Landscapes of the Soul:
The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko

May 8 - 21, 2002
left: earth

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about the series | film descriptions and times

Read more about Alexander Dovzhenko in the new issue of Film Comment.

To hear the schedule for the Alexander Dovzhenko program and directions to The Walter Reade Theater in Ukranian and Russian, please call 212-875-5637.

To order the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Poster for Landscapes of the Soul: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko click here. To order a smaller version click here.

Unquestionably one of the towering figures of Soviet-era 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 all of them were influenced by the Constructivist movement at that time, Dovzhenko drew his inspiration from deep roots in Ukranian folk culture in his passionate celebration of his native landscapes and the people who worked them. Nowhere can this be seen more powerfully than in the film considered his masterpiece, EARTH, a stunning work that celebrates a natural order of being that reaches from seeds planted in the ground to the stars that light up the sky. As strong as his links were to his Soviet contemporaries, it's become increasingly clear over the years that Dovzhenko's work is clearly in keeping with that strain of European modernism, represented by artists such as Marc Chagall, James Ensor, Sholem Aleichem, and Garcia Lorca, that sought inspiration for new forms of art in folk tales, imagery and traditions.

Like that of Eisenstein, his style of filmmaking ran afoul of the Stalinist cultural authorities, and his post-silent-era career is sadly characterized by blocked projects or films that he was forced to drastically alter. Yet even in his most politically flavored works, his extraordinary sensibility for capturing nature on screen 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 students included many of those who would revolutionize Soviet cinema in the 1960s: Andrei Tarkovsky, Larissa Shepitko, Andrei Konchalovsky, etc.

In addition to all of Dovzhenko's extant works, this series will also include CHRONICLE OF THE YEARS OF FIRE, based on his script but filmed by his wife and close collaborator, Yulia Solntseva. We also plan to mount a gallery exhibition curated by the Dovzhenko Museum in Kiev of posters and Dovzhenko drawings, and to hold an international conference on May 11 featuring scholars from Europe and the U.S. on Dovzhenko's work and lasting influence.

This program is made possible by a generous grant from George Gund III and Iara Lee. Silent film programming at the Film Society is supported by the Ira M. Resnick Foundation. Additional support provided by 1+1 TV. Air travel and film shipment courtesy of Air Ukraine.

This program was organized in collaboration with Seagull Films, Ministry of Art and Culture of Ukraine, the Ukrainian National Center of Alexander Dovzhenko and with the support of The Consulate General of Ukraine in New York. Special thanks to Martin Scorsese, Irina Ovdiy and Gregory Vinnikov. Thanks to Michael Zilberman for his assistance in writing the film descriptions.

All the silent films in the Dovzhenko series will have live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin. Mr. Sosin is a composer, pianist, arranger and conductor who has been enthralling audiences in the U.S. and Europe with his silent film music for 30 years. Donald Sosin, composer, pianist, arranger, conductor, has been enthralling audiences in the US and Europe with his silent film music for thirty years. He was the resident film accompanist at MoMA for five years, and has been with the American Museum of the Moving Image since 1989, and the BAM Rose Cinema since 1999.With his wife, actress/singer Joanna Seaton, Sosin performed at the Italian Divas series at the Walter Reade in September 2000, and the couple often writes and performs their own songs for early films as well. In 2001 Sosin received three commissions for chamber scores premiered at the Westchester Film Festival, MASS MoCA and in Italy. Other NYC appearances include the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum and The Film Forum. He has appeared at the Telluride, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Bellport and Hamptons Film Festivals, Pacific Film Archives’ Asian Film Festival, and is a regular at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Sacile, Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato.

On Broadway Mr. Sosin was assistant conductor for THE FIRST and WELCOME TO THE CLUB; he was music director and vocal arranger for the first production of the Mitch Leigh-Lee Adams musical AIN’T BROADWAY GRAND, the American premiere of Cole Porter’s NYMPH ERRANT, and the Folger Theatre premiere of WIND IN THE WILLOWS. He scored Frank Capra’s LONG PANTS with Harry Langdon for Kino Video.Television credits include ANOTHER WORLD, ONE LIFE TO LIVE, several PBS documentaries including THE WEST, and additional orchestrations for the Great Performances Mark Twain series. His arrangements and recordings include "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" for the Naxos label, and two CDs by folk singer Priscilla Herdman. He has recorded an album of original songs, and a twelve-hour background score for the New Testament. Mr. Sosin’s over 1200 pop sheet music arrangements are published by Cherry Lane and Warner Bros. Music.

Mr. Sosin has lectured on silent film music at the Aspen Institute of Humanities, and on many college campuses where he and Joanna Seaton present music of the silent film era along with film screenings. Their CD of Broadway love songs, SAIL AWAY, was released in 1999. In 1995-6 the couple toured the US for fourteen months with the national company of JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT, training over 1000 children. They have taught songwriting workshops all over the country and have written extensively for theater, television, radio, video, the concert hall and for worship. They live in Connecticut with their son Nicholas.

There will also be two special screenings of EARTH on Friday, May 10 at 6:30pm and 9pm with live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra.

