Slabchenko, Yevhen

Slabchenko, Yevhen [Слабченко, Євген; Slabčenko, Jevhen], b 8 December 1898 in Kyiv, d 10 September 1966 in Nice, France. Filmmaker and journalist. He studied at Prague University, Berlin University and the Sorbonne in Paris. He organized the first Plast Ukrainian Youth Association’s group in central Ukraine (1917). From the mid-1920s he lived in France under the name Eugène Deslaw. There he was the official representative of the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration and film correspondent for the Kharkiv futurist journal Nova generatsiia. In the 1930s he made pioneering short experimental sound films and worked on many French film productions. In 1936 he codirected (with J. Daroy) La Guerre des gosses, which received an award as best European film at a 1939 New York film festival. During the Second World War he worked in Spain and Switzerland, and after the war he worked in French television. His Vision fantastique, the first film with solarized images, received an honorable mention at the 1956 Venice Film Festival.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]