After Arsenal (1929) and The Earth (1930), the totals of swaying corn fields became one of the trademarks and iconic images of Soviet cinema. These works, like most of the director’s films, rely on local Ukrainian colors



The child of peasants, with a teaching degree as well as a student of painting, bureaucrat and then a diplomat, caricaturist, illustrator and a novelist, Oleksandar (in Russian Aleksandr) Petrovich Dovzhenko is one of the great Russian authors of revolutionary films who is least often referred to in the context of research of editing techniques. Even so and quite paradoxically his stylistic influence on Soviet film of the socialist realism variety, most visible after Arsenal (1929) and The Earth (1930), and the totals of swaying corn fields became one of the trademarks and iconic images of Soviet cinema. These works, like most of the director’s films, rely on local Ukrainian colors and confirm Dovzhenko’s status as the first regional director of Soviet film. In his film Zvenigora (1928) he draws his inspiration from the fairy tale about a legendary treasure hidden in a mountain and as an eminent modernist he allegorically connects the (stylized) history in a complex narrative structure through a constant change of time levels, retrospection and parallel actions as well as confronting the immediate revolutionary history.


He uses the same techniques in Arsenal. In this film Dovzhenko came closest to establishing a sort of an editing school by making a film which is primarily a visual metaphor, a panorama of the Revolution and a series of fragments connected through associative editing that combine history, folklore, grotesque and allegory. In The Earth, he turns his attention to contemporary times but manages to overcome the ideologically charged theme (rural collectivization) through the pantheistic experience of nature in which the man and the nature connect into one being. Death, a recurring motif in Dovzhenko’s films, is not regarded as a tragic thing but rather as a basic element of the natural cycle and it even acquires some transcendental characteristics. This masterpiece by Dovzhenko, The Earth, completely reveals the basic dialectic essence of his poetics - a structural tension or rather the permanently open mixture of an epic whole and lyricism of separate frames, composed static and skillfully choreographed frames, content and motives based on the emotion of Ukrainian national identity and portrayals of dynamic social changes of the transnational ideological provenance. Dovzhenko’s poetics survived also in his later films in spite of growing political threats; it is evident in Ivan (1932), Aerograd (1935), well-known for its impressively long frames of taigas as well as in the biographical Shchors (1939) and Michurin (1947), and later in the films based on his screenplays and directed by his wife Yuliya Ipolitovna Solntseva, who tried to stay loyal to her husband’s ideas: Poem of the Sea (1958), Chronicle of Flaming Years (1961), Enchanted Desna (1964), The Unforgettable (1967). All these films, at least in fragments, confirm Dovzhenko’s status as one of the biggest romantics (in the best sense) of film art of all time. (Bruno Kragić)