where is the enemy?
by Douglas Messerli
Alexsandr
Dovzhenko (screenplay and director) Арсенал (Arsenal) / 1928
Depending
upon which side of the fight you stood in the early 20th century
between the nationalist, Petliura-led Ukrainians, the Russian Reds who had
ruled Ukraine for hundreds of years and were desperate to keep it within the
Russian borders, and the new-developed Ukrainian Bolsheviks, Ukrainian workers
who sought some of the values of Russian politics but also fought for an independent
Ukraine. The boundaries between these three battling forces were not always
clear and, the Bolshevik position, in particular—the position from which
Alexsandr Dovzhenko’s important film, Arsenal
seems to be arguing—was seen by the nationalists as traitorous, and in fact
probably did help in weakening the nationalists and helping the Russians to
overtake Petliura’s troops.
Perhaps we should simply say that
Dovzhenko tells his story of the 1918 uprising of Bolsheviks at the Kiev
Arsenal features a hero, Tymish Stoyan, who seemingly supports the Bolshevik
position. But the complexity of Dovzhenko’s work, particularly its use of the
classical Ukrainian literary form, “the duma” (an oral lament), makes it
difficult to characterize, just as in in his Earth, as a simple embracement of new Soviet values—despite the
fact that the Russians themselves saw Dovzhenko’s “Historical-Epic” in that
way, and, particularly in the Red-Russians’ charge across the Ukrainian
landscape in Episode Six, the director tells the tale through the methods of
the older tradition.
In fact, Dovzhenko makes his case for a
far-more pacifist view in the very first of his seven episodes as the warring
World War I troops attack an empty trench, while Tymish (Semen Svashenko), as a
young soldier, arrives to find no one there, crying out as he tosses away his
rifle, “Where is the enemy?”
Half-embedded corpses are scattered
throughout the landscape; in another short sequence we see a German soldier,
suffering from laughing gas, slowly going insane. Despite the continued
assaults, the battles we observe are already over. But before they soldiers can
even assimilate that fact, new battles are being plotted as Tsar Nicholas,
writing a letter in St. Petersburg, seems to have no perspective of larger
issues, writing instead of a hunting expedition and the weather. So devastated
are the surviving members of the populace who some simply stand in a stupor,
one not even registering the sexual assaults she suffers by hands of a local
official; a mother who has lost her three elder sons, beats her young boy and
daughter; a seemingly docile village man beats his own horse before reclaiming
it and pulling it off.
The soldiers from the front have not
even returned home before they are rounded up and forced to sign up for service
in Petilura’s forces; of his peers, seemingly only Tymish refuses to sign up.
Asked who he is, he describes himself as a “demolished soldier. An Arsenal
worker.” When asked whether is a Ukrainian (i.e. a nationalist) or a worker
(i.e. a Bolshevik), Tymish cannot comprehend separating the two. He is unable,
as the insightful on-line critic Ray Uzwyshyn points out, to divide himself
into two opposing beings. As Dovzhenko makes quite clear, however, the Petliura
forces do not represent the workers as much as they do the Ukrainian
capitalists; the director insists on bringing up the question that few loyal
Ukrainian’s of the day could ask themselves: are we better off as a free nation
of landowners or a free nation of workers?
In short, Dovzhenko asserts, at least
subliminally, that the Ukrainian nationalist’s forces were in tandem with the
Soviet-led Black Sea Fleet, which would ultimately, of course, abandon the
Ukrainian cause to support the Soviet domination.
When Tymish joins the Bolshevik strike of
the Arsenal, moreover, it is with less political commitment and zealotry than
out of a sense of his identity with the working class, which throughout the
film, Dovzhenko dramatically represents in dichotomy to dithering, confused
capitalists who throughout the film shout out unheard speeches that demand
total allegiance to their blather. As most critics have observed, Arsenal is less about the actual
uprising that a singular battle between Tymish, as representative of the
workers. Indeed, nearly all the figures of Dovzhenko’s film are types, symbols
of their positions rather than realist figures who act out deeds of
psychologically-perceived values. And Dovzhenko’s style and methods are far
closer to the late 20th century director, Sergei Paradjanov, who,
also using traditional narrative story-telling methods, created films that
relied on a series of emblems, short scenarios dependent upon the visual more
than action.
In the end of Dovzhenko’s film, as Tymish,
attempting to battle the nationalist forces, finds his gun in empty, the
character ceases almost entirely to be a “real” human being, and is transformed
into an image that stands for all of the insane destruction which the country,
and by extension, the world, has been forced to face. The attackers’ guns no
longer can kill him, as he tears open his shirt, rising up—as Uzwyshyn argues—as
a visual icon of Edvard Munch’s 1910 painting The Scream. Whether or not Dovzhenko was actually thinking of the
painting or not, the image represents that emotion and reveals that the
director perceives his “character” less as a figure who stands for a political
point of view than as a symbol of the oppression such views impose upon their
populaces. In the end, both the reactionary Ukrainian critics of the director’s
own time, nearly all of whom damned the film, and the Soviets who saw in this
director’s work a viewpoint close to their own, missed, it seems to me, the
true message of Dovzhenko’s stunning
cinema-making. Making films when he did, Dovzhenko had always to carefully
balance seemingly political statements with his own, often avant-garde,
film-making procedures. It meant that often he could not make the films he
might have desired to shoot, but it also meant that he survived the years of
Stalin’s purges without completely abandoning his own values in art.
Los Angeles, May
23, 2014
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