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Dovzhenko's 'cinematographic poem' Zvenigora, the first film in his 'Ukraine trilogy' with Arsenal and Earth to follow, marries timeless fable and Ukrainian history with revolutionary intent. Harnessing a battery of cinematographic techniques - slow motion, superimposition, dissolves, rapid cutting, striking compositions and even dreamlike fantasy - to his cause, the film builds in excitement and intent as it progresses, as scenes of pastoral lyricism give way to the mighty construction of a revolutionary society through human and industrial muscle. No wonder Dovzhenko referred to Zvenigora as his 'party calling card'.

An ageless old man who knows where a legendary horde of treasure - the 'bloodstained national assets' - is buried, has two sons. One, the bubble-blowing simpleton Pavlo, throws in his lot with the Ukrainian nationalists. His brother Tymishko however, is built in the heroic Soviet mould, and is a man with no time to waste - certainly not on the religious superstitions of his forebears. He has a country to reshape.

As in Arsenal, the imagery is continually surprising and striking, no more so than in the scene in which, as a comment on the loss of life in WWI, stooks in a field dissolve into silhouettes of guns propped against each other as the night comes on.

The film's final segment is a hymn to industrialisation that builds to an audacious climax, counterpointing the duplicitous bourgeois Pavlo - threatening to commit suicide in front of an increasingly frenzied Parisian audience whose eyes greedily clamour for the spectacle of his death, only to find themselves deceived in his money-making scam - with his the noble Bolshevik brother who is part of the extraordinary effort to forge a new country over the old through muscle and steel. Dovzhenko said of Zvenigora that it was 'a catalogue of all my creative abilities'; from first frame to last it is packed with the bold, complex expressions of his artistry.

 

Graeme Hobbs on 19th January 2011
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