|
Like Rousseau or Malick, Alexander Dovzhenko sees war as a disfiguring intrusion into Nature, in the first shot he sketches a landscape in silhouette (tree stump, barbed wire, gray sky) and blows it up. The structure is symphonic in the way Stravinsky is symphonic, jabbing notes moved and linked in the viewer's eye. The first half kicks off in 1918, men march and collapse in the front (mist creeps over the trenches, or is it artillery smoke?), back in the village a bereft matriarch stands in the center of the frame, contorted like a scarecrow. Horses speak up in Gogolesque visions, the Tsar writes down absurdities: "Today I shot a crow." An emaciated peasant keels over in the fields, a thoughtful pause before the punchline: "Splendid weather." Helmets obscure the faces of soldiers, once removed they reveal the maniacal laughter of the dying and the frozen grimace of the dead, assuredly a model for Klimov's Come and See. Keaton for the Train of Revolution, canted angles send the locomotive rushing diagonally across the screen while accelerating editing visualizes each doomed heartbeat on board, the brakeless ride ends on a discarded accordion slithering across the wreckage. The second half pivots on the clash of Ukrainian nationalism and Soviet rule, most evocatively on the glance of weary suspicion cast by the munitions worker (Semyon Svashenko). The Reds and the Whites, the Kiev strike, massacres and executions, religious processions with serpentine banners and mighty, bushy mustaches in extreme close-up. Amid the mad montage, a dash of depth-of-field lyricism as a fallen comrade is rushed to be buried in the snow. In this work of a thousand images, which blends the historical and the mythical with the raw and the formalized, Dovzhenko is a good two or three decades ahead of just about everybody. James Joyce's "bulletproof dress" is absorbed into the final parable, Earth resumes the elegy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |