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By Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Guardian, UK, Friday July 4, 2003
One of the most neglected major film-makers of the 20th century, Alexander
Dovzhenko has never come close to receiving his due. This is in part a
problem related to our categories and labels. His fervent, pantheistic,
folkloric
films develop more like lyric poems, moving from one stanza to the next,
than like narratives, proceeding by way of paragraphs or chapters. The world
they describe is one of Gogolesque horses that sing or reprimand their
owners, noble cows, glistening meadows, wily Cossacks, dancing peasants,
declamatory speeches by wild-eyed individuals, sunflowers in sunny close-ups
alongside noble women with similarly open faces, vast reaches of empty sky
over fields of waving wheat.
Dovzhenko's vision is of a natural order that paradoxically seems both
brutal and harmonious, primitive landscapes bursting with animal and vegetal
life. One calls this poetry because it comprises a paean to sheer existence,
singing about rather than relating or recounting what it sees. But cinema as
it's generally packaged is understood more in terms of prose narrative, as a
string of events. In Dovzhenko's world, the events often turn out to be the
shots themselves.
Furthermore, most accounts we have of Dovzhenko's work are found in
discussions of Russian cinema, but the man wasn't Russian. He was a
Ukrainian who fought against the Russians, and, as a consequence of having
done so, is said to have lived under the surveillance of the Soviet
government for the rest of his life while making Soviet films, most of them
set in the Ukraine. (It appears that this surveillance has only recently
come to light. Marco Carynnyk, the English translator and editor of
Dovzhenko's writings, recently wrote to me that he read a long article on
the subject in a Ukrainian journal that quoted extensively from a secret
police case file on Dovzhenko.) If we ask whether William Faulkner - another
avant-garde bard from the sticks - was primarily an American or primarily a
southerner, assuming that these terms can be mutually exclusive, we might
wind up similarly confused.
For related reasons, Dovzhenko's best work is found towards the beginning of
his career rather than at the end. So one can't object too strenuously to
the absence of two late features in the Cambridge film festival's upcoming
Dovzhenko retrospective. During the final decade when he was still able to
work, Stalinist directives and roadblocks depreciated his visionary talent
from fitful brilliance (Shchors, 1939) to encroaching kitsch (Michurin,
1949), culminating in the mercifully unfinished Farewell America of 1950 -
which the festival is showing, along with a couple of uneven wartime
documentaries - whose surviving fragments are so discouraging that it's
impossible even to determine whether or not they're sincere.
Substantially more personal are the five posthumous widescreen features
derived from Dovzhenko's unrealised scripts and directed by his widow, Julia
Solntseva - a one-time actress who starred in the science fiction epic
Aelita (1924) six years before she met Dovzhenko, and worked as his
assistant on most of his pictures starting with Earth, in which she also
acted. The second of these Solntseva features is being shown, the 1961
Chronicles of the Years of Fire. Unlike the subsequent and sublime The
Enchanted Desna, it can't be termed any sort of masterpiece, but a full
quarter of a century after seeing it, I can still vividly recall a dialogue
between a delirious woman and a male statue towering over her on a beautiful
Ukrainian hillside.
In fact, Dovzhenko was able to work at his peak for only about a third of
the 23-year span covered by his oeuvre - a period stretching from Zvenigora
in 1927 to Aerograd in 1935 that encompasses five features, the middle three
being Arsenal (1929), Earth (1930) and Ivan (1932). My favourite, Ivan, his
first sound picture, also happens to be the least well-known. But many of
the most neglected masterworks of Soviet cinema are radical early sound
features - bold experiments by Lev Kuleshov (The Great Consoler), Vsevolod
Pudovkin (Deserter), and Dziga Vertov (Enthusiasm) as well as Dovzhenko that
were initially attacked domestically for their "formalism" and then ignored
everywhere else.
