by Allan Fish
(USSR 1928 75m) not on DVD
Old grandfather time
d Alexander P.Dovzhenko w Yuri Tyutyunik, Mikhail Johansson ph Boris Savelyev ed Alexander P.Dovzhenko art Vasili Krichevsky
Georgi Astafyev (Leader of Skyths), P.Otava (Okasana/Roksana), Nikolai Nademsky (Grandfather/The General), Les Podorozhnij (Pavel), Ivan Selyuk (Ataman), Semyon Svashenko (Timoshko),
There’s something eerily appropriate about the way Alexander Dovzhenko’s first masterpiece has been forgotten by modern critics. Like many such films to suffer such a fate, availability is again the problem. Trying to find this film, let alone sitting through it, is hard enough, and it’s fair to say that it’s an acquired taste eighty years on. Upon seeing the film, his contemporaries Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevelod Pudovkin apparently invited Dovzhenko for an evening’s drinking session to celebrate the arrival of a new comrade, but in truth the very term ‘comrade’ say most uneasy on Dovzhenko’s shoulders. On the surface, there may be things to say about the Soviet way of life, but underneath, in its simplistic essence, it’s really about anything but.
Zvenigora has been called a tone poem by many people, and not without just cause. It begins with a caption; “soaked with blood, sealed in secrecy, shrouded in legend, treasures of the country have been buried for ages in Ukrainian soil.” The action then opens with a prologue sets several hundred years earlier in which Cossack raiders and bandits try to persuade the old legendary guardian of the treasure to disclose its whereabouts. They don’t succeed in getting the treasure, and the old grandfather has the task of protecting it, as if by ageless magic, from future potential thieves. Or, as the film refers to the old man, “the centuries old guardian, preserver of antiquities, a moss-covered grandfather.”
Stalin and his officials would have been contented by the way money leads to greed and unhealthy ambitions, an effective rejection of capitalism, as if subliminally saying that Communism is the way forward. I personally don’t think Dovzhenko gave a hoot about all that, rather like Sergei Paradjanov and his later films about Georgian life, his film celebrates his homeland, the Ukraine, and its traditions. As it turns out, the fabled treasure is of course non-existent in material terms, what Hitchcock might have called the definitive McGuffin. The treasure does exist, but the treasure is the land; the Ukrainian and the land are one, the land cares for the Ukrainian and he must care for Mother Earth so she shall producer her bounty. Just as in his later masterpiece Earth, where the villagers’ pissing into a water cooler in their tractor is seen symbolically, here again we this time have a small naked boy pissing on the ground, replenishing it with his water, as if they are all essentially part of the same being.
Technically, too, the film is dazzling, with memorable use of slow-mo to accompany the opening scene of the galloping Cossacks, shot as if they had literally ridden out of time and into the present. Indeed, time itself is transient here, as we go back, forth and back again at regular intervals, most memorably in the dreamy, multiple-exposure story of Roksana, which is arguably the high point of the film. The editing may lack Eisenstein’s revolutionary speed, but it’s nonetheless remarkably fluid and subtle, none more so in its depictions of simple rural life; never has a simple shot of men sweeping their scythes through the wheat in unison seemed so majestic. Dovzhenko certainly embraces the Eisenstein concept of cinema as a new language, devoid of the theatrics of the stage, with performances not in themselves exercises in acting so much as demonstrations of the director’s vision. It is, as I have intimated, not an easy film to sit through, its narrative will confuse and befuddle many a casual viewer into not sticking the course, but I can only recommend that you try, for this is a film that deserves mention, if not completely beside Earth, then only just behind it, and one of the essential Soviet films of the late twenties. Not a perfect film, but an endlessly fascinating one, long overdue a reappraisal.
Dovzhenko’s masterpiece of course is the expressionistic, montage laden masterpiece EARTH (1930) which ranks among the cinema’s greatest films, but this intoxicating tone poem most assuredly deserves placement on this countdown.
Thank you very much for the interesting analysis of Zvenihora (The Mountain that sounds). This film was not accepted as originally was going to be shot. Censorship by the regime made cut important parts of it. And, besides this bitter or painful fact, another circumstance or mishap unknown because of what it meant, changed the superb production it was to be into a much more modest but nevertheless extraordinary film. Alexander (Sasha) Dovzhenko , the brilliant Ukrainian film producer, the scriptwriters, the art director, were much frustrated because of these limitations to their creativity.
Dovzhenko decided to make this film when talking with Vasyl Hryhorovych Krychevsky, the Ukrainian architect,painter,graphic, applied art master, folk art researcher,The Father of Ukrainian National Modern, the designer in 1918 of the current Ukrainian Coat of Arms, who was Art director, Set designer and History consultant for many films. It was an old legend. The mountain emmited sounds when, under harsh circumstances, the spirits of the indomit Ukrainians of past centuries appeared.
When Vasyl H. Krychevsky was ill for a long time, his talented son, Vasyl Vasyliovych Krychevsky was Art director working with Dovzhenko. Due to the same name, and that it was forgotten to differentiate them by the complete name, Zvenihora, Arsenal and Earth, appear as if the same person was in charge of the Art direction.)
From the soon to be published memories of Vasyl H. Krychevsky´s daughter Halyna Krychevska-Linde, I will transcribe part of what she wrote, for she was witness, when a child, accompanying his father during the filmation, of the unvoluntary “accident” that erased the triunfal beginning of the movie:
“In the small town of Jareshky,steppes of Poltava, Dovzhenko and my father found an ideal place for the scenes opening the film.
1 Picture: A very ancient, pre-historical people, on horses.. everything vanishes in a mist, after covering a slope of a hill.
2 An army of hourse mounted Scythians in an avalanche, sliding down the same hill.
3 An army of horse-mounted Cossacs, in an avalanche, sliding down the same hill, and vanishing in a mist.
5 A tractor slides down the same hill, and totally destroys it, cutting it in two.
The shooting of these scenes was done in the same day, starting at dawn (to prepare all the costumes to be swiftly changed without delay. All the mounted people were lent by the local authorities, for just one day.
Finally, at the end, the shooting was finished. I do remember this scene, for I was standing near the operator. The sun already going down. The operator, tired of the whole day of filming, opens the camera.
Oh, God! The camera was empty! He did forget to put in the film! Nothing remained. everybody did not know it. Of course, Dovzhenko, immediately, understood the situation. To confess the real situation meant the following: He would be accussed of whatever happened, and also, of having into protracted spending (all this became clear to me after many silent speculations, during many years, following upp, analysing. I could never forget it)
I understood how painful it would be for my father. The pattern of life repeated itself again. As in February 1918, when all his life´s work was destroyed in a spark, this time .a steady work of several weeks, creating and directing the tediously methodic details, was destroyed forever, without redemption.
I do not understand how Dovzhenko and my father Vasyk had not fulminant heart attack… No way to reproduce all this work, a huge amount of money lost.. no hill like this one in the beginning…
So, during all my life (I am 83 years old now), since 1926-27, when I was 8-9 years old, all this was hidden inside. The picture stayed in my memory, buried, etched deeply forever, as so many other unbearable, terrible images of sorrow, like the death of my uncle Danylo Scherbakyvsky due to the harrasment of the regime, like the Holodomor, still in my mind, every day of my life. The strong impact affected my whole soul. Highly symbolical this unfortunate fact. To me, it was, clearly, a symbolical representation of the methodical destruction of my beloved Ukraine…. ”
Halyna died several years ago.