DIPLOMATIC POUCH/SUMKA DIPKUR'ERA
1927, USSR, 72m An early effort almost as likely to stun the casual viewer as LOVE BERRY, the director's sophomore feature is, in fact, an international spy thriller complete with mustache-twirling British villains. Extrapolating on the true-crime assassination of Soviet diplomat Teodor Nette, Dovzhenko adds a McGuffin as classic as they come: the slain envoy's pouch, which must be returned to Russia before it's intercepted by the British secret police. In a touching display of proletarian unity, English country folk - Communist sympathizers all - race against time to deliver the pouch to Leningrad.
preceded by
LOVE BERRY / YAGODA LYUBVI
1926, USSR, 30m
Betraying the director's beginnings as a newspaper cartoonist, Dovzhenko's debut film LOVE BERRY is a farce that combines hyperkinetic proceedings à la Harold Lloyd with satirical sketches of NEP generation, the beneficiaries of an early Soviet attempt at mixing capitalist elements with socialism that resulted in a short-lived Soviet bourgeoisie. The plot 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.
Wed May 8: 2 & 6:15; Thurs May 9: 4 & 8
All shows are silent and will have live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

ZVENIGORA
1927, USSR, 65m
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 invites more comparisons to Gogol. "As the lights went on, we all felt that we had just witnessed a memorable event in the development of the cinema: the man before us had created something new....That is how Dovzhenko was "ordained" a director. On that day Diogenese's lantern could be extinguished: we had found a real man. A real, new and mature film producer. A real original trend within Soviet cinematography." - S.M. Eisenstein, The Birth of an Artist
Wed May 8: 4:15 & 8:30; Thurs May 9: 2 & 6:15
All shows are silent and will have live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

EARTH/ZEMLYA
1930, USSR, 62m
Dovzhenko's undisputed masterpiece (and a prerequisite to viewing anything by Tarkovsky or Kiarostami), 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 or bothers to notice. Not to worry: the earth will do its own healing, and mete out its own punishment.
Special Event: Fri May 10: 6:30 & 9 with live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra (Admission: $12 for Film Society members, $15 for general public);
Other showings with live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin: Sat May 11: 4:15; Sun May 12: 6:30

ARSENAL
1929 , USSR, 92m
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 anti-war sentiments in films by Renoir and Kubrick.
Sat May 11: 2 & 6:15; Sun May 12: 8:30
All shows are silent and will have live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

FAREWELL, AMERICA/PROSCAJ, AMERIKA
1949/50, USSR, 73m
A remarkable rarity, Dovzhenko's unfinished final film was a response to the atmosphere of intrigues and espionage - real or imagined - that dominated the early Cold War era. In protest of the intensifying postwar anti-communist witch hunt, American journalist Annabelle Bucard emigrated to Russia and became a Soviet citizen; her book, The Truth About American Diplomats, was published in English and Russian in 1949. That book, and aspects of Ms. Bucard's life, formed the basis for FAREWELL, AMERICA. Shortly after the Allied victory, an idealistic "Anna Bedford" gets a job in Moscow at the U.S. Embassy, which she promptly discovers is crawling with spies. Upon returning home some time later for her mother's funeral, she encounters an America plagued with massive unemployment and sinking into anti-communist hysteria. Near the end of the shoot, Dovzhenko received an order from the Kremlin to immediately halt production on the film; the film remained unfinished until in 1995 Mosfilm and Gosfilmofond Rossii completed the film as best as could be done with the existing material. Finally - a chance to see the Cold War from the other side!
Sat May 11: 8:30; Sat May 18: 9:30 Sun May 19: 1; Tue May 21: 2:45

SYMPOSIUM: THE ART AND LEGACY OF ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO
Sat May 11, 2002 at 10:30am
Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery at the Walter Reade Theater. Admission free.
Among the invited participants will be Hanna Chmil, Deputy State Secretary, Ministry of Art and Culture of Ukraine; Vladimir Mandryka, General Manager, National Center of Alexander Dovzhenko; P. Adams Sitney, Professor of Film Studies, Princeton University; Sirgiy Trymbach, Film Historian, Deputy General Manager for Archive and Science, National Center of Alexander Dovzhenko; and Josephine Woll, Professor in the Department of German and Russian at Howard University and author of Reel Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw. This event is free, but seating is limited; passes may be picked up at the Walter Reade box office beginning May 1.

