RUSSIAN CULTURE NAVIGATOR

english
win1251
KOI8
By Olga Bobrova
All computer magic can at times look like a naive game of a child next to an old black-and-white close-up of a silent film shot with primitive equipment but by a man of genius and a true master of cinema.
A village boy is returning home from his first date. "Here he goes along the road, lit with the moon. Light dust under his feet. The dew on the grass. Dark horses on the pasture. The soil smells of night flowers and fruits. All is fragrant around him, even the dust on the road, even the dew. Overflowed with happiness and the magic beauty of the night, the guy breaks into a dance, a dance that seems to make one of man and nature, earth and space. But all of a sudden there comes a gunshot... It kills life and destroys the harmony..." In these words Alexander Dovzhenko described a scene from his film "The Earth". In 1930 the film shook Europe. That was the first time Europe had come in contact with the work of the Soviet master. Later "The Earth" entered into the list of motion picture masterpieces of all times and nations, and Dovzhenko's name and work became part of the golden collection of world cinema. Unfortunately, the contemporary viewer is rarely concerned with the treasures of this collection. Apparently many are strangers to Dovzhenko's films, but his name is well-known to the entire cultural world. The great master was ahead of his time and in many ways he is ahead of the people who live today.
In 1928 Dovzhenko, who at the time already had his first innovative movie "Zvenigora" to his credit, said jokingly: "We want to work until we are 100 years old. Please, don't bother us." But his life was not long. He lived to be a mere 62. In his lifetime he had more than his fair share of disapproval, interference and bans on the part of the authorities. Dovzhenko managed to shoot only seven full-length films and three documentaries, just a small part of what he has left unaccomplished in scripts and sketches, of what was stopped half-way on orders from the authorities. Nor did his main dream come true: to shoot a film based on the historical novel "Taras Bulba" by the Russian classical writer Nikolai Gogol, and to write a book, "The Golden Gates", an epic featuring Ukraine.
There was not a thing Dovzhenko was not accused of! The accusations ranged from Ukrainian nationalism to Hinduist pantheism. They sound ridiculous today but in the years of Stalin's totalitarian regime this was not a laughing matter at all. Yet Dovzhenko never cared to adjust himself to the regime. Nor did he conceal his views. He looked upon himself as a son of his native Ukraine and held dear all the values cultivated in him as a child in a peasant family: respect for labor, land, and nature, a poetic attitude toward life, the famous Ukrainian sense of humor and memory of the historical past. These things were of eternal universal value to him. Dovzhenko used to repeat: "As an artist, I belong to mankind. I am its servant. My art belongs to the world."
That the artist really meant this was immediately understood by the most perceptive people as soon as Dovzhenko's first films appeared on the screen. His great contemporary, another motion picture director Sergei Eisenstein, recalled once that the film "Zvenigora" aroused an association with the work of the German romantic writer Hoffmann for its amazing merger of reality and fantasy. The poetic film was based on a popular legend about a treasure, its message was that happiness lies in freedom, not in gold.
Americans found that another masterpiece of Dovzhenko's, "The Earth" (1930), had a lot in common with films by American masters, for one, those by John Ford. Things portrayed by Dovzhenko - the penetration of a new life with its new social relations and machinery into the patriarchal patterns of a Ukrainian village - were all the issues once high on the American national agenda too.
In Italy Dovzhenko was dubbed a 20th-century Homer, while Italian neo-realists of the 1950s-60s were described as his pupils and followers.
Once Sergei Eisenstein compared Dovzhenko to human dynamite. It was not the power to destroy, of course, that provoked the comparison. Eisenstein meant the energy of creative force, the explosive power of his temperament and passion he employed in his work. This work could be anything: shooting a film, writing a book, setting up a film studio in Kiev (the one that bears his name), or working on articles, leaflets and short stories (during World War Two Dovzhenko worked as a war correspondent).
What Dovzhenko was anxious about he expressed in his art with the passion of a romantic. "I belong to the poetic camp in the art of cinema," he used to say. He looked at the most concrete events and gave them a poetic interpretation on the screen. In one of his best films, "Arsenal" (1929), he turned what was in fact a chronicle of a workers' uprising into a poetic narration. There is a hero who is immune to the bullet, a mother who is an embodiment of a mourning Madonna and legendary horses that race through space and time. All this was conveyed with previously unheard-of and amazingly scarce cinematic means.
Perhaps, the fantastic freedom Dovzhenko brought to the art of cinema might be explained by his lack of any systematic training as a motion-picture director, which left him free from any regulations. He came to the cinema at the age of 33 after having tried his hand in painting and in the theater. By the time he had experienced a lot but was still very sensitive and open to the world. Born in poverty in an out-of-the-way place, he had a hard time getting educated. He studied in Kiev and took part in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Then he worked as a diplomat in Warsaw and Berlin. Back home he began working as an artist and as such even gained some popularity. But cinema, a young art, promised a new breath of air, new opportunities. This was what Dovzhenko believed in. So did his wife, a beautiful actress Julia Solntseva. Dovzhenko and his wife could have built brilliant careers shooting Hollywood-style commercial films. But this amazing couple chose a different path: they created a cinematic world of their own, complicated, versatile, clear and romantic.
Young people were attracted to Dovzhenko, whose manner with them was always kind and considerate. But did he leave any cinematic school of his own? It's hard to give a positive answer, though Dovzhenko taught for years at the Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. His master class released brilliant film directors, including Georgy Shengelaya, Otar Ioseliani, Larisa Shepitko and Jemma Firsova. The School of Dovzhenko, however, does exist, but of a different quality. His work continues to exist in a changed form in the poetic works of the Ukrainian directors Ilienko and Osyka, in the films of the Armenian Sergei Paradzhanov and in the masterpieces of the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky. The Oscar prize winner Nikita Mikhalkov, who holds Dovzhenko in high esteem, says his films have scenes inspired by the master.
Dovzhenko said once: "My films are like apples. If you shake an apple-tree thoroughly, you will get 500 apples, if just slightly - a mere 10." Can we say today that we have gathered all the apples from Dovzhenko's apple-tree? The prominent cinema critic Neya Zorkaya ventured an answer: "Frankly speaking, now is not the time of Dovzhenko. Mass cinema, which occupies all the space, has no use for Dovzhenko with his apple-tree. But in an eternal perspective Dovzhenko enters the 21st century, and does it as an absolutely unshaken apple-tree, though his work is well studied, especially in Ukraine. Dovzhenko was not a mass culture master. His was the path of an experimenter, of a master of poetic cinema. The most amazing in his work were the queer things he did, his departures from the narrative flow of the film. These innovations, I believe, will be part of the aesthetics of the future and will eventually become common in mass cinema. The world is witnessing audiences' return to movie-theaters. The screen will sooner or later demand new methods and old craftsmanship instead of the boring speaking heads. As for Dovzhenko, he is the inexhaustible source of such craftsmanship, the essence of true cinema."
 
 
 
 
 
 

BACK TO MAIN PAGE