ARSENAL Movie Review

At the end of the silent era, Russian filmmakers created masterworks of power and lyricism that frequently transcended their propagandistic purposes. Alexander Dovzhenko, a cinematic poet and brilliant theorist, created in his Arsenal a sweeping chronicle of the war of 1914 and the conflict between nationalists and revolutionaries. Startling images—a group of well-heeled bourgeois listening in silence in their homes for the sound of revolution, crushed accordion that suggests the revolution's dashed hopes—are so potent in their evocative power that it would be a disservice to Dovzhenko's art to label them mere symbolism. Although Arsenal, as well as his Zvenigora (1928) and Earth (1930), is a superb representative of the Soviet cinema's golden era, the mutilated versions of it that have been circulated in the west for years have caused many viewers and a few critics to find the picture nearly incomprehensible. Try to find a complete version; seen in its original form, Arsenal is a model of storytelling and pacing that is the equal of the greatest work of Griffith and Eisenstein.

NEXT STOP … Earth, Chapayev, Strike

1929 70m/B RU Semyon Svashenko, Luciano Albertini; D: Alexander Dovzhenko; W: Alexander Dovzhenko; C: Daniil Demutsky.VHS NOS, MRV, IHF