Earth (Kyivska Kinofabryka, Vseukrainske Foto Kino Upravlinnia [VUFKU], 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Despite the extensive DVD collection my husband Charles and I have accumulated over the years, I had a really hard time picking out a movie to watch last night, but I finally ran Earth, a 1930 Russian silent movie directed by Alexander Dovzhenko, who’s generally considered the third in the triumvirate of great Soviet directors of the 1920’s along with Sergei Eisenstein and Veslovod Pudovkin. We watched Earth in a 75-minute cut restored by the Moscow Film Archive in 1971 and copyrighted in the West © 1975 by the Eastin-Phelan Corporation, parent company of Blackhawk Films, who marketed 8 mm and 16 mm prints of classic films in the 1960’s and 1970’s, essentially doing home video before home video was a “thing.” Since then there’s been a further restoration in 1997 with a different musical score. Earth was made right after Joseph Stalin had firmly established himself as ruler of the Soviet Union, had driven Leon Trotsky into exile (first to Turkey and then to Mexico, where Stalin’s hit squad assassinated him in 1940) and was getting ready to launch his series of purges that would ultimately lead to the arrest, disgrace and (often) execution of all the Old Bolshevik leaders Stalin wanted eliminated. He also instituted a policy of collective farming; instead of dividing the great estates of Tsarist Russia into individual farms, Stalin and his crew decided that the future of Soviet agriculture lay in setting up large collective farms the peasants would at least technically own and work together. There was a certain logic to all this – the Soviets wanted to bring economies of scale to farming and in particular to make it possible to use tractors and other large pieces of agricultural machinery that would have been prohibitively expensive for individual farmers to own – but Stalin did it with his typical ruthlessness, waging a war against the kulaks (relatively better-off peasants who had managed to accumulate land and farm it effectively under the Tsarist regime), stripping them of their hard-earned land and forcing them into collective farming whether they wanted it or not.

Dovzhenko was a native Ukrainian whose propaganda assignment with Earth was supposed to be to get Ukrainians to accept the need for collective farming and the shift from using oxen to pull their plows to using tractors, and one reviewer on imdb.com, comparing the relatively benign version of that change given here with the brutal reality (which led to a huge famine in the Soviet Union in general and the Ukraine in particular in the early 1930’s; Miron Dolot’s 1985 book Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust is the most authoritative book on both the cruelty and the idiocy of Stalin’s agricultural policy and how it led to mass starvation in the Soviet Union’s most agriculturally productive region), lumped Earth in with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will as movies of great artistry with loathsome political messages. I think there’s a difference, though, and the difference is that while Griffith and Riefenstahl were both true believers in the messages of their films, Dovzhenko almost literally couldn’t have cared less about it. The film is preceded by a written preface acknowledging that the reality of Soviet agricultural policy in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s was quite a bit different than it’s portrayed here, and also arguing that because he’d been a visual artist before he became a filmmaker Dovzhenko was more interested in the “pictorial” than the “thematic.” (It occurred to me that the most famous Western director who was originally a visual artist, Alfred Hitchcock, was equally good at both.) Dovzhenko’s original inspiration for the movie was a newspaper article about a young Soviet organizer working to get the Ukrainians to form collective farms who had been killed by a kulak, and he worked that into a parable of the land and how it endures no matter what humans do to it.

The film actually centers around two deaths, and the very different social responses to them: old peasant Semyon Opana (Nikolai Nademsky) in the opening and his grandson Vasyl (Semyon Svashenko, the most handsome and charismatic male in the film – it’s a shame we lose him so soon!) midway through. Semyon (this print Anglicizes his name to “Simon” and Vasyl’s name to “Basil”) dies under a tree while eating a pear and is buried under two crosses by the local Orthodox priest (Vladimir Mikhaylov), who later becomes one of the film’s principal villains. Vasyl encounters resistance to his organizing from his father (Stepan Shkurat), and the clash between generations becomes a major part of the film as it progresses. In one big scene the Ukrainian collective farmers finally get the tractor they’ve been waiting for and promised by the Soviet government – there’s a fascinating series of titles reading “IT’S COMING!” and “IT’S HERE!” as the tractor approaches, and a woman wearing a loose-fitting skirt and shown only from the waist down kicks up her legs and looks like she’s about to have an orgasm from the tractor’s arrival. Alas, when the tractor arrives it soon stops working because all the water in its radiator has boiled away – though later the farmers get it to work and it’s not clear from the censored print we were watching just how they manage that. In Dovzhenko’s original cut the farmers literally pee into the tractor’s radiator to get some liquid in it that will keep it cool, but Soviet censors ordered that scene cut. (They also ordered the removal of a scene in which, after Vasyl’s death, his fiancée, played by Yelena Maksimova, flops around her bed in the nude to register her anguish – and that scene was included in the print we were watching.)

