abstraction
and individuation
by Douglas Messerli
Aleksandr Dovzhenko (writer and director) Земля (Russian, Zemlya) (Earth) / 1930
Dovzhenko’s great film of 1930 was
intended to be a kind of Russian propagandist film encouraging Ukranian kulak
(individual and often rich farmers) to join with one another in establishing
state collectives, and the kernel of the tale of kulak unrest and the murder of
a young member of the komsomol, Vasyl (Basil) (the beautiful Semyon Svashenko)
remains at the core of Dovzhenko’s movie. And the film, in outline, presents its
political “plot.”
Despite the opposition of Vasyl’s father, Semyon (Nikolai Nademsky) and
his uncle Opanas (Stepan Shkurat) are opposed to it, as are their neighbors,
Arkhip Bilokin (Ivan Franko) and his son Khoma (Thomas) (Pyotr Masokha), preferring
to work the rich land and its harvests in the old manner of oxen and plow.
To prove them wrong, Vasyl and his compatriots arrange to have a tractor
sent, and proudly drive it through their small village, with crowds arriving to
gape at the new wonder. When suddenly the tractor stops, the driver discovers
that the radiator is dry. With no water in sight, the komsomol members are
stymied until the driver suggests that the men piss into the radiator, and the
tractor moves forward again.
The following montage shows Vasyl busily harvesting the wheat,
demonstrating the entire process of gathering the grain to the production of
bread. But in the process he also destroys the fences belong to the Bilokins.
That night, as Vasyl joyfully dances home, he is killed by Khoma.
Distraught by the death of his son, Semyon orders the priest off his
land, and asks Vasyl’s friends to bury him instead, in a new manner with
contemporary songs, since his son believed so strongly in the future. They
agree to do so, and the entire village joins them in a joyous celebration of
Vasyl, Khoma going mad in the process and admitting his guilt.
Vasyl’s glory will fly around the world, argues one friend, just as does
the new Soviet airplane. So ends the “propagandist” aspects of Dovzhenko’s
tale.
Had the director simply presented this in simple terms, the authorities
might have been pleased, but history would never have bothered about this
masterwork, often rated today as one of the most important works of film
history. It is almost as if, mesmerized by his homeland’s landscape, families,
products, and cultural perspectives, Dovzhenko could not resist celebrating them
in a manner that renders his film’s political intentions nearly mute. Soviet
critics of the day certainly seemed to miss the basic story, describing the
film as “ideologically vicious.”
The film begins with vast waving fields of grains, lingering camera
shots of apples and pears, and the death of a family elder, who just before
dying, sits up to eat his last pear. Family individuals are shot separately as
in 19th century portraits, usually with camera looking up and
directly into their worn and drawn faces, or, in the case of the handsome Vasyl,
portraying him in silhouette, looking off into the distance, obviously symbolic of the
direction he would take his family and friends. *
In the long scene in which we see Vasyl harvesting the wheat, Dovzhenko
turns his basically realist tale into a series of abstract images, as the wheat
and its chaff go hurtling endlessly through space, with Ukrainian maidens
gathering the bundles by tying them together in braids of grain. Huge mixing
containers beat up the dough before it is molded into the form of loaves and
placed into gigantic ovens. We see thousands of loaves of bread being spewed
out of the ovens into space. In short, the individuation of the first scenes is
utterly transformed into collective abstraction, reiterating the theme, but
also transforming this film from a simple realist tale into a wondrous cinematic
spectacle of the abstract akin to the paintings of Russian artists such as Kasimir
Malevich.
Once more the earth is stirred up into dust, while Vasyl’s mother bears
another baby.
In the final scene the rains
gather, pouring down upon the rich landscape, dripping seemingly endlessly
across the surfaces of pears, apples, melons and other fruits, which in the
director’s hands become another kind of abstract representation of nature. And,
in the end, Dovzhenko’s film seems more concerned with the cycles of nature and
human life and death than the political fable at its core. Daily life matters
in Earth far more than the political
fissures and bonds of social structures. The individual and their eccentricities
seem of far greater worth than the abstractions of a collective living. If
nothing else, Dovzhenko gives them equal value in his idyllic testament to the Ukrainian
way of life.
By coincidence (my old friend) Network sent me this film on the very days
when the modern Ukraine was rebelling against their President’s attempt to
realign their country with the Russia. You certainly do perceive in The Earth the importance of the Ukraine
to the former Soviet Union. It seems almost eerie to realize that most of the
work was filmed in and near Kiev, where just yesterday fires were blazing in
protest of the alignment which Dovzhenko’s kulaks also fought.
*In Earth’s
continual series of friezes, we can perceive the film’s later influence on
other Soviet filmmakers, including the Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov.
Los
Angeles, February 21, 2014
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (February 2014).
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