Director/writer/editor: Aleksandr Dovzhenko
Photography: Daniil Demutsky
Cast: Semyon Svashenko, Stepan Shkurat, Nikolai Nademsky, Yelena Maksimova
My full disclosures here have to start that sometimes the whole narrative style of another country's cinema, or silent movies, or in this case both, can throw me off. Usually, even if I'm not particularly in the mood, I can throw on whatever movie I want to review and pretty soon the thing more or less sweeps me up. Even though Earth is short and should be quick, it feels alienating, ponderous, and opaque to me. For one thing, I had a hard time just following this "masterpiece" picture by director, writer, and editor Aleksandr Dovzhenko, partly because I had (and have) only the dimmest context for the story itself, rooted in the tension between Russia and Ukraine, which I barely understand today, let alone in 1930 Soviet Union. Something about agricultural resources.
And once again we confront a picture of great reputation that comes with version problems. I started with my commercial Grapevine DVD from 2003, which is 87 minutes and has one score. Later I looked at a version on YouTube posted in 2016 that was 76 minutes and had another and much better score (note: at the moment, YouTube appears to have up to four versions). For what it's worth, the picture is listed as 75 minutes on IMDb. My sense was that the additional footage on the DVD was largely devoted to livestock shots. Among other things Earth is a movie about oxen being replaced by tractors. It is also a movie about wresting control of land from the putative owners who won't work with the collective in early Communist times. I probably should have read the Wikipedia article first (or maybe the YouTube version is really that much better), because understanding more context and paying more attention to plot-wise visuals helped on the second look at least as much as the score.
My full disclosures here have to start that sometimes the whole narrative style of another country's cinema, or silent movies, or in this case both, can throw me off. Usually, even if I'm not particularly in the mood, I can throw on whatever movie I want to review and pretty soon the thing more or less sweeps me up. Even though Earth is short and should be quick, it feels alienating, ponderous, and opaque to me. For one thing, I had a hard time just following this "masterpiece" picture by director, writer, and editor Aleksandr Dovzhenko, partly because I had (and have) only the dimmest context for the story itself, rooted in the tension between Russia and Ukraine, which I barely understand today, let alone in 1930 Soviet Union. Something about agricultural resources.
And once again we confront a picture of great reputation that comes with version problems. I started with my commercial Grapevine DVD from 2003, which is 87 minutes and has one score. Later I looked at a version on YouTube posted in 2016 that was 76 minutes and had another and much better score (note: at the moment, YouTube appears to have up to four versions). For what it's worth, the picture is listed as 75 minutes on IMDb. My sense was that the additional footage on the DVD was largely devoted to livestock shots. Among other things Earth is a movie about oxen being replaced by tractors. It is also a movie about wresting control of land from the putative owners who won't work with the collective in early Communist times. I probably should have read the Wikipedia article first (or maybe the YouTube version is really that much better), because understanding more context and paying more attention to plot-wise visuals helped on the second look at least as much as the score.
Which reminds me, further disclosures: I do have a hard time making my adjustments to the syntax of many silent pictures, even recognizing we are still seeing fragments of the big bang of the invention of cinema and that's kind of thrilling too. There is a lengthy montage here of breadmaking, for example, starting literally with plowing the fields and finishing on loaves hot from the industrial ovens. It's remarkable but it's hard for me not to get lost in the surface detail of a lot of heavy-handed hambone gestures, particularly the way the women are depicted bringing in the sheaves, with ah yes, those lusty Eastern European flourishes, confined to shots of women's bare legs that are somehow still lascivious. Also this whole idea of happy laborers, as in they are laboring and yet they are grinning constantly as they do so, for the sheer joy of working and being treated equitably—I'm not sure I buy it. Call it Western cynicism. A hard day's work is still a hard day's work.
There's a really beautiful shot—a little better in the print on the DVD—of basically our main guy, the optimistic forward-seeing son of the farm clan on his way home from a day plowing with the tractor. He dances for joy and the dust he kicks up, this literal "earth," has been retouched or lighted or something to make it look almost animated, ghostly and magical. He's killed as he dances but the death or murder really is remarkably murky given what a key plot point it is. On a very long shot, he's shown simply collapsing. His corpse is shown soon after, but it is so obviously the actor with his eyes closed that it's not immediately obvious, at least to a viewer in 2021, even one trained way back on 1960s TV, that he is actually dead. We've seen shots before of people crying in this movie. It isn't always anything. Earth is so primitive in terms of the invention of cinema that it kind of feels like not everything has been invented for it yet—most notably fixed audio, but also things like establish that he was murdered.
