Earth (1930 film)

1930 Soviet film

Earth

Theatrical release poster

Ukrainian| Земля
Directed by| Alexander Dovzhenko
Written by| Alexander Dovzhenko
Starring|

* Stepan Shkurat [uk]
* Semen Svashenko [uk]
* Yuliya Solntseva
* Yelena Maksimova
* Mykola Nademsky [uk]

Cinematography| Danylo Demutsky [uk]
Edited by| Alexander Dovzhenko
Music by|

* Levko Revutsky (original release)
* Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov (1971 restoration)
* DakhaBrakha (2012 remaster)

Release date

* 8 April 1930 (1930-04-08)

Running time

| 76 minutes
Country| Soviet Union
Languages| Silent film
Russian intertitles

Earth (Russian: «Земля», Ukrainian: «Земля», romanized: Zemlya) is a 1930 Soviet silent film by Alexander Dovzhenko. The film concerns the process of collectivization and the hostility of kulak landowners under the First Five-Year Plan. It is the third film, with Zvenigora and Arsenal, of Dovzhenko's "Ukraine Trilogy".

The script was inspired by Dovzhenko's life and experience of the process of collectivization in his native Ukraine. That process, which was the backdrop of the film and its production, informed its reception in the Soviet Union, which was largely negative.

Earth is commonly regarded as Dovzhenko's masterpiece and as one of the greatest films ever made. The film was voted number 10 on the prestigious Brussels 12 list at the 1958 World Expo.

## Plot

[edit]

Earth (1930)

The film begins with a montage of wind blowing through a field of wheat and sunflowers. Next, the film transitions to show an old peasant named Semyon who dies beneath an apple tree, attended by his son Opanas and grandson Vasyl. Elsewhere, local kulaks, including Arkhyp Bilokin, denounce collectivization and declare their resistance to it. Later, at Opanas's home, Vasyl and his friends meet to discuss collectivization and argue with Opanas, who is skeptical about collectivization.

Later, Vasyl arrives with the community's first tractor to much excitement. After the men urinate in the overheated radiator, the peasants plow the land with the tractor and harvest the grain, destroying the kulaks' fences in the process. A montage sequence presents the production of bread from beginning to end. That night, Vasyl walks along a path on his way home while dancing a hopak, and he is killed by a dark figure. Upon discovery of Vasyl's death, Opanas looks for his son's killer and confronts Khoma, Bilokin's son. Khoma does not confess to the murder.

Vasyl's father turns away the Russian Orthodox priest who expects to lead the funeral, declaring his atheism. He asks Vasyl's friends to give his son a secular funeral and "sing new songs for a new life." The villagers do so, while Vasyl's fiancée, Natalya, mourns him and the priest curses them. At the cemetery, Khoma arrives in a frenzy to declare that he will resist collectivization and that he was the one who killed Vasyl. The villagers ignore Khoma while one of Vasyl's friends eulogizes him. The film ends with a montage showing a downpour of rain over fruit and vegetables, after which Natalya finds herself embraced in the arms of a new lover.

## Cast

[edit]

* Stepan Shkurat [uk] as Opanas
* Semen Svashenko [uk] as Vasyl
* Yuliya Solntseva as Vasyl's sister
* Yelena Maksimova as Natalya
* Mykola Nademsky [uk] as Semen
* Petro Masokha [uk] as Khoma Bilokin
* Ivan Franko as Arkhyp Bilokin
* Volodymyr Mikhajlov as priest
* Pavlo Petrik as Communist Party cell leader
* O. Umanets as peasant
* Ye. Bondina as peasant girl
* Luka Lyashenko [uk] as young kulak

## Production

[edit]

Dovzhenko wrote, produced, and filmed Earth in 1929, during the process of collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which he described as "a period … of economic [and] mental transformation of the whole people."[1][2] Collectivization began in 1929 as Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin sought to control agriculture in the Soviet Union as it industrialized.[3] This meant the collectivization of privately owned farms, which peasants resisted by killing their draft animals, sabotaging agricultural machinery, and assassinating Soviet agents. Much of Earth's script was inspired by Dovzhenko's experience of this process; Vasyl's death was based on the assassination of a Soviet agent in his home district.[4] Dovzhenko also drew inspiration from his childhood memories, for instance basing the character of Semyon on his own grandfather.[5][6]

Production of Earth began on 24 May 1929 and was finished on 25 February 1930.[7] The original soundtrack was composed by Levko Revutsky.[8]

### Cinematography

[edit]

A shot from the first montage, showing a woman standing next to a sunflower against the sky

