Word: dovzhenko
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...today's Soviet films likely to be superior to those of the first flush of revolution. Now that the specter of Stalinism has receded, another shadow haunts Soviet filmmakers, and it may be harder to escape. This is the legacy of Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov, the giants of Soviet silent cinema. Their works (October, Mother, Earth, Man with a Movie Camera) remain at the core of every film curriculum; movies are still made in the visual language they helped invent...
This is no small triumph, considering the sorry history of repression exercised by Goskino, the state censorship board. For any reason or none, Goskino could cut a scene, ban a film, put a director out of work or put him in jail. Sergei Paradjanov, a lyric poet in the Dovzhenko mold, spent nearly four years in prison. Andrei Tarkovsky, the greatest Soviet director since Eisenstein, filmed Andrei Rublev in 1966; the complete version was not shown publicly in the U.S.S.R. until 1987, just after Tarkovsky died in exile. Alexander Askoldov's The Commissar, filmed in 1967, was accused of "Zionist...
...arts," declared Lenin in 1922, and not since Pope Julius ii commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling had the proclamation of a chief of state resulted in such a sunburst of high art. A troika of young film maker-theoreticians-Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko-seized the movie toy and remade it into a sophisticated machine that dazzled the world intelligentsia, even as it instructed the Russian proletariat. As long as the party hierarchy was amused too, all was well. But in 1924 Stalin rephrased the famous dictum, and his diaphanous threat holds to this...
...neither their taste for, nor their skill with, the epic historical drama. Siberiada traces the history of an obscure Siberian village from snowbound primitivism and isolation at the beginning of this century through war and revolution, to the discovery of a great oilfield in the late '60s. Like Dovzhenko before him, Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky has a way of linking a peculiarly Russian feeling for the sacredness of native ground with the developing force of the revolution...
...Dovzhenko's Earth and Rosselini's The Miracle, with Anna Magnani and Frederico Fellini, Sunday...