Between Earth and Sky

Oleksandr Dovzhenko was a connoisseur of clouds. In many of his shots, the big sky of Ukraine’s fields and steppe swallows the frame. When tiny human forms emerge upward into the heavens, they come as a surprise. As they grow they become monumental, often viewed from below. This is a fairly standard technique in Soviet visual art, which had a mandate to make workers look like heroes. But Dovzhenko goes a step further by making his characters look less like statues than like natural features, the wrinkles on their faces as noble as riverbeds.Earth (1930), Dovzhenko’s silent masterpiece, is not only a celebration of agricultural collectivization—a predictable assignment for a filmmaker working at a Soviet studio—but an ode to the cycles of life, which resist the linear logic of Stalinist industrialization. In the opening scene, an old man eats a pear, smiles, and expires under a fruit tree; a beautiful death. His grandson Vasyl, a strapping young peasant, the hero of the collectivization effort, brings in the village’s first tractor to great fanfare, but it stalls on the road. He and his friends solve the problem of an overheated radiator by taking turns pissing into it. Dovzhenko fi...