Filming mostly took place in the Poltava Oblast of Ukraine.[9] To shoot the film, Dovzhenko partnered with the Ukrainian cinematographer Danylo Demutsky [uk], who also shot two of Dovzhenko's previous films, Zvenigora and Arsenal.[10][11] Close-ups are used extensively to highlight one or several characters, usually unnamed peasants, frequently motionless. Film scholar Gilberto Perez likened Earth's cinematography to Homer's Odyssey, as "all that counts, in a given moment, is what is … clearly displayed on the screen".[12]

Vasyl's dance celebrating the success of the harvest was originally scripted as a Cossack-style hopak but Svashenko altered it after consulting local Ukrainian farmers.[9]

The film is 89 minutes long.[13]

## Release

[edit]

Earth was released on 8 April 1930 and banned by Soviet authorities nine days later.[7][14] Before Earth was approved for general distribution, certain scenes that were criticized as giving the film a "biological" focus, such as the peasants urinating into the tractor's radiator, were removed.[15] The original negative for the film was destroyed in 1941 by a German air raid during the First Battle of Kiev.[16] In 1952, Dovzhenko adapted the film into a novelization.[1]

In 2012, the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Center, the Ukrainian state film archive, restored Earth and gave it a new score by the Ukrainian folk quartet DakhaBrakha. This version of the film premiered at the 2012 Odesa International Film Festival.[7]

## Reception

[edit]

Earth was released at a time when the independence of the film industry in the Soviet Union from the Communist Party was being eroded and its most prominent directors—like Dovzhenko—and critics were being criticized and purged.[17] Soviet authorities and journalists simultaneously lauded the film for its "formal mastery" and derided it for perceived ideological shortcomings.[18][19][20] Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, praised the film's visual style but called its political content "false".[18] The Soviet poet Demyan Bedny attacked Earth, calling it "counterrevolutionary" and "defeatist" in the newspaper Izvestia.[21][22] Ippolit Sokolov, a Soviet film critic, described Dovzhenko as a "great director" but also "a petty-bourgeois artist" in his review of Earth.[20] Dovzhenko was so upset by the negative reaction to the film that, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he left Ukraine and traveled abroad to screen his films and experiment with newly developed sound equipment available in western Europe.[21][23]

Film critic C. A. Lejeune praised the film's main section, saying that it "contains perhaps more understanding of pure beauty in cinema, more validity of relation in moving image, than any ten minutes of production yet known to the screen." Lewis Jacobs compared Dovzhenko's work to that of Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, stating that Dovzhenko "had added a deep personal and poetic insight … [his films] are laconic in style, with a strange, wonderfully imaginative quality difficult to describe."[24] Film director Grigori Roshal praised the film, writing, "Neither Eisenstein nor Pudovkin have achieved the tenderness and warmth in speaking about men and the world that Alexander Dovzhenko has revealed. Dovzhenko is always experimental. He is always an innovator and always a poet."[25]

Dovzhenko's biographer Marco Carynnyk lauded the film's "passionate simplicity … which has made it a masterpiece of world cinema" and praised its "powerful lyric affirmation of life."[10] It was ranked #88 in the 1995 Centenary Poll of the 100 Best Films of the Century in Time Out magazine.[26]

### Legacy

[edit]

Earth is widely considered to be Dovzhenko's magnum opus,[27][18][28] and among the greatest films ever made.[29] The National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Center considers Earth to be the most famous Ukrainian film made.[7] Earth was voted one of the twelve greatest films of all time by a group of 117 film historians at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair[30] and was selected as one of five films to be screened at a festival to celebrate the 70th anniversary of UNESCO in 2015.[31][32]

The work received 10 critics' votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the world's greatest films.[33] The British Film Institute said of Earth that its plot "is secondary to the extraordinarily potent images of wheatfields, ripe fruit and weatherbeaten faces".[34] In 2022, the film was ranked joint 243rd in the critics' poll, tied with 21 other films.[35]

## See also

[edit]

* Dovzhenko Film Studios
* Holodomor
* List of Soviet films of 1930
* Soviet propaganda

## References

[edit]

