The Life and Work of Alexander Dovzhenko: Earth (1930)

One of the greatest films of all time, Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s lyrical Earth(Zemlya; released here in the States, as Soil, the same year as in the Soviet Union) is one of the quintessential Soviet films. Dovzhenko, cinema’s “poet of the Ukraine,” made this film in response to another (wonderful) film, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s The Old and the New (Staroye i Novoye, sometimes called in the States The General Line, 1929). Dovzhenko, in Earth, was expressing his own view of “the old and the new.” (It is Godard who has said that the best way to criticize someone else’s film is to answer it with a film of your own.)

Dovzhenko’s film is both national and urgent, and serenely transcendent. Selfish peasants—kulaks—resist collectivization; seeking to hold onto exclusive ownership of land, they oppose Nature by violating the bond of sympathy that weds individuals to the common good and to the earth. Nature is shown here as bountiful, ripe and nourishing, the source of moral truth, and an ennobling, humanizing force that the farm cooperative as a practical idea embodies. Nature also is the eternal witness in whose philosophic breadth and breath human mortality—the tragedy of life—unfolds. Whereas Eisenstein’s The Old and the New points proudly, confidently ahead, Dovzhenko’s Earth finds a solemn continuity—imaged forth by a vast ocean of waving wheat—threading past and present.

Dennis Grunes