Metrograph

Dovzhenko’s final silent feature, which depicts a clash between reactionary landowning kulaks and modernizing muzhiks bringing the first tractor to their corner of the Ukrainian countryside, has by now spawned nearly a century of debate: is it a propagandist paean to the collectivization project in Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, which would have catastrophic results in the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, or, as certain Soviet censors suspected, an on-the-sly celebration of a Ukrainian folk culture grounded in an ancient connection between the peasants and the soil they’ve so long tilled, threatened with impending erasure? What is not up for question is that Earth is among the greatest of films from the silent film canon, its distinct synthesis of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov making it something like a summation of what had come before it, while its lyric ode to the natural world and those that live with it in harmony blazes a trail for the Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the future to follow. Presented with an original score by renowned Ukrainian folk quartet DakhaBrakha, commissioned by the Dovzhenko Center in Kyiv.

DCP courtesy of Dovzhenko Center

Pre-screening performance by polyphonic folk choir, Ukrainian Village Voices on Saturday, November 8th