| Earth | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Ukrainian | Земля |
| Directed by | Alexander Dovzhenko |
| Written by | Alexander Dovzhenko |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Danylo Demutsky [uk] |
| Edited by | Alexander Dovzhenko |
| Music by |
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Release date |
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Running time | 76 minutes |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Languages | Silent film Russian intertitles |
Earth (Russian:«Земля»,Ukrainian:«Земля»,romanized: Zemlya) is a 1930 Soviet Ukrainiansilent film byAlexander Dovzhenko. The film concerns the process ofcollectivization and the hostility ofkulak landowners under theFirst Five-Year Plan. It is the third film, withZvenigora andArsenal, of Dovzhenko's "Ukraine Trilogy".
The script was inspired by Dovzhenko's life and experience of the process ofcollectivization in his native Ukraine. That process, which was the backdrop of the film and its production, informed its reception in theSoviet Union, which was largely negative.
Earth is commonly regarded as Dovzhenko's masterpiece and as one of thegreatest films ever made. The film was voted number 10 on the prestigiousBrussels 12 list at the1958 World Expo.
The film begins with a montage of wind blowing through a field ofwheat andsunflowers. Next, the film transitions to show an oldpeasant named Semyon who dies beneath an apple tree, attended by his son Opanas and grandson Vasyl. Elsewhere, localkulaks, including Arkhyp Bilokin, denouncecollectivization and declare their resistance to it. Later, at Opanas's home, Vasyl and his friends meet to discusscollectivization and argue with Opanas, who is skeptical about collectivization.
Later, Vasyl arrives with the community's firsttractor to much excitement. After the men urinate in the overheatedradiator, the peasants plow the land with the tractor and harvest the grain, destroying the kulaks' fences in the process. A montage sequence presents the production ofbread from beginning to end. That night, Vasyl walks along a path on his way home while dancing ahopak, and he is killed by a dark figure. Upon discovery of Vasyl's death, Opanas looks for his son's killer and confronts Khoma, Bilokin's son. Khoma does not confess to the murder.
Vasyl's father turns away theRussian Orthodox priest who expects to lead thefuneral, declaring hisatheism. He asks Vasyl's friends to give his son a secular funeral and "sing new songs for a new life." The villagers do so, while Vasyl's fiancée, Natalya, mourns him and the priest curses them. At the cemetery, Khoma arrives in a frenzy to declare that he will resist collectivization and that he was the one who killed Vasyl. The villagers ignore Khoma while one of Vasyl's friends eulogizes him. The film ends with a montage showing a downpour of rain over fruit and vegetables, after which Natalya finds herself embraced in the arms of a new lover.
Dovzhenko wrote, produced, and filmedEarth in 1929, during the process ofcollectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which he described as "a period … of economic [and] mental transformation of the whole people."[1][2] Collectivization began in 1929 asSoviet General SecretaryJoseph Stalin sought to controlagriculture in the Soviet Union asit industrialized.[3] This meant the collectivization of privately owned farms, which peasants resisted by killing theirdraft animals, sabotagingagricultural machinery, and assassinating Soviet agents. Much ofEarth's script was inspired by Dovzhenko's experience of this process; Vasyl's death was based on the assassination of a Soviet agent in his home district.[4] Dovzhenko also drew inspiration from his childhood memories, for instance basing the character of Semyon on his own grandfather.[5][6]
Production ofEarth began on 24 May 1929 and was finished on 25 February 1930.[7] The original soundtrack was composed byLevko Revutsky.[8]
Filming mostly took place in thePoltava Oblast of Ukraine.[9] To shoot the film, Dovzhenko partnered with the Ukrainian cinematographerDanylo Demutsky [uk], who also shot two of Dovzhenko's previous films,Zvenigora andArsenal.[10][11]Close-ups are used extensively to highlight one or several characters, usually unnamed peasants, frequently motionless. Film scholarGilberto Perez likenedEarth's cinematography toHomer'sOdyssey, as "all that counts, in a given moment, is what is … clearly displayed on the screen".[12]
Vasyl's dance celebrating the success of the harvest was originally scripted as aCossack-stylehopak but Svashenko altered it after consulting local Ukrainian farmers.[9]
The film is 89 minutes long.[13]
Earth was released on 8 April 1930 and banned by Soviet authorities nine days later.[7][14] BeforeEarth was approved for general distribution, certain scenes that were criticized as giving the film a "biological" focus, such as the peasants urinating into the tractor's radiator, were removed.[15] The original negative for the film was destroyed in 1941 by a German air raid during theFirst Battle of Kiev.[16] In 1952, Dovzhenko adapted the film into anovelization.[1]
In 2012, theNational Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Center, the Ukrainian state film archive, restoredEarth and gave it a new score by the Ukrainian folk quartetDakhaBrakha. This version of the film premiered at the 2012Odesa International Film Festival.[7]
Earth was released at a time when theindependence of the film industry in the Soviet Union from theCommunist Party was being eroded and its most prominent directors—like Dovzhenko—and critics were being criticized and purged.[17] Soviet authorities and journalists simultaneously lauded the film for its "formal mastery" and derided it for perceived ideological shortcomings.[18][19][20]Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, praised the film's visual style but called its political content "false".[18] The Soviet poetDemyan Bedny attackedEarth, calling it "counterrevolutionary" and "defeatist" in the newspaperIzvestia.[21][22]Ippolit Sokolov, a Soviet film critic, described Dovzhenko as a "great director" but also "a petty-bourgeois artist" in his review ofEarth.[20] Dovzhenko was so upset by the negative reaction to the film that, on the verge of anervous breakdown, he left Ukraine and traveled abroad to screen his films and experiment with newly developedsound equipment available inwestern Europe.[21][23]
Film criticC. A. Lejeune praised the film's main section, saying that it "contains perhaps more understanding of pure beauty in cinema, more validity of relation in moving image, than any ten minutes of production yet known to the screen."Lewis Jacobs compared Dovzhenko's work to that ofSergei Eisenstein andVsevolod Pudovkin, stating that Dovzhenko "had added a deep personal and poetic insight … [his films] are laconic in style, with a strange, wonderfully imaginative quality difficult to describe."[24] Film directorGrigori Roshal praised the film, writing, "Neither Eisenstein nor Pudovkin have achieved the tenderness and warmth in speaking about men and the world that Alexander Dovzhenko has revealed. Dovzhenko is always experimental. He is always an innovator and always a poet."[25]
Dovzhenko's biographer Marco Carynnyk lauded the film's "passionate simplicity … which has made it a masterpiece of world cinema" and praised its "powerful lyric affirmation of life."[10] It was ranked #88 in the 1995 Centenary Poll of the 100 Best Films of the Century inTime Out magazine.[26]
Earth is widely considered to be Dovzhenko'smagnum opus,[27][18][28] and among thegreatest films ever made.[29] The National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Center considersEarth to be the most famous Ukrainian film made.[7]Earth was voted one of the twelve greatest films of all time by a group of 117 film historians at the 1958Brussels World's Fair[30] and was selected as one of five films to be screened at a festival to celebrate the 70th anniversary ofUNESCO in 2015.[31][32]
The work received 10 critics' votes in the2012Sight & Sound critics' poll of the world's greatest films.[33] TheBritish Film Institute said ofEarth that its plot "is secondary to the extraordinarily potent images of wheatfields, ripe fruit and weatherbeaten faces".[34]In 2022, the film was ranked joint 243rd in thecritics' poll, tied with 21 other films.[35]
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