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After the frenzies of Arsenal, an interlude out of Chekhov or Twain: Surrounded by bountiful Nature (blank skies filling three-quarters of the screen, shimmering apples about to drop from branches, sunflowers the size of a maiden's head), a smiling geezer is at peace with mortality. ("Let me know where you are over there," asks the scratchy chum by his side, "in heaven or hell.") Agrarian collectivization is Alexander Dovzhenko's bedrock, the new tractor is the mythical-modernist beast—revived with a radiator full of piss and vinegar—needed to knock down the Ukrainian village's fences. Wheat crops vibrate for the camera, the progression from open field to bakery posits a world ecstatically shared with the elements, laborare est orare. (Vidor in Our Daily Bread and Buñuel in Viridiana analyze the montage tellingly.) "They don't give medals to oxen," the old farmer meanwhile presses his ear to the soil covering his friend's grave, a Fordian staple. The collective's prosperity infuriates the rich kulaks, the young chairman (Semyon Svashenko) is the sacrificial lamb, struck by a bullet at the crossroads in the middle of a midnight jig. (A magical sequence, approached perhaps by the tramp's death midway through Au Hasard Balthazar.) The priest is banned, the funeral is a proud pagan rite: "We'll sing new songs of the new life," proclaims the fallen comrade's father (Nikolai Nademsky). Lustrous and granular, Dovzhenko's vision is one of pantheistic juxtapositions and cycles, where cosmic concerns crack the cement of propaganda. The martyr's corpse caressed by tree leaves, vengeful praying drowned out by cathartic choruses, the fiancé's frantic grief yielding to the cry of the newborn. A proto-Tarkovsky downpour answers the sea of upturned faces, the confession of the miserable kulak (Pyotr Masokha) goes unheard. A grave and jubilant landmark, an elegy for the terrain that Stalin would soon drench with blood. Cinematography by Daniil Demutsky. With Yuliya Solntseva, Yelena Maksimova, Stepan Shkurat, and Ivan Franko. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |