Sunday, August 3 at 7:00 PM / Music Box Theatre — 3733 N Southport Ave
Tickets: $12 at the door or purchase in advance
EARTH
Directed by Alexander Dovzhenko • 1930
An old man dies, a baby is born, and still the wind ripples through the apple trees. The ancient, quasi-mystical connection between a people and their soil has been torn asunder: a tractor brings hope for a better way of life to the countryside, but the landed gentry oppose any challenge to their power. The kulaks orchestrate the murder of a young agitator, whose death sends the peasantry into a paroxysm of revolutionary rage and psychosexual fury. Seemingly inventing principles of montage and poetic embellishment that remain obscure and almost supernatural, Earth more than earns its lofty title, merging the cosmic and the quotidian. Alexander Dovzhenko’s final silent film, produced by Ukrainian studio VUKFU to spread the good news of agricultural collectivization and modernization under Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, has been celebrated, lambasted, and misunderstood from every possible angle over the last century. Was Dovzhenko striking a blow for Ukrainian nationalism and advocating for the folkways of a culture being plowed under by totalizing Soviet homogeneity — or was he putting a shine on ghoulish propaganda for a system that would soon result in widespread famine? Soviet censors denounced Earth as “counter-revolutionary” and “defeatist,” mandating extensive cuts, and curtailing the release. (Amusingly, the British Communist critic Ivor Mantagu dismissed any non-dogmatic interpretation of Earth: “Pantheism? No. Nature worship? Not at all. Sound Marxist dialectic: the union of opposites.”) Dovzhenko’s film remains unclassifiable, a dispatch from a society uprooting itself but clinging strenuously to its mythic inheritance. (KW)
75 min • VUFKU • 35mm from George Eastman Museum
Preceded by: Granton Trawler (John Grierson, 1934) – 11 min – 16mm
Live musical accompaniment by Whine Cave (Kent Lambert & Sam Wagster)
NEXT UP: TIME AND TIDE on Thursday, August 7 at the Film Center