1. ^ a b Dovzhenko 1973, p. 58.
2. ^ Burns 1981, pp. 86, 90.
3. ^ Burns 1981, pp. 85–86.
4. ^ Kepley 1986, pp. 76–78.
5. ^ Kepley 1986, p. 4.
6. ^ Dovzhenko 1973, pp. 59–60, 65.
7. ^ a b c d "Земля" [Earth] (in Ukrainian). Dovzhenko Center. Retrieved 4 March 2022.
8. ^ Leyda 1983, p. 436.
9. ^ a b Kepley 1986, p. 79.
10. ^ a b Wakeman 1987, p. 262.
11. ^ Rollberg 2010, pp. 168–169, 203.
12. ^ Perez 1975, pp. 71–72, 74–77.
13. ^ Rollberg 2010, p. 203.
14. ^ Gerhard, Susan. "Earth". San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Retrieved 3 March 2022.
15. ^ Burns 1981, p. 92.
16. ^ Beumers 2007, p. 57.
17. ^ Youngblood 1991, pp. 194–204.
18. ^ a b c Kepley 1986, p. 75.
19. ^ Papazian 2003, p. 412.
20. ^ a b Youngblood 1991, p. 211.
21. ^ a b Wakeman 1987, p. 263.
22. ^ Leyda 1983, pp. 75–76.
23. ^ Kepley 1986, p. 85.
24. ^ Wakeman 1987, pp. 262–63.
25. ^ Manvell 1949, pp. 159–60.
26. ^ "Top 100 Films (Centenary)". filmsite.org. Retrieved 25 August 2015.
27. ^ Rollberg 2010, p. 188.
28. ^ Barsam 1992, p. 56.
29. ^ Petrakis, John (7 June 2002). "'Earth' is a testament to Soviet Silent Cinema". Chicago Tribune. Archived from the original on 7 October 2018. Retrieved 5 February 2017.
30. ^ "MRC FilmFinder – Full Record: Earth". lib.unc.edu. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Archived from the original on 3 July 2007. Retrieved 2 November 2008.
31. ^ "UNESCO ranks Ukraine's avant-garde film Zemlya among world's five greatest masterpieces – watch it here". Euromaidan Press. 9 December 2015. Retrieved 4 March 2022.
32. ^ "Фильм Александра Довженко попал в пятерку шедевров мирового кино ЮНЕСКО" [Oleksandr Dovzhenko's film is included in the list of UNESCO masterpieces of world cinema]. NEWSru (in Russian). 9 December 2015. Retrieved 4 March 2022.
33. ^ "Votes for ZEMLYA (1930)". BFI.org.uk. British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 5 February 2017. Retrieved 5 February 2017.
34. ^ "ZEMLYA (1930)". BFI.org.uk. British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 9 April 2016. Retrieved 5 February 2017.
35. ^ "Earth (1930)". British Film Institute.

### Books

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* Barsam, Richard (1992). Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253207067.
* Beumers, Birgit (2007). The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union. Wallflower Press. ISBN 9781904764984.
* Dobrenko, Evgeny (2007). "The Product: Aleksandr Dovzhenko's "Created Space"". Political Economy of Socialist Realism. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300122800.
* Dovzhenko, Oleksandr (1973). "Earth". Two Russian Film Classics. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671213938.
* Kepley, Vance (1986). In the Service of the State: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 9780299106805.
* Leyda, Jay (1983). Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. Allen & Unwin. ISBN 9780691003467.
* Manvell, Roger, ed. (1949). Experiment in the Film. The Grey Walls Press. OCLC 1074067763.
* Rollberg, Peter (2010). The A to Z of Russian and Soviet Cinema. The Scarecrow Press. ISBN 9780810876194.
* Wakeman, John (1987). World Film Directors: 1890–1945. H. W. Wilson Company. ISBN 9780824207571.
* Youngblood, Denise (1991). Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935. University of Texas Press. ISBN 9780292761100.

### Articles

[edit]

* Bahry, Romana M. (2011). "Subversions in Dovzhenko's "Earth"". Harvard Ukrainian Studies. 32/33. Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute: 97–106\. JSTOR 24711657.
* Burns, Paul E. (December 1981). "Cultural Revolution, Collectivization, and Soviet Cinema: Eisenstein's Old and New and Dovzhenko's Earth". Film & History. 11 (4): 84–96\. ISSN 1548-9922.
* Kenez, Peter (Autumn 1988). "The Cultural Revolution in Cinema". The Slavic Review. 47 (3). Cambridge University Press: 414–33\. JSTOR 2498389.
* Mally, Lynn (January 1993). "Review of Earth". The Russian Review. 52 (1): 93. JSTOR 130861.
* Papazian, Elizabeth A. (July 2003). "Offscreen Dreams and Collective Synthesis in Dovzhenko's Earth". The Russian Review. 62 (3): 411–28\. JSTOR 3664464.
* Perez, Gilberto (Spring 1975). "All in the Foreground: A Study of Dovzhenko's "Earth"". The Hudson Review. 28: 68–86\. JSTOR 3850551.
* Perez, Gilberto (Summer 2011). "Dovzhenko: Folk Tale and Revolution". Film Quarterly. 64 (4). University of California Press: 17–21\. JSTOR 10.1525.

## External links

[edit]

* Earth at IMDb
* Earth on YouTube (English subtitles)
* Ray Uzwyshyn's Earth (1930): Philosophy, Iconology, Collectivization
* Senses of Cinema Poetry in Motion: Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth

* v
* t
* e

Films directed by Alexander Dovzhenko

* Love's Berries
* The Diplomatic Pouch
* Zvenigora
* Arsenal
* Earth
* Ivan
* Aerograd
* Shchors
* Ukraine in Flames
* Michurin

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