Earth *****

by Allan Fish

(USSR 1930 70m) DVD1

Aka. Zemlya

Ode to a tractor

d/w  Alexander P.Dovzhenko  ph  Danylo Demutsky  ed  Alexander P.Dovzhenko  art  Vassili Krichevsky

Semyon Svashenko (Vasil Trubenko), Stepan Shkurat (Opanas Trubenko), Nikolai Nademsky (Old Semion Trubenko), Yelena Maximova (Natalka), Julia Solntseva (Opanas’ daughter), Vladimir Krasenko (Old Peter), Ivan Franko (Arkhijo),

In Mamoulian’s 1957 film Silk Stockings, a composer comes to Paris on the success of his communist piece ‘Ode to a tractor’, which immediately conjures up images of this 1930 film, which really was an ode to a tractor.  Yet it was also a eulogy for the earth.  Dovzhenko’s Earth is one of those films that can justifiably be called a spiritual experience, yet it’s not in any way religious.  Indeed, religion is seen as one of the evils of the world, in the person of an unforgiving self-righteous old priest.  This is a film where there are heroines, but the one real spiritual heroine is Mother Earth. 

            At the beginning of the film, one of a farming village’s elders, Old Simeon, is dying.  He’s lying outside, surrounded by friends, wishing him well for the journey ahead.  One asks him to tell him how he gets on and he promises to do so if he can.  The old man briefly comes to and asks for some food and savours its taste for one final time before returning from whence both came, to the earth.  Yet Simeon’s death is also a milestone, for the world he knew is about to vanish forever.  Under the Stalinist Collective Farms, each village is about to get a tractor to help them increase turnover for the good of the state.  The old farmers dread seeing the earth taken away from them, but one of their sons, Vasil, is very keen on the idea, preaching the benefits to all who will listen and anyone else, too.  However, the rich farmers who lived nearby grow suspicious of the peasants getting better off and they shoot Vasil late at night in cold blood, while he is dancing down the lane. 

            On the surface, the film is about the benefits of communism, but at its heart it’s about tradition against progress.  Dovzhenko was interested in the Ukrainian ideals of the earth and its spiritual ties.  Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, to it shall we return.  As is said in the film, “it’s my earth, I won’t give it up!” – looking forward to Charley Grapewin’s Grandpa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.  The imagery is startling but also powerful, so powerful that three scenes were originally censored; firstly of the men collectively urinating into the empty tractor radiator, not only showing the ideals of collective farming, but also showing subversive contempt for (ie. pissing on) progress.  Then there was the shot of the men collectively placing their hands inside their women’s blouses to clutch on their breasts.  This is also symbolic of motherhood and the earth, steeling themselves by feeling their women’s strength, which also is symbolic of the way, in the third excised scene, Vasil’s naked widow mourns hysterically, squeezing her breasts together in desperation, trying to be strong, but melting inside at her loss.  It’s just a relief that the scenes survive now to be seen in full context, as they add so much to the film. 

            Dovzhenko’s whole oeuvre is unavailable in the UK, but if you have the ability to do so, seek him out in the US where this and his Arsenal are on DVD (and Zvenigora was on video).  They are all incredible works, but Earth is his greatest film, a wonderful cine poem to his nation’s (Ukraine not Russia) traditions, whose editing (especially in the end between the guilt-ridden killer doing an ostrich breakdance in the mud, the naked widow, the marching hordes and the awful priest) almost conjures up a rhapsody of its own (and was surely an influence on the works of Miklós Jancsó and Andrei Tarkovsky) and whose photography is so full of beauty as to be something of a miracle (though, despite no longer being censored, the print still needs the restoring love and care that a Kino or a Criterion could bestow on it).  For any viewer to whom Russian pre-war cinema means Eisenstein, it’s a revelation.  To the cinema itself, it’s a heritage of unparalleled beauty.