EARTH Movie Review

Zemlya
Soul

“I wanted to show the state of a Ukrainian village in 1929,” wrote director Alexander Dovzhenko in 1930 of his masterpiece, Earth, “that is to say, at the time it was going through an economic transformation and a mental change in the masses.” The change that the great director portrays is the struggle to establish a collective farm program in the face of the murderous old-line landowners, the kulaks. But though this struggle forms the spine of Earth's plot at its most conventional level, Dovzhenko's film is far more than a sophisticated piece of advocacy drama. Earth bites off a great deal; it attempts to be nothing less than a poetic cinematic tribute to the cyclical glory of nature, as seen through the eyes of those who tend to and love the land. The complete, stunning success of Dovzhenko's film is all the more staggering when you consider the immensity of its goal. It is capable, even 70 years after its creation, of making one marvel anew at the majesty and logic of the natural world, as well as producing the sheer elation that comes with rediscovering—with all the force of a tidal wave—the primal, incomparable power of cinema. Correctly voted one of the ten greatest films of all time by more than one international panel of film critics.

NEXT STOP … Arsenal, Shchors, Nanook of the North

1930 57m/B RU Semyon Svashenko, Mikola Nademsy, Stephan Shkurat, Yelena Maximova; D: Alexander Dovzhenko; W: Alexander Dovzhenko; C: Daniil Demutsky. VHS VYY, CCB, IHF