Zvenigora

Full review on my blog max4movies: Zvenigora is a Soviet silent black and white drama about a mysterious old man who spends centuries to find a legendary treasure buried in the middle of the Ukraine. The movie is essentially an epic fictionalized retelling of the country's history. Using recurring characters, who should be seen as symbols or embodied ideologies, several historical struggles are retold (e.g., the invasion of the Poles in the 18th century or the October Revolution in 1917). However, as there is no real plot to tie the several episodes together, the movie all too often feels fragmented and disjointed. Together with the symbolic dialogues and that at least some basic knowledge of Ukrainian and/or Soviet history is needed to understand certain scenes, the overall movie alienates many viewers. And while the production values and the cinematography are often impressive and the mix of historical events and surreal elements is ambitious, Zvenigora falls short in presenting a coherent journey.

Zvenigora is, in terms of narrative and content, one of the most remarkable avant-garde films of an exuberantly experimental period. The film uses the central construct of a legend regarding treasure buried in Mount Zvenigora to build a montage of scenes praising Ukrainian industrialisation, attacking the European bourgeoisie, celebrating the beauty of the Ukrainian steppe and re-telling ancient myths.

The narrative is built upon Modernist lines, disregarding the traditional, novelistic storytelling techniques and instead using abrupt shifts in time and using the constructive devices of avant-garde poets such as Blok, Bely and Mayakovsky to create a picture of modern Ukraine that pushes in several directions at once.

There are some incredibly striking tableaux that require the viewers to create a structure for themselves (such as the Bolshevik soldier directing his own execution) although the climax does draw the preceding events together, combining the dialectical threads of modern industry and the old man's myth together in two exhilarating scenes.

The cinematography is fascinating - elements of the style of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Protazanov and Kuleshov are recognisable, yet Zvenigora seems completely different to any of them. The juxtaposition of rapid montages, swift city tours and slow, poetic journeys around the countryside is powerful, and the mythical scenes, although winding, are beautifully realised with a dreamlike quality to them.

Zvenigora is not Dovzhenko's masterpiece, if only because his Earth (1930) is one of the greatest Russian films ever made. However, it is highly recommended, although if you are new to Russian film of the period it is probably not the best place to start.

The first part of Aleksandr Dovzhenko's trilogy (followed by "Arsenal" and "Earth") focuses on a man's hunt for treasure buried somewhere in a mountain, thereby showing a millennium of Ukrainian history. Beyond that, "Zvenigora" is about the relationship between humans and nature. Apparently, Dovzhenko was of the opinion that humanity's full submission to nature kept humans backwards, and that understanding and control of nature is required to advance (which they were supposed to have achieved with the October Revolution). When the movie got released, the Soviet magazine Kino (Cinema) called it bourgeois and nationalistic, although Dovzhenko was allowed to keep working after that.

Anyway, worth seeing.

For the record, Zvenigora is the Russian rendering of the name. In Ukrainian it's Zvenyhora, since in Ukrainian the Cyrillic G has a sound that's halfway between G and H.

With Eisenstein - scientist of film, scholar - it was about synthesized image that opened eyes with conflict of the individual parts. It was a studied thing, architectural. This, on the other hand, is what they were fond of calling back then a 'cinematic poem'. So, yes, the stanza is evocative of soul, the rhythm seductive with earthly lyricism; you can see how all this is later revitalized again into poetry with Tarkovsky.

Yet even though the heart is old world, dwelled by spiritual yearnings about the past and rural pageantry - the protagonist is an old man who escorts us through legend or memory - the eye is unerringly modern; it sees in ways that, now with hindsight, we can recognize as distinctly cinematic and only possible with the camera.

So an old battle is diffused with dreamlike ambiance, reconstructed mechanically by actors moving like tinker-toys, but modern life is dazzling where shown; dynamic, disorienting. There are some amazing shots of electric city night humming with motion that I will keep with me. It is ultimately about these two worlds briefly coexisting in the same frame, one rushing against the other, clashing or making way for the locomotion forwards.

Oh, there is the brief forray into civil war, and the brave, statuesque Red officer who must order his own firing squad. But elsewhere the Reds are shown to flee a village in defeat. The politics are ambivalent, mere footnote in the larger flow and pull.

Looking at the few reviews I've read, I'd like to strike a balance. I'd just bought the recently issued 3 film boxed set of Dovzhenko's War Trilogy, of which, this is the start. I bought the set as it was an absolute bargain, making it little more than the fairly well-known 'Earth' that I'd heard about and wanted to see.

Firstly, I took 'cinematic poetry' to be just that, images and scenes that evoked a story rather than simply reciting it in the usual way. Thus heavy symbolism plays a huge part and I have to disagree with those that say one has to know the subject to appreciate it. I use that word, 'appreciate' rather than 'understand' and it is the very nature of the genre here, known as 'avant-garde' that further takes into realms of fantasy, or, pretentious waffle, if that's how you take it.

Avant-garde is not my favourite genre either but when you consider that this is still the Silent Era - normality would be having a fixed camera, on a studio set and the actors moving around in front of it, in all but the most expensive and adventurous productions. The Russians, at this point, as well some notable German film-makers were doing much more and experimenting with double exposures, cutting, fading, all-sorts, simply to extend both the boundaries of their imagination and cinematic technology.

Of course, film has moved on an awfully long way and so has people's entertainment. These moving images are both historical; a recreated scenario now wouldn't anywhere near the same authenticity - and human. As in stills photography of those days, it is capturing people and their lives that would have seemed so special and fascinating, marrying that up with story-telling would take longer as both film-makers and the public got used to this exciting, new medium. Marx unashamedly exploited artists of all kinds for propaganda purposes and these have, understandably, been seen in a bad light in the West, but thank goodness now, we are finally seeing them for what they are, not were - pioneering and hugely influential.

I'm no historian or film expert and in effect, I haven't really reviewed the title itself but hopefully cast a light on it as a subject. However, I would say that the Mr Bongo reproduction, from the restored print is very good, with hardly a blemish and features a new(?) stereo orchestral score.