Silva
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 Inregistrat: acum 18 ani
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Earth ('Zemlya') (1930)
| 713.5 MB | Runtime 1:11:37 | b/w |
Language : silent-film
Forced subtitles : English
Audio : mp3 , 48000 Hz , 128 Kb/s , 2-ch
Video : XviD , 1200 Kb/s , 29.97 frm/s , 512x384 (4:3)
Dovzhenko's "film poem" style brings to life the collective experience of life for the Ukranian proles, examining natural cycles through his epic montage. He explores life, death, violence, sex, and other issues as they relate to the collective farms. An idealistic vision of the possibilities of Communism made just before Stalinism set in and the Kulack class was liquidated, "Earth" was viewed negatively by many Soviets because of its exploration of death and other dark issues that come with revolution. )
Dovzhenko has often been ranked with Eisenstein and Pudovkin as the top Soviet directors, so has "Earth" on more than one occasion been voted by critics as one of the top films of all time. But in the USSR, it was attacked in 1930 as a high-brow delicacy with little appeal to the farmers for whom it was supposedly intended. "Earth" was part of a campaign to coax private farmers to voluntarily merge their land and cattle into state controlled collective farms.
But the film was released at a time of violence waged by radicals who tried to take the earth and livestock away from stubborn farmers who fought back with equal ruthlessness. The real-life atmosphere bore little resemblance to the idyllic mood of the film.
A. Dovzhenko (1894-1956) had studied art and worked as a painter and cartoonist ; as with many directors who came from the visual arts, the literary side of his films is less important than the pictorial.
The rather slight story line of "Earth" was inspired by a newspaper story, and the movie was filmed in a Ukrainian village where an activist leader had recently been stabbed by reactionary farmers... But the plot held little interest for Dovzhenko, a very individual, non-conformist filmmaker. Instead he followed the dram-logic of passion and emotions, skipping impressionistically over events and characters to focus an the generalized, eternal experiences of nature and living things: love, family ties, birth, death, new birth, planting and harvest, rejoicing in the fruits of one's toil.
This great masterpiece of Soviet cinema has images so powerful and an editing technique so bold that at times the narrative is transcended. By this I mean that the film goes beyond it's original intention of arguing for changes from individualistic to more technologized and collective agricultural strategies and becomes a kind of realization of what a "liberated" agricultural zone would really look and feel like. )
This is a film ripe with the excitement of the creation of a new art to match a hopeful new world. It hardly needs to be mentioned that Stalinsit forces decried the final results of this masterpiece; calling it decadent and stylistically elitist. In actuality the film is too Marxist (I would go so far as to say too Leninist) for Stalinism. The film respects the ability of the viewer (and the viewers were assumed to be proletariat working class and agricultural workers) to grapple with rigorous ideas and images and to function outside of the narrative frame of individualistic melodrama. Like many early Soviet films this work seems not only ahead of its time, but, actually ahead of ours. )
What an unusual and memorable film this is, almost more like a poem or an impressionist painting than a movie. It's filled with activity and images that push the actual story into the background. Sometimes the characters overreact to events in a highly exaggerated fashion, while at other times they barely respond to what happens - yet it seems both real and believable. The movie is probably not quite as great as some would have it, but it has an unusual appeal that makes you want to watch it (or, perhaps, experience it) over again. )
To be truthful there isn't much of a story--that's secondary in this film. The imagery is what counts and it's truly stunning. It contains some of the most gorgeous footage I've ever seen of nature and, in images, clearly documents man's love of the earth
Historically and visually this is a landmark of world cinema--a definite must-see. Try to see the unedited prints which contain surprising (for 1930) female nudity. )
"The Earth", Dovzhenko's last silent movie, and it is also his best. With a simple story of a young farmer from an Ucranian village, Dovzhenko works the lyrical expression of an universal theme: the life circle of a person. The movie is developed with a constant counterpoint between pictures of life and death, being the images of death and social changes extremely powerful. The arrival of a tractor is the turning point of all the social changes in the farm, as it is gradually shown in the movie. Yes, it is a movie from former USSR, but that shouldn't make us build a preconceptcion of the movie (in fact this movie was censored by the USSR). In short, one sentence for this movie: Death not as an end, but as a natural process. )
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"In politica, prostia nu este un handicap". - Napoleon Bonaparte
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