In the second part of Dovzhenko's 'Ukraine trilogy', the folklore of Zvenigora takes a back seat, while the pastoral setting of Earth is to come; Arsenal, as its title implies, is martial at its heart, showing the necessity for justified uprising but cognisant of the waste and desolation that all conflict brings.
Tangles of silhouetted barbed wire contrast with the loneliness of a despairing mother in her empty home. Grieving women stand motionless in a village; an officer walks past one, considers for a moment, appraises her breast with his hand as she stands there numbed, arouses no reaction and walks on down the street. The camera lingers. 'The mother lost three sons' reads the intertitle. A son with his legs blown off sits on the floor of his home while his mother sows grain in the field. Meanwhile Tsar Nicholas II, seemingly preoccupied with weighty matters of state while sitting at his desk, manages a few words for his daily diary entry: ' September 12th. I killed a crow. The weather is nice' - to which he signs his name. The woman in the field collapses with exhaustion as she sows grain. This is stark, strong imagery that uses shock, emotional response, caricature and expressionist style for effect. (It's no surprise to learn that Dovzhenko studied with George Grosz and Erich Heckel as an art student in Berlin, and later worked as a political cartoonist on his return to Ukraine.)
The film continues with frame after frame of striking compositions: a gap-toothed, spectacled private laughing deliriously and desperately as he dies in a gas attack above a half-buried soldier sporting a rictus grin in his death; an insubordinate soldier, pleading hands silhouetted against the skyline, being berated by a gun-waggling officer.
And then there is Tymishko, the 'Ukrainian worker' played once again by a glowering Semyon Svashenko as he tries to introduce Bolshevism into his homeland, pitying the smirking, self-serving buffoons of the pan-Ukrainian Congress, knowing there time will soon be up. As the crowds celebrate Easter, he looks on with a kind of bemused pity. By the end, having mounting a doomed defence of the Kiev Arsenal, he stands tall, baring his breast to face the counter-revolutionaries' bullets which leave him unmarked.
The onslaught and combination of striking, audacious imagery that characterises the film (aka January Uprising in Kiev, 1918) from its outset marks it as something well out of the ordinary. This is volatile, exuberant, passionate filmmaking, energised by the possibilities of the medium in the service of revolution.
The second part of his 'Ukraine Trilogy', between Zvenigora and Earth, Arsenal is Alexander Dovzhenko's remarkable, action-packed account of the effects of World War I on his Ukrainian compatriots, and is remarkably vivid even today. It is set in the bleak aftermath and devastation of World War 1, through which a recently demobbed soldier, Timosh, returns to his hometown, Kiev, after having survived a train wreck. His arrival coincides with a national celebration of Ukrainian freedom, but the festivities are not to last as a disenchanted Timosh soon begins to clash with the city’s authorities when he starts to agitate for the adoption of the Soviet system. The film's defence of the Sovietisation of the region is an unavoidable document of its time, though Dovzhenko's extraordinarily lyrical sensibility shines through even the more crudely propagandist sections. Of the film, the Chicago Tribune said that it ‘represents the summit of Soviet cinema and remains one of the most poetic and visually beautiful of all Russian films.’
