Alexander Dovzhenko, a Ukrainian filmmaker, is best known today for a series of political pictures he wrote and directed in the early Stalin years, movies that kept drifting in directions that risked the wrath of the Soviet authorities. Arsenal (1929), set in the Russian Civil War, had hints of pacifism. Earth (1930) was supposed to be a celebration of the collectivization of agriculture, but the picture he actually produced is lyrical, funny, and more surrealist than socialist; the propaganda parts play like tongue-in-cheek interludes. The government reacted to it by kicking Dovzhenko’s father off the farm where he worked and …read more
Source: Reason.com
