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
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