EARTH - ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO’S 1930 FILM MASTERPIECE

ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO’S 1930 MASTERPIECE FILM

The first really personal film in Soviet cinema, literally teeming with grandiose images of the natural world, echoing our entry into Autumn.

With spontaneous music from:
Tim Beckham and Lyndon Owen
Free admission, with a voluntary collection

... perhaps the most poetic of the Soviet silents, frequently placed on “Greatest Films” lists. It is propaganda, made to glorify collective farms, finishing shooting shortly before Stalin’s deadly policies of forced collectivization went into effect. Yet there is depth in the operatic Earth that seems to transcend its subject.

In Earth, Dovzhenko creates a model, an impression of an idealized reality of a bucolic mode of life that paradoxically never existed but now is passing away.

"If it’s necessary to choose between truth and beauty, I’ll choose beauty. In it there’s a larger, deeper existence than naked truth. Existence is only that which is beautiful." (Alexander Dovzhenko)

Through Earth’s presented images, there is the sense of lives halted, freed from future destiny. In joining cinema, iconic portraiture and his own personal mythopetic through reference to Byzantine Eastern Orthodox iconographic code, in Earth (1930),

Dovzhenko would construct his own surrealistic death mask of an old way of life.

It opens with vistas of ripening wheat fields, rippling in the wind of the Ukrainian steppe. Fertile seeds from fertile soil–there’s a long history behind the familiar sight. It cuts to a medium shot of a young woman standing beside a sunflower, with the sky providing a natural background. Both are also connected to the fertile soil. Seeds, fields, sun, harvest, life–those few shots elevate their humble subjects into symbols of the most natural, the most beautiful order of things.