CHRONICLE OF THE YEARS OF FIRE/POVEST' PLAMENNYH LET
Yulia Solntseva, USSR, 1960, 106m
NOTE: This film will be shown dubbed in English.
After Dovzhenko's death in 1956, the director's wife - actress Yulia Solntseva, the Martian queen Aelita in the Soviet classic by that name - not only supervised restoration (and some have claimed, re-editing) of his early work, but made several films based on his unproduced scripts. Awarded the prize for Best Direction at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, CHRONICLE follows a young Ukrainian peasant through the trials of the Great Patriotic War all the way to Berlin. Less a work of fiction than a dramatization of material from Dovzhenko's wartime documentaries, CHRONICLE charts the passage from the sensual delirium of battlefield combat to the growth of steel-hardened political consciousness.
Sun May 12: 4; Sat May 18: 7:15; Sun May 19: 8; Mon May 20: 2:45

IVAN
1932, USSR, 90m
Driven to near-suicidal depression by the rather cool acceptance of EARTH, Dovzhenko followed up his masterwork with IVAN, his first experience with sound cinema, which Dovzhenko seemed to accept and master more readily than some of his Soviet contemporaries. Like EARTH, IVAN concerns itself with the natural rhythms of country life disrupted by the beat of the 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, but as in Dovzhenko's other films IVAN seeks to address the danger and effects of a disrupted natural harmony. "Despite the change in his medium IVAN is consistent with the growth of Dovzhenko's method. This is clear, not only in its beauties - in the introductory poem to the Dnieper, in the magnificent sense of space at the construction site, day and night, in the sculptural figures of workers there, and in the images of pain. . . . There is, aside from these visual beauties, Dovzhenko's ceaseless search for simplicity of statement...." - Jay Leyda, Kino
Tue May 14: 1, 4:45 & 8:30 Thurs May 16: 2:45 & 6:30

AEROGRAD
1935, USSR, 93m
Far Eastern settings provided the Soviet cinema with its equivalent of U.S. frontier dramas, populated by many of the same kinds of characters: hard-boiled hunters, scheming rogues and adventurers of every stripe. Another tale of epic construction (this time, of an entire modern city) sprouting up against a majestic natural backdrop, AEROGRAD takes full advantage of these stock types, but adds a note of state-sanctioned paranoia by introducing Japanese infiltrators and vile old believers into the fray. The optical effects are by Alexander Ptushko, one of the great technical pioneers of Soviet cinema and the subject of a tribute at the Walter Reade this past December; the cinematography is by Eduard Tisse, best known for his long collaboration with Eisenstein.
Tue May 14: 3 & 6:45 Thurs May 16: 1, 4:45 & 8:30

SHCHORS
1939, USSR, 140m
Nikolai Shchors was one of the few indisputable Bolshevik icons of Ukrainian origin; Dovzhenko's film on him began as a specific personal commission from Stalin - to direct "a Ukrainian Chapayev," after the wild success in 1934 of the Vasilyev's comic biopic, which portrayed a wily, folksy Red Army commander (the hit that still endures). Uncomfortable with the assignment, yet clearly under pressure, Dovzhenko threw himself into his research on the project, only to discover that many of Shchors's comrades from the old days had by that point been purged. Clearly made under the sign of "socialist realism," Dovzhenko portrays the film as a model of clear-headed political vision, although obviously much more of a sophisticate than the homespun Chapayev; he quotes Shevchenko to his troops and even keeps a portrait of Pushkin at his HQ.
Wed May 15: 1; Fri May 17: 3:15 & 8:15

MICHURIN
1948, USSR, 103m
"Dovzhenko's first treatment for his idea of Ivan Michurin's life was as a play - and he agreed reluctantly to turn it into a scenario and a film. One argument finally convinced him: that all the physical beauties that were an essential part of the naturalist's long, ripe life - orchards, blossoms, fruit - could never be conveyed as satisfactorily as in a Dovzhenko film. The prospect of working in color for the first time was the final inducement, and Dovzhenko began work on what was to be his final film." - Jay Leyda, Kino
Dovzhenko's final feature is a biography of the famed Russian horticulturist, even imagining him as an artist of sorts: his pre-Revolutionary hardships bear a certain Tolstoyan quality, up to and including damnation from the church ("Do not turn God's garden into a brothel!"). After the Bolshevik victory, however, Michurin's career is an ever-rising crescendo of successes, culminating in his doctrine's acceptance as the "sole correct line in the biological sciences."
Wed May 15: 3:45; Fri May 17: 1 & 6

BATTLE FOR SOVIET UKRAINE/BITVA ZA NASHU SOVETSKUYU UKRAINU
1943, USSR, 80m
"A feature documentary continuing the tradition of Dziga Vertov." - Neya Zorkaya, The Illustrated History of Soviet Cinema
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's also scenes of the counterattack, as well as unique scenes depicting the battlefield cooperation between Ukrainian and Czechoslovakian troops. Dovzhenko's cameraman on the film was Sergei Urushevsky, who would later go on to form an extraordinary partnership with director Mikhail Kalatozov on such masterworks as The Cranes Are Flying and I Am Cuba.
Sat May 18: 5:30; Sun May 19: 4:30 Mon May 20: 1

VICTORY ON THE RIGHT BANK UKRAINE/POBEDA NA PRAVOBEREZHNOI UKRAINE
1944, USSR, 73m
This feature-length documentary focuses on the western advancement of the Soviet Army after the Germans and their allies had been driven out of the Ukraine. Despite the triumphant tone of the film, it also captures the terrible swath of destruction caused by the enemy. Seen today, the film perhaps takes on more ambiguous overtones, yet there's no denying the extraordinary power of Dovzhenko's images.
Sun May 19: 2:45 & 6:15 Tue May 21: 1

about the series | film descriptions and times