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Film: Arsenal
Release date: 14th February 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 87 mins
Director: Alexander Dovzhenko
Starring: Semyon Svashenko , Amvrosi Buchma, Georgi Khorkov, Dmitri Erdman, Sergey Petrov
Genre: Drama/War
Studio: Mr. Bongo
Format: DVD
Country: Soviet Union/Ukraine
First released in 1929, Arsenal, one of Alexander Dovzhenko’s great masterpieces of silent soviet cinema, is being re-released on DVD. Also known as January Uprising in Kiev in 1929 when it was first released in the UK, it is the second movie of Dovzhenko’s Ukraine trilogy, sitting in between 1928s Zvenigora and 1930s Earth. Though originally criticized in Soviet Russia for being counter revolutionary, Arsenal was received better in the West for obvious reasons.
Beginning in 1917, Russia is suffering during the Great War, as Tsar Nicholas II sits in his office largely oblivious to the woes and circumstances of his fellow countrymen.
Returning from the frontline, are a number of defecting soldiers, one of which is the film’s hero Tymish Stoyan (Semyon Svashenko), who is heading back to his native Kiev where he intends to work in the Arsenal factory.
In the lead up to the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly elections, which are haphazardly arranged in the wake of the Ukraine/Soviet war, it soon transpires that the city’s Bolsheviks are not being very well represented. Allying themselves with the Soviet forces, the Bolsheviks soon become involved in an armed uprising in one of the city’s munition factories, the famous January Uprising, which gave rise to the Russian Revolution. Stoyan is obviously also involved in the armed uprising, becoming a ‘bulletproof’ revolutionary hero in the film’s famous closing scene...
The film’s narrative can be difficult to follow on first viewing but it is through the Dovzhenko’s montages and imagery that Arsenal is remembered as a compelling piece of Soviet propaganda film making.
The accompanying music throughout the film’s 70 minute duration is provided by a discordant string section which only adds to the malevolent air of revolutionary menace within this historical epic. There are times in which the melodies become sweeping, but generally Igor Belza’s score promotes a genuinely unsettling tone.
The imagery of the movie has similarly lost none of its potency, now faithfully remastered for its DVD release. Early sections when a woman beats her children and a man beats his horse whilst the Tsar writes letters in his cushy office do well to define the suffering of the people at the lower end of the social spectrum. Meanwhile, a following sequence set upon the frontlines where a soldier falls prey to German laughing gas is frantically disturbing. Importantly, as a movie that is supposed to glorify the armed uprising of a Bolshevik movement, Arsenal’s representation of war and violence is one of disdain. Accompanied with shots of smiling corpses, Arsenal presents you with an array of images that are guaranteed to stick within your imagination.
The film can also be appreciated allegorically, a sequence involving a runaway train implies the unstoppable movement towards revolution - its subsequent crash may perhaps represent the inherent danger of such great social transition. Yet, with Tymish Stoyan emerging undamaged from the wreckage, the film finds its heroic protagonist worthy of the Soviet Union.
Stoyan himself is a brooding presence, a distinguished brow accenting his unblinking steely eagle eyed gaze. For all the horrors that happen around him, all the executions, he remains an enigmatic hero. In the final scene, in which he comes to literally portray the undying Bolshevik spirit, his muted screams for death as he bares his chest to the barrels of several enemy rifles provides much food for thought that will linger long after the credits finish rolling.
For newcomers, Arsenal is a very difficult watch, an overpowering score, a series of imposing black-and-white faces and distorted facial expressions perhaps echo the socio-political purposes of the film. For fans of this specific genre, however, the re-release of Arsenal is worthy of experiencing all over again. For anyone else, history students or those who are just curious in silent cinema, Dovzhenko’s masterfully creates mesmerizing and often disturbing shots that are rife with complexity and are essentially timeless. CPH
From trailblazing Soviet director Alexander Dovzhenko’s comes the first film of his loose trilogy, Arsenal (1929).
Arsenal is the remarkable, action-packed film based on the real life events of the Ukrainian Civil War, and stars Semyon Svashenko in the lead role.
Set in the bleak aftermath and devastation of World War One, a recently demobbed soldier, Timosh, returns to his hometown Kiev, after having survived a train wreck. His arrival coincides with a national celebration of Ukrainian freedom, but the festivities are not to last as a disenchanted Timosh soon begins to clash with the city’s authorities when he starts to agitate for the adoption of the Soviet system.
Arsenal is an emotionally wrenching film.
