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Godard adduces a gag from the opening sequence, a Mona Lisa photograph amid peasant squalor (Les Carabiniers). Overlapping epochs, tradition and modernity, thus a collectivist manifesto exploded for the mad poetry within. "The land in shreds," drought and fences and yokels who divide the farm by literally sawing it in half. The bulge of a pregnant belly next to the slope of an emaciated equine back, a fleshy cubism that gives complacent kulaks as porcine eyes and double chins. The cauldrons and frogs of witchcraft are no less antiquated than the official icons of religion, congregation members dust themselves off after vigorous prayer to glare at the priest for the lack of results. "It's impossible to live separately" is the rallying cry, the cooperative kicks off with the ecstatic ejaculations of a cream separator, from onanism to orgy for the benefit of Anger (Fireworks) and Makavejev (Man Is Not a Bird). Sergei Eisenstein at his most pholyphonic-lyrical-bonkers: His heroine (Marfa Lapkina) dozes off on the group's money box and a bovine fertility god looms in oneiric skies, a dairy rain floods the world. (The bull meets its bride in a ceremonial mating, after which a vast herd fills the screen.) Nature as raw material for worker and camera alike, reaper and grasshopper and tractor racing for the harvest, "I am also a machine." Lang's Metropolis and Keaton's Go West are taken into account, cute piglets grow into hanging carcasses but poisoned beasts can be resurrected. The monumental aplomb of the filming observes a Lenin-shaped inkwell on a bureaucrat's desk ("Less political chatter!") and climaxes with tractors circling in a Giotto O. (The cinematic miracle turns out to be a broad smile spreading on a weathered visage.) The finale tips its hat to Chaplin's A Woman of Paris, and Dovzhenko takes it from there. Cinematography by Eduard Tisse. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |