Dovzhenko 1
Max Pyziur
UNESCO Courier
July, 1994
SECTION: Pg. 66; ISSN: 0041-5278
LENGTH: 1918 words
HEADLINE: Olexander Dovzhenko: poet of the seventh art.
BYLINE: Hosejko, Lubomir
BODY:
The pioneering film-maker once dubbed "the Homer of the cinema"
dominated the Ukrainian cinema for three decades
OLEXANDER Dovzhenko was one of the giants of Ukrainian cinema.
He was born in the town of Sosnytsia on 30 August 1894, shortly
before the invention of the cinema. After teaching for a while at
a primary school, then studying economics at the Kiev Institute of
Commerce, he was caught up in the maelstrom of civil war in 1918.
Once the Soviet regime had been established, Dovzhenko took up
various responsibilities in education and the fine arts. In January
1920, he chose his political camp by joining the Borot'bisti, a
Ukrainian peasant party in favour of independence. When it was
dissolved he found himself, almost reluctantly, a member of the
Ukrainian Communist Party.
After a spell with the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs,
which took him to Warsaw and then Berlin, where he took lessons
from the Expressionist painter Erich Heckel, Dovzhenko settled in
Kharkov, then Ukraine's administrative capital, and took up
painting. He contributed illustrations and cartoons to several
newspapers, and designed film posters.
After half-heartedly toying with the idea of a theatrical
career, Dovzhenko ended up joining the Odessa film studios. He had
earlier decided to give himself ten years in which to master the
art of painting, and now assimilated cinematic technique within a
year. The next step was to make his mark on the screen.
Dovzhenko's first film efforts in 1926 were minor works: a
satirical comedy, Vasya the Reformer, and a burlesque short, Love's
Berry. Then he directed his first successful film, a thriller
called The Diplomatic Pouch (1927), in which he himself played the
part of a stoker, his first and last screen role.
A year later, Zvenyhora secured Dovzhenko a place in the
pantheon of great directors. It is an eclectic but spontaneously
original work, a sweeping poetic pageant that encompasses ten
centuries of Ukrainian history. The linking thread of this visual
symphony in twelve cantos is the figure of an old man who embodies
the patriarchal peasantry, and who is attached to the values of the
past and indifferent to those of the Revolution. The film marked
the beginning of Dovzhenko's own personal tragedy.
A deeply patriotic artist, Dovzhenko ran up against the
ideological and aesthetic constraints of a totalitarian regime
throughout his career. He was forced to make concessions to those
in power and to praise them in sometimes overblown terms. He
stated, for example, that his aim in Arsenal (1929) was to destroy
nationalism and chauvinism and glorify the working classes. The
film, which describes the workers' uprising against the Rada
(central council) of Kiev, exaggerates the Bolsheviks'
achievements. Arsenal, which bristles with didactic symbolism, is
the most expressionist work produced by Ukrainian cinema.
That did not stop Dovzhenko campaigning actively for the
recognition of national minorities. He championed above all the
cause of his native land. Earth (1930), made at the watershed
between two eras and a harbinger of great upheavals to come, is a
hymn to the glory of nature and its perpetual confrontation with
man. The shots showing the first tractor flattening the boundary
markings in the fields and turning the peasantry into a
collectivist society were much imitated in later Soviet films.
An epoch-making work that carries an extraordinarily powerful
emotional charge and produces an almost physical effect of
revelation, Earth was violently criticized for its pantheistic view
of the world and its excessive naturalism. It was also denounced as
nationalistic. Almost thirty years later, a jury of 117 historians
meeting in Brussels in 1958 rated Earth one of the twelve best
films of all time.
Exiled in Moscow
Labelled a reactionary and banned from lecturing at the Kiev
Film Institute, Dovzhenko was forced to stay in Moscow and had to
pay a high price for his professional survival. His first sound
film, Ivan (1932), foreshadowed Socialist Realism. It shows a
radically transformed Ukrainian landscape, devastated by
collectivization. Starving peasants try to escape deportation and
the effects of an artificially engineered famine. Those taken on as
navvies on the construction site of the Dnieper dam project are the
central characters of this film of great pathos, which ambitiously
tackles such issues as the forced industrialization of an
agricultural community and the social rehabilitation of the
peasantry through collective labour. At a time when Russian
directors were becoming increasingly prosaic, Dovzhenko steered the
Ukrainian cinema towards more poetic horizons.
After the genocide of 1933, Dovzhenko was forced to endure a
twofold exile: he was robbed of both his native land and his
creative universe. Stalin sent him off to Siberia to shoot Aerograd
(1935), a film about the construction of a Utopian city. The
mise-en-scene of this visionary work shows Dovzhenko at his most
inspired. It was the first time he had set eyes on the landscape of
the taiga, and he immediately spotted its powerful aesthetic
potential. Aerograd, which describes Japanese infiltration into
eastern Siberia, delivers an ecological message. But it was soon
forgotten.
Stalin wanted Dovzhenko to make a "Ukrainian Chapayev". He
therefore authorized him to return to Kiev to direct Shchors, a
historic and revolutionary epic to which he was to devote four
years of his life. The film paints a moving portrait of the
commander of the first Ukrainian Soviet division during the civil
war. Shooting was long and difficult, as Dovzhenko was kept under
close surveillance during the purges of 1936-37: the rushes were
systematically sent to Moscow and checked by the Kremlin. Depending
on Stalin's mood and the political situation at a particular
moment, Dovzhenko might be forced to rejig whole sequences,
sometimes even five or six times. Shchors, who had actually been
killed by a stray bullet, had to be shown as the hero of a
Bolshevik happy end. It is true that the war clouds were gathering.
A new form of creation
After the signing of the Russo-German pact in September 1939,
western Ukraine was reunited with the Soviet Ukraine. The event was
the subject of Dovzhenko's first documentary, Liberation (1940). He
made two others during the Second World War, The Battle for Our
Soviet Ukraine (1943), an extremely violent indictment of war, and
the more considered and triumphant Victory in the Ukraine (1945).
Towards the end of the war Dovzhenko wrote and secretly edited for
the Yervan studios a documentary about Armenia, Native Land (he is
not credited as editor).
Dovzhenko had earlier planned to make a film called Ukraine in
Flames. But the publication in 1943 of extracts from the script
caused a scandal. He was summoned before the Politburo by Beria,
who controlled the Soviet Unions internal security system, and
roundly admonished by Stalin, who accused him of being a defeatist
and party to a nationalist plot. Such treatment only made Dovzhenko
all the more determined to look beyond the Stalinist notion of the
class struggle and criticize the education of Soviet youth and its
ignorance of history, which he saw as the reason for the Red Army's
defeat in 1941.
Dovzhenko was dismissed from his post as artistic director of
the Kiev studios. He then embarked on a new career as a war
correspondent, writing some thirty articles, pamphlets and short
stories while the war was still on. The effervescence of his
literary inspiration can be judged from stories like The Mother, On
the Barbed Wire and Before the Battle, plays like The Descendants
of the Zaporozhe Cossacks and Life in Bloom, and his novel The
Golden Gates.
Final indignities
After the war, Dovzhenko's filming activity was severely cut
back. The personality cult was at its height, and priority was
given to biographical films. It was in that noisome ideological
climate that he made his first colour film, Michurin (1949), a
biography of the celebrated Russian agronomist. But Dovzhenko
refused to produce a work of pure scientific popularization, and
his final cut was turned down by the authorities. To save his film
from destruction, he made a second version including various
rationalist and didactic episodes, though he did manage to retain
two of the original sequences. A hybrid work, Michurin is above all
a tribute to nature and to solitude--a fate shared by both the
film-maker and his subject. Michurin wanted to turn the earth into
an orchard. That was also the secret dream of Dovzhenko, an
ecologist before his time.
Dovzhenko suffered one final humiliation. When he had almost
finished shooting the interiors of Goodbye America (1950), he was
locked out of the studios. He had made the mistake of choosing a
sensitive subject, taken from a short story by the American Annabel
Buckart. The central character of the story, Anna Bedford, who
works at the American embassy in Moscow, refuses to become a spy
and ends up going over to the Soviet camp. As always, Dovzhenko
gave a poetic dimension to the story, one of political
brainwashing. Once again he was disavowed: the Cold War was at its
height.
Stalin's death in 1953 completely changed Dovzhenko's life. He
lectured at the State Film Institute in Moscow, did some more
writing, and devoted the last three years of his life to preparing
Poem of the Sea. But he died on 25 November 1956, shortly before
shooting was due to start. He left six unfilmed screenplays,
including one of Taras Bulba, which he had always wanted to direct.
His wife and collaborator Yulia Solntseva loyally continued his
work and directed Poem of the Sea (1958), The Flaming Years (1961)
and The Enchanted Desna (1964) from his screenplays.
Dovzhenko was not only a towering figure of Ukrainian cinema
over almost three decades, but one of the most pioneering directors
in the history of film. The man dubbed "the Homer of the cinema" by
the Venice Film Festival immortalized on film an era that was at
once productive and tragic. The price he had to pay was that
although he miraculously survived the system he was totally
ostracized by it.
His work, with its Gogolian undertones, can be seen as a long
lyrical meditation on what it means to be Ukrainian. His formal
innovations, such as the meditative pause, the voice-over and an
editing style that breaks free from the spatio-temporal
restrictions of the image, established a filmic syntax that was
totally new for the period. His brand of realism, at once poetic,
revolutionary, romantic and socialist in form, was always national
in content. Although his message was occasionally obscured by the
philosophical digressions that accompanied his lyrical outpourings,
his poetic language inspired many film-makers. Kinugasa, Kurosawa
and Rossellini, to name but three, owed much to Dovzhenko.
Worshipped abroad but all too often detested by his own people,
Dovzhenko was a true poet who always highlighted the purest aspects
of the beautiful. His work marks the triumph of beauty over truth,
of innermost conviction over reason.
LUBOMIR HOSEJKO is a French cinema critic of Ukrainian origin.
He is a member of the Ukrainian Film-makers' Union, and, as a
specialist in films made by expatriate Ukrainians, works for
several newspapers in the Ukraine and elsewhere. He is currently
engaged in the creation of a Ukrainian Film Library and is working
on a history of the Ukrainian cinema.