Earth (1930)

 

Film: Earth

Director: Oleksandr Dovzhenko

Country: Ukraine

Released: April 1930

Runtime: 76 minutes

Genre: Drama

Studio: AUPCM

Influenced: Jean Renoir, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Terrence Malick

Also known as Soil, Dovzhenko's Earth (Zemlya) is the final film in the director's Ukraine Trilogy and concerns itself with the process of "collectivisation" in Ukraine (the pooling of privately-owned land into state-controlled farms) as part of Stalin's first five-year plan for the USSR. But this film is far from propaganda and its concerns are more profound than with the shallow realm of politics – it's a poetic and passionate movie about our place in nature and the universe, the continual cycle of death and renewal.

Dovzhenko's poetic shots of the landscape – the film is full of gorgeous images of bulging clouds, rippling wheat fields, luminescent sunflowers, ripening fruits and pelting horses – and the angelic music help to make this film feel like a dramatic story from the Bible. In the opening scenes, we see the dying old man Semen, who has plowed the earth for 75 years ("that’s no joke"), pass away peacefully beneath an apple tree along side his son Opanas and grandson Vasyl.

While Vasyl and his friends support collectivisation, Opanas is sceptical about the new ways. Vasyl brings the village its first tractor, but it stalls and the peasants must devise a way to get the tractor started. The peasants plow, till and harvest grain with the help of Vasyl who is driving the tractor, while the women tie the sheaves of hay. In the midst of these scenes, Dovzhenko creates a stunning montage about the production process of baking bread. After a hard day’s work, young farm workers meet with their sweethearts, but tragedy awaits.

Vasyl celebrates the arrival of the community's new tractor by dancing on his way home, only to be struck down in the road by a bullet under the glow of the harvest moon. Dovzhenko seems to be making a comment here about the advantages and pitfalls of modern technology. Opanas leads his son's funeral procession in a show of support to the community and the collective. Forsaking religious ceremony, the villagers bury Vasyl while singing modern folk songs. 

After focusing predominantly on nature, the film ends with a panoramic montage of desperate humanity, with shots of a madman running, a priest beseeching God to bring punishment, a nude woman gone raving mad, another woman going into labour, and then a funeral procession of stern, solemn faces. This complex montage sequence (which was censored) comes to an end with a presentation of the earth’s fertility. Dovzhenko's film is gently subversive, showing the independent spirit of Ukraine that persists to this day.