|
The medium's history is from the beginning braided with that of the land, thus Cossack horsemen in slow-motion like Muybridge's jockey. Hidden treasure in the Ringing Mountain, centuries of searching for the scraggly grandfather (Nikolai Nademsky) who embodies the folkloric side of Ukraine as well as Alexander Dovzhenko's notion of cinema, not a storyteller but a shaman of images. "The destiny flows by..." The buried vault swings open and a mad-eyed monk skulks out, practically Bela Lugosi with rosary and lantern, he vanishes in a puff of smoke but lingers in the old man's nightmares. Grandsons have their own paths to follow, one (Semyon Svashenko) is a strapping rationalist who joins the Bolshevik cause and the other (Aleksandr Podorozhnyy) is a superstitious bumpkin who turns unscrupulous fortune hunter. A phantasmagorical crazy quilt, a rhapsodic incantation. "Tresses turned into humming reeds, eyes turned into wells and caves." Dovzhenko's poetry in full bloom, instinctive, euphoric, split between reverence for the soil and loyalty to the Party. The mystical steppe, shoot a tree and Poles fall out. Soviet rule is a stern officer filmed in belly-expanding low angle as he tsk-tsks the codger's excavations, the Great War is a handshake extended across trenches and a firing squad directed by the prisoner himself. The medieval maiden with marauding Tartars at the door, their rampage staged like an interpretative dance of spectral animatronics in sendup of Die Nibelungen. (Incidentally, the suicidal coup de théâtre before an audience of bourgeois gargoyles runs parallel to Lang's Spione.) "The revolution is in danger" is the refrain as industrialization accelerates, modernization's locomotive is confronted by the ancient soul last seen aboard the "fire monster," chummily sharing a cup of coffee with comrades. A confrère of Vigo, a sire to Parajanov. With Polina Sklyar-Otava, Vladimir Uralskiy, and Leonid Barbe. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |