Landscapes of the Soul: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko
All of Dovzhenko’s major films include events—in the wild montage flurries of Arsenal they’re virtually nonstop—and some of them are explosive, sometimes literally. Events can’t be consumed the way narratives can be, because their very nature tends to confuse and confound us: they are splintered experiences that generally become coherent only through the continuity and logical progression of storytelling.
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A silent-film syntax, including a bold use of intertitles, persists in Dovzhenko’s work up through Michurin (1948), though it would be wrong to conclude that this made any of his sound films old-fashioned in their own time. Ivan and Aerograd aren’t just silent films with music and sound effects. The first resembles an orchestral suite divided into six sections; the second is clearly operatic, with the sounds of plane engines used as effectively as the voices.
Ivan got Dovzhenko into plenty of trouble as well. There are three separate characters named Ivan in the film, a celebration of the building of a huge dam on the Dnieper River that doesn’t bother to show us the completed dam. One of these Ivans has a gruff, illiterate father (Stepan Shkurat) who’s an unapologetic slacker and a hilarious bullshit artist. He spends his time idly fishing at a construction site where the rest of the people are working their butts off; he boasts directly to the camera that he’s contemptuous of the very notion of labor, brandishing the back of his neck for all to see. Without question, the film adores this old coot more than anyone else in the picture. And when we later see a Soviet army marching, the sky is so vast and the soldiers so tiny, crawling across the lower edge of the screen like bugs, that it’s hard to know exactly what’s being extolled. If this is propaganda, we need to ask on behalf of what.
He still felt that way when he started making his own movies—after a brief stint as a highly skillful and inventive commercial director (see, for instance, his 1926 slapstick comedy Love Berry and his 1927 thriller Diplomatic Pouch, playing together on Saturday, June 29). His own films were in part the ecstatic expressions of a sometime painter, cartoonist, and diplomat, but they were also tragic reflections on the price that has to be paid for any revolutionary change, inflected by turmoil, anguish, and even horror. And few films anywhere are more exalted and passionate in their feeling for people. The late Russian film historian Jay Leyda, who met Dovzhenko in Moscow in 1934, recalls him reading aloud his script of Aerograd: “His voice, as powerful and convincing as I imagined Mayakovsky’s must have been, filled his hotel room to the bursting point….When I later watched him work at Mosfilm I saw that his relation to actors was to infect them with his immense enthusiasm in the same way that he swept me off my feet with his reading.”
This traveling retrospective is close to complete in terms of Dovzhenko’s work as a director; the most conspicuous absences are the five features based on some of his unrealized scripts and directed by his widow, Julia Solntseva—an absence clearly ascribable to the cold war and its legacy. None of these films has ever been subtitled in English, but I’ve seen one of them dubbed into French, Chronicle of Flaming Years (1961), and three of them untranslated: Poem of an Inland Sea (1958), The Enchanted Desna (1965), and The Golden Gate (1969). (The only place I know of where these films have been shown in recent years is Paris.) I’ve missed only Ukraine in Flames (1968).
People also have a bad habit of associating vanguard art with cities regardless of where they’re from themselves—not because it all comes from cities but because so much of their access to it and understanding of it does. To the best of my knowledge, Dovzhenko retrospectives aren’t screened in the sticks anywhere in the world, though French television offered a retrospective a few years ago.
