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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2013 |
Ukraine: The Great Experiment |
| Film Title |
ZEMLYA |
| Alternative Title 1 |
[La terra] |
| Alternative Title 2 |
[Earth] |
| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
UkrSSR [Ukraine / USSR] |
| Release Date |
1930 |
| Production Co. |
VUFKU, Kyiv |
| Director |
Oleksandr Dovzhenko |
| Format |
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Speed (fps) |
| DCP |
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24 |
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| Footage |
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Time |
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79' |
| Archive Source |
Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Centre, Kyiv |
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| Print Notes |
orig. l: 2425.8 m.
Didascalie in russo e ucraino / Russian and Ukrainian intertitles
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| Cast |
| Semen Svashenko (Vasyl Trubenko), Stepan Shkurat (zio/Uncle Opanas), Yuliya Solntseva (sorella di Vasyl/Vasyl’s sister), Elena Maksimova (Natalia,), Mykola Nademskyi (zio/Uncle Semen), Ivan Franko (Arkhip Bilokin), Petro Masokha (Khoma Bilokin), Vladimir Mikhailov (il prete del villaggio/village priest), P. Petryk (giovane leader della cellula di partito/young Party-cell leader), Pavlo Umanets, E. Bondina, Luka Liashenko (giovane/young kulak), Vasyl Krasenko |
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| Other Credits |
| prod., scen: Oleksandr Dovzhenko; f./ph: Danylo Demutskyi; f./ph. asst: Borys Kosarev; scg./des: Vasyl Krychevskyi, Jr.; mus: Lev Revutskyi (1930), Viacheslav Ovchinnikov (1971), DakhaBrakha (2012) |
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| Other Information |
| première: 8.4.1930 |
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| Program Notes |
In order to implement the principles of collectivization, Vasyl, a poor peasant and the leader of a local Komsomol community, decides to bring a tractor to the village in order to divide the land fairly among impoverished peasants. The life of the village, which Vasyl is determined to change tooth and nail, seems to be quite harmonious: although rich peasants and their children oppose the young Komsomol members, their common work for the rich harvest unites the peasants with the land and with each other.
The tractor finally arrives, and Vasyl ploughs over the borders of the rich peasants’ fields, symbolically destroying not only private property but also the artisanal economic order. On a moonlit night, Khoma, a rich peasant’s son, kills Vasyl. Vasyl’s father, who has been sceptical about his son’s collectivist intentions, now joins the Communists. He asks to bury Vasyl in the new way, without priests and laments. Vasyl’s death brings new life, and the backward-looking Khoma, realizing his old world is crumbling, goes insane.
The last part of Dovzhenko’s epic trilogy, Earth was filmed in the summer and autumn of 1929. To achieve the highest possible authenticity, Dovzhenko invited actors from Les Kurbas’ avant-garde Berezil Theatre school as well as non-professional actors. The policy of collectivization had been proclaimed only recently by the Party, and Dovzhenko approached the subject with a mystical philosophical vision, making the land into a metaphor of the national universe, the centre and the meaning of existence for the Ukrainian peasant. The film’s patriarchal Ukrainian village, whose tranquility is disrupted by a tractor, exists outside historical time and resembles an earthly paradise. In this harmonious universe, farmers lead a happy, timeless pastoral existence. The dissolution of this organic and mystical connection with Nature by collectivization violates the eternal order of the universe.
The film’s images of exuberant nature, fertile land, and abundant harvests, brilliantly filmed by director of photography Danylo Demutskyi, subverted the very idea of collectivization, which Dovzhenko tried to justify rather than to substantiate. Unlike the protagonists of Dovzhenko’s previous films, the Komsomol activist Vasyl is presented vividly and without excessive monumentality. He is a romantic and a lyricist who does not hide his love of the land and life. Vasyl destroys the power of the earth over man and finally subjugates it, paying for it with his own life. From the melancholy rural point of view, the elemental forces of life are subdued by a silent agreement with nature, and Vasyl’s acts look absurd.
