Earth (film)

What is the story?

Wind runs across fields of wheat and sunflowers. Under an apple tree the old man Semyon is dying, watched by his son Opanas and grandson Vasyl. His friend Petro asks him to send a sign from the next world, heaven or hell; no word comes. The village kulaks oppose collectivisation, and Vasyl, a Komsomol youth, declares their time is over. His father Opanas is sceptical.

Vasyl arrives with the first tractor. The village is excited; the radiator overheats and the men fill it with their own urine. The tractor ploughs the land and breaks down the kulaks' fences, and bread is made from start to finish in one sequence. That night Vasyl dances a hopak on the dirt road home and is killed by a dark figure.

Opanas turns away the priest and asks his son's friends to bury him with "new songs for a new life". As the village carries the coffin through the orchard, his fiancée Natalya mourns him naked and the priest curses them. Khoma runs to the cemetery shouting that he did it in protest against the new order, but the villagers are listening to a Komsomol speech that the whole world will know Vasyl's name, and nobody turns. At the end a downpour falls on fields, fruit and vegetables, and Natalya has a new lover.

Why is it called so beautiful?

Images speak more than events: close-ups of almost motionless peasants, the dance filmed in soft focus in the early morning light with dust rising from the road. The film scholar Gilberto Perez likened the cinematography to Homer's Odyssey. Danylo Demutsky was the cinematographer and most of it was shot in the Poltava region; Semen Svashenko, who played Vasyl, changed the dance after consulting local farmers. Dovzhenko based Semyon on his own grandfather and Vasyl's death on the killing of a Soviet agent in his home district, and called this "a period ... of economic [and] mental transformation of the whole people".

It is a film in praise of collectivisation, yet what stays longest is death and the cycle of nature. Grigori Roshal wrote that neither Eisenstein nor Pudovkin had reached the tenderness and warmth Dovzhenko showed in speaking of men and the world. It was named among the twelve greatest films at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.

Why was it banned?

Released on 8 April 1930, it was withdrawn nine days later. That month the Orgburo ordered showings stopped until elements contrary to Soviet policy were removed. Pravda praised its formal mastery and called its political content false. The poet Demyan Bedny attacked it in Izvestia as "counterrevolutionary" and "defeatist". The critic Ippolit Sokolov called him a great director and "a petty-bourgeois artist". Scenes attacked as "biological" and naturalistic, such as the urine and Natalya's nudity, were cut. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Dovzhenko left Ukraine and went abroad. His Ivan (1932) was attacked in its turn, Stalin later told him he owed "a Ukrainian Chapaev", and the resulting Shchors, four years in the making, passed Stalin without a single remark.

The attack came at the height of collectivisation, which provoked resistance in the form of slaughtered animals, sabotaged machinery and murdered Soviet agents. The Ukrainian countryside where the film was shot went through the Holodomor a few years later. The film's optimism has to be set beside that later history.

Which version can we see today?

The original negative was destroyed in a German air raid during the Battle of Kiev in 1941. The fuller version reached wide release only some forty years later; Mosfilm prepared a restoration in 1971-1972 under Dovzhenko's widow Yuliya Solntseva. In 2012 the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre restored it with a new score by the folk quartet DakhaBrakha. It was selected for UNESCO's seventieth anniversary in 2015 and ranked second among 100 Ukrainian films in 2021.