Earth

Director: Oleksandr Dovzhenko

1930 / 84min / 35mm

Dovzhenko’s final silent feature, which depicts a clash between reactionary landowning peasants and modernizing paupers bringing the first tractor to their corner of the Ukrainian countryside, has by now spawned nearly a century of debate: is it a propagandist paean to the collectivization project in Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, which would have catastrophic results in the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, or, as certain Soviet censors suspected, an on-the-sly celebration of a Ukrainian folk culture grounded in an ancient connection between the peasants and the soil they’ve so long tilled, threatened with impending erasure? What is not up for question is that Earth is among the greatest of films from the silent film canon, its distinct synthesis of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov making it something like a summation of what had come before it, while its lyric ode to the natural world and those that live with it in harmony blazes a trail for the Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the future to follow.

35mm print courtesy of the Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw

Live musical accompaniment by Fima Chupakhin, piano & synths, and Julian Kytasty, bandura & vocals on Saturday, October 10th

Part of Oleksandr Dovzhenko: Earth and Empire