Earth

This is one of those "critics' darlings" titles that frequently crops up in "All-Time Best Films" polls; however, it is also one which certainly seems to have lost its edge with the passage of time. While I am generally a fan of politically-themed movies, I have always admired the early Russian classics for their pioneering use of film language but found them oppressively heavy-going viewing overall. This belated Silent is considered to be its director's masterwork and, despite the brevity of its running time (70 minutes), this standard opinion holds true regardless, notwithstanding the relative simplicity of its plot: tragedy strikes a farming community when oncoming progress (the use of a new tractor to plough the land in place of the old horse-driven method) divides it into two factions.

The intertitles on the copy I acquired (taken from the Kino DVD) are stiltedly Americanized and the acting style is typically hammy; what ultimately saves the film and preserves its reputation as a precious cinematic document are the strikingly lyrical compositions – highlighted by the extended funeral sequence of the murdered tractor driver which is powerfully intercut with the breakdown of the killer in a field, the lonely naked wife of the murdered man in the throes of sexual frenzy, a middle-aged villager going through labor pains, an elderly priest invoking a curse upon the godless community that has shunned him and an impromptu political rally by the mourners!

This great masterpiece of Soviet cinema has images so powerful and an editing technique so bold that at times the narrative is transcended. By this I mean that the film goes beyond it's original intention of arguing for changes from individualistic to more technologized and collective agricultural strategies and becomes a kind of realization of what a "liberated" agricultural zone would really look and feel like. This is a film ripe with the excitement of the creation of a new art to match a hopeful new world. It hardly needs to be mentioned that Stalinsit forces decried the final results of this masterpiece; calling it decadent and stylistically elitist. In actuality the film is too Marxist (I would go so far as to say too Leninist) for Stalinism. The film respects the ability of the viewer (and the viewers were assumed to be proletariat working class and agricultural workers) to grapple with rigorous ideas and images and to function outside of the narrative frame of individualistic melodrama. Like many early Soviet films this work seems not only ahead of its time, but, actually ahead of ours.

In Ukraine the landowners hold out against progress and the rights of communally worked farms of the people. When one such farm gets a tractor to further help them one of the richer farmers murders one of the collective, hoping to stop the movement in its tracks. However the opposite is true and the collective rises up out of the oppression and the tragedy to overcome the selfish and cruel approach of the rich.

This is one of those films that I knew I had to see rather than one of those films that are less well regarded but are less demanding to watch. I am glad that I finally got round to it because it is technically and visually a very good film with some very striking images. This is different from it being a good film due to the narrative though because in this regard it is quite a mixed bag. The structure of the tale is not great and it doesn't flow together in a way that I found engaging but more of concern to the modern viewer is the sweeping unquestioning propaganda that the story essentially is. It would be nice to pretend that this does not detract from the film but it does – and not because I happen to disagree with the point being made but just because it is the simplistic clumsy point making of propaganda and it does jar slightly.

Dovzhenko's visuals are where the film is strongest though and it is worth seeing for this because whether is the depiction of sorrow or the beauty of the open fields, he catches it really well. If only he had done more with the performances then things would have been helped, not to mention the clunky dialogue cards (although I have to assume that those are mostly down to poor translation). So as long as you are not expecting this to be a fun experience or a great story then it is indeed a classic film that you should watch as part of an education in cinema.

What an unusual and memorable film this is, almost more like a poem or an impressionist painting than a movie. It's filled with activity and images that push the actual story into the background. Sometimes the characters overreact to events in a highly exaggerated fashion, while at other times they barely respond to what happens - yet it seems both real and believable. The movie is probably not quite as great as some would have it, but it has an unusual appeal that makes you want to watch it (or, perhaps, experience it) over again.

The scenes often have little connection with one another, and it's clear that the plot is not meant to be the main emphasis. On the surface, the story is about the collective farm, their hopes of getting new machinery, and their rivalry with the independent landowners. But it's intended to be something more subtle and worthwhile than a political message. The themes and images involving the characters and, especially, the "Earth" itself, are more vivid than the slight story-line.

To be sure, the collectivist perspective from which the film was made is rather obvious. But that does not detract from this unusual achievement. And while it would not work as light or casual entertainment, it is well worth watching, and it's a movie you won't forget afterwards.

The film ends with a stunning panorama of humanity, a set of images alternately showing; a man running mad, a priest beseeching god to punish, a nude woman raving mad, another going into labor, a funeral procession of stern, solemn faces. So it is all there, with life as this dance between sorrow and new life, between damnation and transcendence

It has all been set in motion by the eye though, the Soviet eye that doesn't contemplate but animates by seeing. In Zvenigora it was the statuesque officer of the Red Army as emblematic of Soviet spirit; here it is the young farmer driving a tractor.

So look how it all transpires, it's more knowledge than film courses offer in a year. Before life was clear, content with unjust hardship and small pleasure - images show tilted skies, fields of hay rolling in the wind, and the old man quietly submitting to the prescribed fate - but with the arrival of the tractor, and so this mechanical eye literally plowing through the frame, it's all vigorously animated in a chorus, a frenzy of splintered image. The scenes of production are so powerfully abstract I register them on a cosmologic level; they might as well be a lost reel from the first moments of the universe, in fact, they are, astutely so, about the genesis of a new world and new life from it, Soviet in this case.

In this new life machines are the engines forward. Man as this machine. In something that could read like the ravings of some futurist manifesto, the young man preaches this new word to an assembly of villagers. So even though, like all silent films, it reaches us as a museum piece, we can and must reclaim it; it is a vigorous cinema pounding with the youthful vision of a new society.

Oh, the failings of that society to materialize as prescribed are known to most, and neither here nor there. The thing is this; the struggle was thought to matter, and so this cinema, perfectly centered in that struggle, provided voice that mattered, the song to work the fields to.

Such voice we find in the powerful metaphor that ends the film. There is fruit everywhere, on the ground, or hanging from branches, and it's pouring down hard; it rains and rains but it is all silently endured and what was thought for a moment that would break life away was merely what washed it clean, watered it to grow.

You may hear that Dovzhenko was a Malick of the time who made his art for the masses. Rather it's the other way around; I like Malick, but there is a tinge of sadness compared to a work like this, that his talents - or anyone's for that matter for a long time - cannot hope to animate, and be animated by, a new world anymore and we're merely chronicling our despairs.

It's all so perfectly centered in a worldview, this one probably the final step in the Soviet cinematic sojourn before sound and censors scattered these makers in the four winds. Only the Japanese centered deeper. Oh, it's a sermon alright; but a sermon that washes perception clean.