Arsenal

Director: Oleksandr Dovzhenko

1929 / 92min / 35mm

The film that made Dovzhenko’s international reputation, Arsenal depicts—in thrillingly innovative, lyric cinematic language—a 1918 episode in the Russian Civil War, a worker’s uprising at Kyiv’s Arsenal Factory, and its brutal military suppression, in the midst of fighting between Bolshevik forces and the Central Rada of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, in whose ranks Dovzhenko may have served for a time. One of a quartet of films commissioned by Soviet authorities to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution and, of the four, the most ambivalent, showing an understanding, in turns, of both the universalist, workers-of-the-world-unite Bolshevik cause and a Ukrainian nationalism rooted in soul and soil.

35mm print courtesy of the Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw

Distributor: The Film Desk

Live musical accompaniment by Fima Chupakhin, piano & synths, and Fabio Rojas, percussion, on Sunday, October 11th

Part of Oleksandr Dovzhenko: Earth and Empire