Film: Arsenal
Release date: 14th February 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 87 mins
Director: Alexander Dovzhenko
Starring: Semyon Svashenko , Amvrosi Buchma, Georgi Khorkov, Dmitri Erdman, Sergey Petrov
Genre: Drama/War
Studio: Mr. Bongo
Format: DVD
Country: Soviet Union/Ukraine
Film: Earth
Release date: 17th May 2010
Certificate: 18
Running time: 78 mins
Director: Aleksandr Dovzhenko
Starring: Stepan Shkurat, Semyon Svashenko, Yuliya Solntseva
Genre: Drama
Studio: Mr Bongo
Format: DVD
Country: Russia
The third film in director Alexander Dovzhenko’s ‘Ukraine Trilogy’, Earth was filmed in 1930 to the backdrop of social revolution in the Soviet Union. Detailing a struggle between two sets of farming groups, Earth follows an ensuing insurrection as the peasant farmers find themselves subjected to a takeover by the wealthier Kulaks landowners.
Opening with the almost poetic death of an old man in the shade of a pear tree, the farmers come to the realisation that they must somehow find a way of compensating for all his years of hard work, and the experience that he possessed. Their answer is to pull their collective resources and invest in a tractor, sacrificing the traditional farming methods for what they believe to be a speedier, more efficient and, ergo, more profitable venture.
The machinery’s arrival causes a great deal of uproar in the community, as the collective farmers rejoice at the presence of what they believe to be their future, while the Kulaks look on with a mix of fear and anger at this brazen act by the villagers.
From the tractor’s arrival, an ever-spiraling sequence of events is put into motion. As the collective farmers band together in order to work together, and for each other (even collectively urinating on the tractors’ radiator to cool it down), the Kulak’s begin to fear this is the beginning of the end for them and their affluence. One evening, they take it upon themselves to kill Vasili, the farmers’ ringleader, in an attempt to drive a stake into the heart of the villagers’ new found optimism, yet it yields an opposite outcome. Instead of permitting the church to undertake the traditional funeral ceremony, the collective, with their new sense of spirit, decide to create their own brand of religion, as they bury him in the earth on which he worked, while singing songs about new life…
Earth, or Zemlya in its native language, is a film that takes us back to a time of cinema that has long since been archaic. The film is completely silent bar the evocative score that continually ploughs through the film, proving to be its heartbeat, as Russian intertitles tell the audience what the characters have said.
The director has a penchant for long focused still shots that are incredibly emotive, almost to the point of surprising, given how rudimentary many will view this film as being. Dovzhenko captures some unbelievable cinematic moments, as he does not simply create delightful compositions of nature and the earth that prove to be the bedrock to the themes in this film, but captures the expressions and emotions of his actors with powerful close ups and superb editing. Not only this, but his implementation of ‘day for night’, where he films Vasile dancing the kozachok (a traditional Cossack dance) through a red filter at dawn, provides for startling imagery that is light years ahead of its time.
Given the backdrop to the film’s creation, it would be naïve not to comment on the political scenery at the time, and address whether or not this film is in fact a machine in itself for Soviet propaganda. The signs are certainly there, if you want to go looking for them - the collective farmers being repressed by the wealthier Kulak landowners is a theme that was endemic of Stalinist Russia. Earth can be viewed as highlighting the plight of the peasants that for so long were forced to work in squalor, and how they can break free from the shackles imposed upon them by working together and supporting each other for a better future. It is an unsettling prospect to think, however, that not long after this film’s creation, Stalin undertook the first of his mass extermination of the Kulak’s, where the fortunate ones were those that did not have to go to the mines in Siberia to spend the rest of their lives.
However, Dovzhenko’s message is a much more ambivalent and ambiguous one when you factor in all the equations, and don’t subject it to hindsight and our minds, which have been subjected to their own forms of propaganda. Dovzhenko intertwines messages of life, hope, love and death as the primary driving force throughout Earth. He is more concerned with being anti-church than pro-communist, yearning to break away from the conformity and controlling patterns of church, and looking for the true religion in each and every individual – and, more to the point, connecting with Mother Earth. Every character within the film has their life and livelihood based on and around the ground, and when they pass on, the villagers return them to the soil, completing the life cycle that is the true focus of Dovzhenko’s Earth.
Earth is poignantly powerful with an immense amount of layering and depth to its ostensibly minimal construct. While it is a highly polysemous work, most who watch this will agree that it is undeniably a work of art that can unashamedly rank alongside Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will or Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin as sublime works of cinema. BL