The lyricism of Dovzhenko’s film is given poetic life by the original camerawork of Demutskyi, who can rightfully be regarded as a co-author of the film. The picture abounds in visual delights, expressing a love of the land and the passing of an old way of life: meditative close-ups, morning light, the endless sky that serves as a background for many pastoral scenes; and in the scene of “Vasyl’s dance”, shot in a golden haze, a melody of folk songs can almost be heard. The poetic pantheism of Earth is philosophically consonant with the “romantic vitaism” of the writer Mykola Khvylovyi (1893-1933), an ideologist of the Ukrainian cultural revival of the 1920s, with whom Dovzhenko felt an emotional and intellectual kinship.
After the necessary cuts and 32 official and private screenings, Earth was released in Kyiv cinemas on 8 April 1930 – and only nine days later was banned, because of allegations of “biologism” and naturalism. The withering criticism of Earth was a huge psychological blow to Dovzhenko: “My joy of the artistic success was violently crushed by Demyan Bedny’s terrible dvopidvalnyi [double-edged] feuilleton published in the newspaper Izvestiya under the title Filosofy [Philosophers]. I got grey hair and grew older literally in a few days. It was a real psychic trauma. At first I wanted to die.” He fell into a depression, which accompanied him almost all his life. Given the accusations of “bourgeois nationalism” and the first of Stalin’s purges of Ukrainian patriotic intelligentsia, Dovzhenko began to fear for his life. This terror embraced him even more after Mykola Khvylovyi committed suicide in 1933, an event that became a symbol of the destruction of an entire generation of artists, and occasionally resulted in persecution mania.
Dovzhenko is probably the most prominent and the most controversial personality in Ukrainian Soviet culture. A Renaissance man, he was able to realize his creative genius in different art forms. He developed his own philosophical system, a political and cultural project of Ukraine far removed from dogmatic Communism, an avant-garde vision, embracing futurism and traditionalism, utopianism and conservatism. Realizing his genius was thwarted from fully flourishing, in his later years the frustrated Dovzhenko interpreted his life in terms of messianism, thinking about the fate of his people, acutely experiencing its tragedy and perceiving his life as a sacrifice which eventually would redeem the Ukrainian sin of self-oblivion. For him, Earth was a deeply personal statement: “In Earth, my grandfather dies. Shkurat is my father. I am a boy sitting with a girl on a mound of earth... How much I was suffering, how much I cursed the administration that devoured my nerves, my soul, all my forces, by its worthlessness. How disappointed I was after the film was completed.”
In the USSR, Earth was rehabilitated only after Dovzhenko’s death in 1958. That same year, in an international poll of cinema critics conducted by the Belgian Cinémathèque in conjunction with Expo 58 in Brussels, Earth was voted one of the 12 most important films in the history of world cinema.
Restoration: Earth was first restored and re-edited at the Mosfilm film studios in 1971. In 2007 the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Centre effected a digital restoration for a full DVD collection of Dovzhenko’s screen works. This was followed in 2013 by a 2K restoration using material from a 1930 version and the restored 1971 version.
Music In 2012 the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Centre commissioned the popular Ukrainian world music band DakhaBrakha to create a soundtrack for Earth. This was first presented as a special event at the 2012 Odessa International Film Festival, and then as the opening film of the GogolFEST international contemporary art festival in September 2012.
DakhaBrakha is the best-known Ukrainian band performing world music, famous for a unique scenic atmosphere of ethno-chaos. This quartet of multi-instrumentalist singers experiments with Ukrainian folk melodies and rhythms, and Eastern European and Western Asian motifs, complementing authentic folk elements with minimalist techniques. Over the past decade DakhaBrakha has become an iconic group in Ukraine. The band has released five albums: Na dobranich (Goodnight, 2006), Yahudky (Berries, 2007), Na mezhi (On the Edge, 2009), Light (2010), and Khmeleva Project (in cooperation with Port Mone, 2012). It represents Ukraine at the most important world festivals each summer. – Ivan Kozlenko
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