Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons

Death and Life: Landscapes of the Soul—The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko

399 Death and Life Landscapes of the Soul— The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko When I speak of poetry, I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. . . . Think of Mandelstam, think of Pasternak, Chaplin, Dovzhenko, Mizoguchi, and you’ll realize what tremendous emotional power is carried by these exalted figures who soar above the earth, in whom the artist appears not just as an explorer of life, but as one who creates great spiritual treasures and that specific beauty which is subject only to poetry. Such an artist can discern the lines of the poetic design of being. He is capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life. —Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (∞Ω∫π) It is possible that we are still in a pre-historic stage of cinema, for the great history of cinema will begin when it leaves the frame of ordinary artistic representation and grows into a tremendous and extraordinarily encompassing perceptive category. —Alexander Dovzhenko, ∞Ω≥≥ If I could describe adequately the genius of Alexander Dovzhenko in terms of a strictly linear argument, I’d give it a shot, but I know when I’m licked. Conceivably the most neglected major filmmaker of the twentieth century, the Ukrainian writer-director has never come close to receiving his due, in this country or elsewhere, in large part because his fervent, pantheistic, folkloric films develop more like lyric poems, moving from one stanza to the next, than they do like narratives, proceeding by way of paragraphs or chapters. The world they describe is one of Gogolesque horses that sing or reprimand their owners, noble cows, glistening meadows, wily cossacks, dancing peasants, declamatory speeches by wild-eyed individuals, sunflowers in sunny close-ups alongside noble women with similarly open faces, vast reaches of empty sky over fields of waving wheat—a vision of a natural order that paradoxically seems both brutal and harmonious, primitive landscapes bursting with interactive animal and vegetal life. One calls this poetry in part because it comprises a paean to sheer existence, singing about rather than relating or recounting what it sees. But if satire is what closes in New Haven, we all know that lyric poetry doesn’t even open. 400 ESSENTIAL CINEMA All of Dovzhenko’s major films have events (in the wild montage flurries of Arsenal, they’re virtually nonstop), and some of these events are not only explosive but literally explosions; but the degree to which all of them are events—and explosive events—is far more important. Events aren’t consumable in the same way that narratives are because they tend to confuse and confound us by their very nature as blunt encounters, splintering experience and then meting it out to us in separate clusters rather than allowing it the kind of coherence that can only come from the continuity, logical progression, and cohesion of storytelling. Out of the dozen Dovzhenko films showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center this month—more Dovzhenko films than have ever showed in Chicago before, and possibly more than will ever show here again—at least four are jaw-dropping masterpieces, made consecutively over a mere six years: Arsenal (1929), Earth (1930), Ivan (1932), and Aerograd (1935). It’s regrettable that each of the silent films in this retrospective, including Arsenal and Earth, is showing only once. But it’s also understandable given the usually small turnouts for silent films as well as the cost of hiring a pianist for each showing. In some ways, a silent-film syntax, including a bold use of intertitles, persists in Dovzhenko’s work up through Michurin, though it would be wrong to conclude that this makes any of his sound films old-fashioned in relation to their own periods. Ivan and Aerograd are anything but silent films with added music and sound effects; the first resembles a kind of orchestral suite, divided into six numbered sections, while the second is clearly operatic, with the sound of plane engines used as functionally as voices. There are also astonishing things in both Zvenigora (1927)—which Dovzhenko once called ‘‘a catalog of all my creative possibilities’’—and Shchors (1939), which has a remarkable opening, though I’d hesitate to place them in the same league as the other four. But don’t imagine that you can get the measure of any of...