Not to mention the other problem that plagues films well into the 1940s and 1950s—the blasted literal film itself was a decaying fire hazard practically from the minute it was retired into storage, and no one did anything about it or even really knew for decades. As far as I can tell, Earth has been preserved reasonably well and there is more or less a standard version (give or take 10 or 15 minutes and multiple scores).
I know Dovzhenko's name approximately the same way I still seem to know, say, Josef von Sternberg, or any number of Japanese directors—as a name with reputation. Earth sits at #170 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, pretty high on a list of 1,000 but it's Dovzhenko's only appearance. Von Sternberg, by comparison, hits four times: The Scarlet Empress, #460; The Blue Angel, #624; Morocco, #812, and Anatahan, #970. (I am frankly amazed The Blue Angel is so low but that's another matter.) (Never mind about any number of Japanese directors.)
I saw a picture by Dovzhenko from 1935 recently, Frontier (also known as Aerograd), which had a bold and even thrilling score—the music in the titles and opening scene seemed to be literally keyed to the drone of an airplane (check out the first few minutes). Really amazing in a surprising way. And there's a shot in Earth, a very long one of the father contemplating his son's death, that reminds me of Bela Tarr's style. So I don't doubt Dovzhenko might have a handful or so of interesting pictures and/or many more with very interesting parts. But fair warning to philistines like myself on his masterpiece: some homework is in order and maybe a lot of patience too to get much from Earth.
I leave the last word to accused sexual deviant Woody Allen, from Love and Death: "Wheat. Lots of wheat. Fields of wheat. A tremendous amount of wheat."
There's a really beautiful shot—a little better in the print on the DVD—of basically our main guy, the optimistic forward-seeing son of the farm clan on his way home from a day plowing with the tractor. He dances for joy and the dust he kicks up, this literal "earth," has been retouched or lighted or something to make it look almost animated, ghostly and magical. He's killed as he dances but the death or murder really is remarkably murky given what a key plot point it is. On a very long shot, he's shown simply collapsing. His corpse is shown soon after, but it is so obviously the actor with his eyes closed that it's not immediately obvious, at least to a viewer in 2021, even one trained way back on 1960s TV, that he is actually dead. We've seen shots before of people crying in this movie. It isn't always anything. Earth is so primitive in terms of the invention of cinema that it kind of feels like not everything has been invented for it yet—most notably fixed audio, but also things like establish that he was murdered.
Not to mention the other problem that plagues films well into the 1940s and 1950s—the blasted literal film itself was a decaying fire hazard practically from the minute it was retired into storage, and no one did anything about it or even really knew for decades. As far as I can tell, Earth has been preserved reasonably well and there is more or less a standard version (give or take 10 or 15 minutes and multiple scores).
I know Dovzhenko's name approximately the same way I still seem to know, say, Josef von Sternberg, or any number of Japanese directors—as a name with reputation. Earth sits at #170 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, pretty high on a list of 1,000 but it's Dovzhenko's only appearance. Von Sternberg, by comparison, hits four times: The Scarlet Empress, #460; The Blue Angel, #624; Morocco, #812, and Anatahan, #970. (I am frankly amazed The Blue Angel is so low but that's another matter.) (Never mind about any number of Japanese directors.)
I saw a picture by Dovzhenko from 1935 recently, Frontier (also known as Aerograd), which had a bold and even thrilling score—the music in the titles and opening scene seemed to be literally keyed to the drone of an airplane (check out the first few minutes). Really amazing in a surprising way. And there's a shot in Earth, a very long one of the father contemplating his son's death, that reminds me of Bela Tarr's style. So I don't doubt Dovzhenko might have a handful or so of interesting pictures and/or many more with very interesting parts. But fair warning to philistines like myself on his masterpiece: some homework is in order and maybe a lot of patience too to get much from Earth.
I leave the last word to accused sexual deviant Woody Allen, from Love and Death: "Wheat. Lots of wheat. Fields of wheat. A tremendous amount of wheat."
Reminds me of my one viewing of Hitchcock's The Lodger (1927). I was never quite sure what was an arty film gesture and what just an awful print.
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