Dovzhenko's earliest films, also showing in the retrospective, demonstrate
how accomplished and resourceful he could be as a commercial director: the
half-hour Chaplinesque comedy Love Berry (1926), about a vain barber trying
to dispose of his illegitimate offspring, and his feature-length spy
thriller with British villains, Diplomatic Pouch (1927), in which he appears
as an actor, stoking the engine on a ship. But it's telling that he went
straight from these light entertainments to his most difficult film,
Zvenigora (1927) - a highly personal folk tale interweaving several separate
periods in Ukrainian history that he once called "a catalogue of all my
creative possibilities".
When Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, fresh from the triumphs of,
respectively, Mother and Battleship Potemkin, attended an early screening of
Zvenigora - their first encounter with Dovzhenko - in an auditorium with
mirrored walls, they were dumbstruck by the experience. "Goodness gracious,
what a sight!" Eisenstein wrote years later. "We saw sharp-keeled boats
sailing out of double exposures. The rump of a black stallion being painted
white. A horrible monk with a lantern being either disinterred or buried - I
am not sure which."
Dovzhenko was born in 1894 in a town by the Desna river, the son of an
illiterate Ukrainian Cossack farmer who also had to work as a driver and
pitch-burner to feed his family. Alexander had 13 siblings and only one of
them survived, a sister who became a doctor. "I still cannot bear to look at
funerals," he wrote in the 1930s, "and yet they pass through all my scripts
and all my pictures, for the question of life and death affected my
imagination when I was still a child and left its imprint on all my work."
Having recently seen half a dozen of his films, some for the first time, I
consider this an understatement, because I can't think of any other
film-maker who has dealt as comprehensively, as beautifully, and as
profoundly with death - or who has, for the same reasons, so many things to
say about what it means to be alive. I'm thinking of a man, in Arsenal,
missing half his teeth, blackened by smoke, attacked by laughing gas on the
battle front, and laughing hysterically while a corpse nearby is seen
grinning in a hideous rictus. I'm also thinking of the blissfully peaceful
and contented death of the grandfather in harmony with rural nature - a
loving portrait of Dovzhenko's own grandfather - in Earth, and the woman in
the same film who tears off all her clothes in hysterical grief when her
boyfriend is shot.
Equally relevant is the dam construction worker in Ivan who falls to his
death, and the many deaths between fierce antagonists in a Siberian forest -
some of them prefaced by the equivalent of arias - in the clearly operatic
Aerograd, his first film made outside his native Ukraine, in which the
sounds of plane engines are used as functionally as voices.
Are these propaganda films? Yes and no; in many ways, not counting the
wartime documentaries, Dovzhenko makes that category seem close to
meaningless. The features were all made in part for propaganda purposes but
failed more often than not to carry out those objectives. Most of them are
no less clearly avant-garde films financed by state money, and this was
bound to make some bureaucrats furious. Earth, a film about the arrival of
collectivised farming in a Ukrainian village, was received so poorly in the
early 1930s that Dovzhenko's father was thrown out of a collective farm as a
consequence, and Ivan might have gotten his son into even more trouble.
There are three separate characters named Ivan in the latter film - a
celebration of the building of a huge dam on the Dnieper River that never
even bothers to show us the completed dam itself. It lavishes much of its
attention and affection on an irascible old coot who prefers to spend his
time fishing on the construction site while everyone else works. Similarly,
part of what's disconcerting about Aerograd from a narrative standpoint -
even though it quickly became a favourite of both Elia Kazan and James Agee
when it opened in the US, under the title Frontier - is that it supposedly
celebrates another massive Soviet construction project that we never see
being fulfilled, or in this case even started.
A curious kind of pagan fantasy, the film unfolds in a vast Siberian forest
on the Pacific coast populated by religious villagers, hunters, adventurers,
and Japanese spies, where the Soviets plan to establish an airfield and a
city. We're led to expect a triumphant conclusion with the completed
airfield and city, but because the work never seems to get properly started,
it's hard to know exactly what's being extolled. Is it the world, or life
itself? If this is propaganda, we need to ask: on behalf of what?
· The Dovzhenko retrospective runs from Thursday until July 20 [2003]
at the Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, as part of the Cambridge film festival
(01223-504444), then tours.
By Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Guardian, London, UK, Friday July 4, 2003
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,990417,00.html
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