Press Release UCLA Film and Television Archive & Hollywood Trident Foundation present
Earth - The Films of Alexander Dovzhenko Thursday, October 3 Â Tuesday, October 8, 2002
Unquestionably one of the towering figures of Soviet cinema, Alexander Dovzhenko is one of the few filmmakers to whom the label "film poet" could aptly apply. There is an extraordinary delicacy in his use of visual metaphor, a complexity in his use of imagery, that separates him from his more ideologically driven contemporaries Eisenstein, Vertov and Pudovkin.
While those directors were influenced by the Constructivist movement, which likened works of art to machines and sought to expose the inner workings of artistic style, Dovzhenko drew inspiration from his roots in Ukrainian folk culture for the passionate celebration of his native landscapes and the people who worked them. Nowhere can this be seen more powerfully than in the film considered Dovzhenko's masterpiece, EARTH, a stunning work that celebrates a natural order of being, from seeds planted in the ground to the stars in the sky.
Like Eisenstein, Dovzhenko ran afoul of the Stalinist cultural authorities, and his later career is sadly characterized by blocked projects or films which he was forced under duress to drastically alter. Yet even in his most politically flavored works, his extraordinary sensibility for capturing nature onscreen never failed him; even his war documentaries can be read as laments for the landscapes he knew and loved so well. Also like Eisenstein, Dovzhenko devoted much of his final years to teaching, and his influence can be found in many of those who would revolutionize Soviet cinema in the 1960s: Andrei Tarkovsky, Larissa Shepitko and Andrei Konchalovsky.
*Screenings will be introduced by scholars of Dovzhenko's work.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3
7:30 p.m. Earth - The Films of Alexander Dovzhenko EARTH (Zemlya) (1930) Dovzhenko's undisputed masterpiece, EARTH is a rumination on nature's cycles of death and rebirth. That this primeval meta-myth, like most of the director's work, grew out of a banal agitprop assignment-to make a film that would support the then-intensifying efforts at collectivizing Soviet agriculture-only makes it more of a wonder. The serenity reaches truly mystic levels when the culprit in a murder ostensibly crucial for the narrative confesses the deed, yet hardly anyone seems to care. Not to worry: the earth will do its own healing, and mete out its own punishment. Ukrainefilm-Kiev. Scenario: A. Dovzhenko. Cinematography: Danylo Demutsky. With: Stepan Shkurat, Semyon Svashenko, Julia Solntseva. 35mm, silent with English intertitles, 62 min. (21 fps)
Preceded by
LOVE BERRY (Yagodka lyubvi) (1926)
Dovzhenko's debut film is a farce that involves a dandified barber's attempts to get rid of the titular "love berry" (i.e., his illegitimate offspring); even today, its ultra-permissive sexual politics force one to take notice. VUFKU-Odessa. Scenario: A. Dovzhenko. Cinematography: Danylo Demutsky, Joseph Rona. With: Mar'yan Krushelnytsky, Margarita Chardynina-Barska. 35mm, silent with English intertitles, 30 min. (21 fps)
*IN PERSON: Marco Carrynyk, Dovzhenko scholar and translator.
*Live musical accompaniment by Michael Mortilla.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5
7:30 p.m. Earth - The Films of Alexander Dovzhenko ZVENIGORA
(1928) Ostensibly a revolutionary epic, ZVENIGORA is in effect almost a religious one, refracting a millennium of Ukrainian history through myth and superstition. The timeless central trope-an old man tells his grandson about a treasure buried in a mountain-anchors an array of magical recurrences and parallels that keep the film's politicized present firmly tethered to the fairy-tale past. Dovzhenko called ZVENIGORA his "party membership card," but steeped as it is in gentle Ukrainian lore, it also invites comparisons to Gogol. VUFKU-Odessa. Scenario: Mike Johansen, Yurko Tyutyunnyk, A. Dovzhenko. Cinematography: Boris Zavelev, A. Pankratyev, V. Horytsyn. With: Semyon Svashenko, Mykola Nademsky, H. Astafyev. 35mm, silent with English intertitles, 65 min. (21 fps)
ARSENAL
(1929)
Commissioned to make a feature that would glorify the 1918 battle between Bolshevik workers at a Kiev munitions plant and White Russian troops, Dovzhenko turned ARSENAL, according to film scholar Vance Kepley, Jr., into "one of the few Soviet political films which seems even to cast doubt on the morality of violent retribution." The crucial scene of a railroad catastrophe provides a potent response to the era's typically iconic use of the train as a symbol of power and progress. Dovzhenko's eye for wartime absurdities (for example, an attack on an empty trench) anticipates later antiwar sentiments in films by Renoir and Kubrick. VUFKU-Odessa. Scenario: A. Dovzhenko. Cinematography: Danylo Demutsky.
With: Semyon Svashenko, Amvroziy Buchma, Mykola Nademsky. 35mm, silent with English intertitles, 92 min. (21 fps)
*IN PERSON: George Liber, Professor, University of Alabama.
*Live musical accompaniment by Michael Mortilla.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8
7:30 p.m. Earth - The Films of Alexander Dovzhenko IVAN
(1932) Driven to near-suicidal depression by the rather cool acceptance of EARTH, Dovzhenko followed up his masterwork with a more popular reiteration of its main motifs. Like EARTH, IVAN concerns itself with the natural rhythms of country life disrupted by the beat of looming industrialization. The latter is represented here by a river dam, a grand and awesome project the fruits of which Dovzhenko curiously withholds from the viewer. Etched against this monumental project is a story of a country lad's progress from a peasant hut to a workers' school. Ukrainefilm-Kiev. Screenplay: A. Dovzhenko. Cinematography: Danylo Demutsky, Yuriy Yekelchik, Mikhail Glider. With: Petro Masokha, Semyon Shahayda, K. Bondarevsky, D. Holubynsky. 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles, 90 min.
THE BATTLE FOR SOVIET UKRAINE (Bitva za nashu Sovetskuyu Ukrainu) (1943)
Like many other Soviet filmmakers and artists, Dovzhenko threw his talents behind the total mobilization for the war effort against Germany. The first of Dovzhenko's wartime documentaries incorporates footage of the invasion of the Ukraine taken by German cameramen but later captured by the Soviets. There are also scenes of the counterattack, as well as unique scenes depicting the battlefield cooperation between Ukrainian and Czechoslovakian troops. Central and Ukranian Newsreel Studios. Producer: V. Murin. Narration: A. Dovzhenko. 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles, 80 min.
*IN PERSON: Bohdan Nebesio, Professor, University of Alberta.
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Hollywood Trident Network
23rd Floor, 660 S. Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, Ca 90017
Email: semotiuk@aol September 12th, 2002
The above news release has been issued by the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive jointly with the Hollywood Trident Foundation concerning the upcoming Dovzhenko Film Festival. A reception to open the festival will take place on Thursday, October 3rd, 2002 at 6:30 p.m. It will be held in the lobby of the James Bridges screening theater on the campus of U.C.L.A. and will be open to all ticket holders and special guests invited by the hosts. Details concerning tickets and other arrangements can be obtained by contacting the U.C.L.A. film archive at (310) 206-8013.
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