Cast: Stepan Shkurat, Semen Svashenko, Yuliya Solintseva, Yelena Maksimova, Mykola Nademsky, Petro Masokha, Ivan Franko, Volodymyr Mikhajlov, Pavlo Petrik. Screenplay: Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Cinematography: Danill Demutsky. Art direction: Vasyl Vasylovych Krychevsky. Film editing: Alexsandr Dovzhenko.
At once lyrical, tragic, and enigmatic, Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth might be viewed today as an example of how Ukraine has always been a temptation and a thorn in the side of Russia -- or at least those in Russia who would try to rule it. As a film about the collectivization of agriculture in the young Soviet Union it bears comparison to Sergei Eisenstein's The Old and the New (1929), which attempted that subject with a much heavier hand: Its celebration of the tractor, in comparison with Dovzhenko's somewhat problematic introduction of a tractor whose radiator has to be pissed in before it will function, concludes with a tractor ballet. And Eisenstein's treatment of the reactionary clergy involves an all too obvious montage in which the followers of the church are juxtaposed with a herd of sheep; Dovzhenko is content with just showing his priest's frenzied proclamations of anathema on the collectivists. But Eisenstein's film, like Dovzhenko's, met with official disapproval: Collectivization was just too important to Stalin not to undergo intense ideological scrutiny. Artistically, Dovzhenko's Earth has to be judged the greater film, one in which the relationship of beauty and terror informs almost every frame.
