importance it holds in my work. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the periphery is by definition more interesting than the center. Obviously, the notion of the periphery always presupposes the existence of a center, right? And the center is always the problem. Sure, the periphery is harsh, it’s tough, it’s fucked up to be there. But the real problem — the root of all this evil — more often than not, lies in the center. That notion also translates into more cinematic terms. I mentioned all these rushes we found in the archive of KyivNaukFilm. Basically, all the cutouts and material we found there that got removed during their initial editing process, proved to be pure cinematic gold to us 30 or 40 years later. Meanwhile, the stuff that’s contained in the edited and completed films is mostly bullshit. So if you imagine cinema in terms of this kind of topological center-periphery binary, you have the industrial center — films that made it into some sort of completion — which mostly turns out to be worthless. The stuff that doesn’t make it into a film is on the periphery of film production, and is the most valuable to us.
HE: To conclude, I want to ask you about your collaboration with esteemed historian Serhii Plokhy, who recently published his book on the Russian occupation of Chornobyl called Chernobyl Roulette: A War Story.
OR: Plokhy was a major source of knowledge for me before we started our production, mainly due to his previous book on Chornobyl called Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy (2018). At some point, Nataliya Gumenyuk of The Reckoning Project told me that Plokhy is writing a sequel to his Chornobyl book and that he was interested in the testimonies we collected. And I was more than happy to provide him with the complete transcripts of the interviews, consisting of around 25 in-depth interviews with survivors. It seems that this material was useful for him, as he extracted quite a lot of information from these interviews. It made me particularly happy, because when you make a film, usually less than 1% of the stuff that you collect ends up in the final edit. I’m very pleased Plokhy found other things of value there that he could use, and I honestly believe his book is great. So I recommend all readers of this publication to go and get yourself a copy of Chernobyl Roulette.
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