Dovzhenko's "Earth" (1930)

Action filmmaking. The phenomenal or the concrete? Before us the palpable fruits of the earth, grown large and luscious, the pears that old Simon loves and takes up in his farmer's hands and eats with a child's pleasure; he is about to die. Old Simon eats the pear and smiles with its juice in his mouth at the sight of a small child playing on the grass. The old and the young are the fruits of the earth. Gigantic sunflowers announce the imminence of death in their bursting. Old Simon is gratified to go. Old Peter asks him, "When you reach where you're going, tell me if you're in heaven or hell." Old Simon promises, if he is able to he will. The keys to heaven are his. Old Peter remains behind in contemplation of the earth. For the peasants there is no heaven and no hell; there is only earth.

Dovzhenko's narrative, like the concepts of heaven and hell, is nowhere to be found except in the material, yet spiritually charged, existence that is the earth's. Set in roughly 8 tableaux, "Earth" narrates the encroaching discovery of a new paradise, a 'new life' brought about by the introduction of advanced mechanical production (symbolized by a new tractor brought to the village) and collective farming. There is no story by way of conventional technique, but there is an atmosphere, a sustained description of the poetic realism of the earth's presence in the lives of its laborers. In place of 'characters' we are given faces carved out in time frames, whose cheeks and foreheads are lined with soil and sun, and whose eyes sparkle like exposed minerals in a mineshaft. In place of disciplined narrative edits, we are thrusted by the muscle strength of a camera whose shots and edits strike out like crags on the celluloid air. Dovzhenko does not cut a film so much as he harvests images from the grain of the land; he produces not merely action, but the very physicality that action engenders. During the harvest sequence, after the village joyously welcomes the arrival of a single tractor for use on the recently instituted collective farms, the camera like a scythe mows the wheat from the earth it shoots from, collects the grain and packs it along with the tender faced women using the selfsame wheat to tie the bundles. Scenes move across us like the tractor over the fields, overwhelming us with a pure force of expression. The lyricism of this film, owing to Dovzhenko's specific technique, lies in the unarguable fact that the motion of the camera produces an actual good. We are not watching a film so much as we are eating bread. The visible passion of the scythe's blade as it storms over the wheat or of the inebriate dance by Basil on a moonlit road, or lastly of the rains as they pour down on the horses and the mature fruits (a thematic that Tarkovsky has graciously used in half of his films), spreads organically like roots through the film's soil. Dovzhenko's enthusiasm bears down on us.

The subject of "Earth" is the earth and the phenomena that 'worlds' it, and Dovzhenko repeatedly encases the village farmers from a low angle (the camera looking up at them as if arising from the earth, if not the gaze of the earth itself) so that the heavens above girdle the large statuesque figures of the bearded roughhewn men and the robust bonneted women as they stand alongside their equally ennobled livestock; the synonym holds clear that the village folk and the livestock are a single chain united not merely by the camera's frame but by the sacraments of the earth that enchain them. Dovzhenko's framing of the farmers as they stand like giants on the earth, or of the villagers as they march in unison toward the new life of technology and collectivity with the fervor of wild horses, liberates them from abstraction (from what would be termed the tyranny of the church, or of the belief in an alternate, false reality that exists apart from the realism of the earth), while at the same time enclosing their figures in a harmony with the landscape that they till and travail on.

The final shot of two unknown but symbolic lovers gazing into each other's eyes, no doubt imparting the arrival of spring upon a favored son's death, renews the cycle that begins the film, the young fruits of labor replacing the old (harvesting by hand replaced by harvesting by machine; the rich farmer's values replaced by a collective value). It is a shot that invests the phenomenal in film (already intrinsic to its native properties) with the concrete & substantial, that brings full circle the prosperity of a people made aware of the music that springs from them in conjugality with the earth, in their collective acceptance of its ancient devotion to them.
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