Vasyl goes out for a walk one night after the successful introduction of the tractor and scenes showing how much it’s helping the farmers plow and sow more effectively than they could do it with oxen – Charles came up with a typical joke, “That’s the most harrowing scene I’ve ever seen in a movie!” and as he’s walking through the moonlight he starts picking up his pace and then dancing – and just then he falls down dead, apparently picked off by a sniper-style shot from one of the kulaks the collective farm is going to dispossess (though Dovzhenko isn’t all that clear as to just how Vasyl dies). The shock of his son’s death turns Vasyl’s father from an opponent of collective farming to a supporter, and in the film’s last act he agrees with the townspeople that rather than let that old priest bury Vasyl, they should give him a new-style funeral with new songs and salute him as a hero of socialist labor. The priest hangs out in his church (full of religious bling, which is obviously supposed to mark him as an exploiter and a parasite living off the labor of the poor peasants) and literally calls down the wrath of God on the collective farm and its inhabitants, but of course to no avail – and the final scene takes place in the fruit-tree grove in which the film started, with a rainstorm coming down and giving a sort of secular blessing to the collective farm by ensuring it will have enough water for its crops to grow.

Earth is a fascinating film mostly because of its visual style – in synopsizing the film I’ve made it a lot more propagandistic than it actually plays; Dovzhenko is more interested in showing nature, both as is and as tamed by the efforts of human beings, than in making the propagandistic points – it’s indicative of his lack of interest in them that when the kulak who murdered Vasyl finally confesses during the big meeting of farmers and Soviet officials to celebrate the collective farm, almost no one cares – and he shoots the film in a style similar to what Bertolt Brecht called “epic theatre.” It’s a style associated with Leftist politics in which we’re not supposed to see the characters as human beings, but as representatives of their positions in the class hierarchy, and the emotional release we are supposed to feel is over the triumph of the “good,” productive classes over the “bad” exploitative ones. For much of the film the actors – particularly the leads – are seen almost exclusively in close-ups, and Dovzhenko and his cinematographer, Danill Demutsky, shoot most of the film through red filters that build up the immensity of the landscape, make the clouds stand out in the sky, and give a rich, detailed, contrasty look that makes the landscape itself seem almost heroic. (Red-filter effects were one of the biggest losses to film when color became standard; they were used primarily for films taking place in large expanses of outdoor space, including American Westerns, and they offered a powerful effect I really miss in modern movies.)

Earth is more a cinematic poem to nature than a story about individual vs. collective farmers – its message is that the land endures and yields its bounty, no matter what we do to it (we can learn to make it yield more but we can’t alter the basic cycles of nature) – and one can see why the Soviet officials Stalin had put in charge of the film industry didn’t like it and thought it was too artistic to work as propaganda. Later Stalin would order all Soviet artists, in whatever medium, to work under a style he called “socialist realism” and avoid what he called “formalism,” which was any degree of artistic stylization or abstraction. There’s the famous story of composer Dmitri Shostakovich being called into Stalin’s office and told that from now on he must compose according to the dictates of socialist realism – and when Shostakovich asked how he could follow socialist realism in an inherently abstract art form like music, Stalin told him, “That’s easy. Just write tunes people can whistle on their way to work.” Earth is one of the last films made during the period of relative freedom and experimentation Soviet directors (and artists in other media) had been allowed during the 1920’s, especially during the interregnum between Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924 and Stalin’s gradual accession to power ending in 1929, in which they made movies that routinely made ten-best-of-all-time lists for decades afterwards and managed to strike a balance between their own enthusiasm for the Soviet experiment and their commitment to artistic excellence – and it remains a stunning movie as long as you can accept it on its own terms and not think of the brutality and absurdity that attended the real process of collectivizing Soviet agriculture.