1926: Vasya-reformator (Vasya the Reformer) (co-director, scenarist/scriptwriter); Yahidka kokhannya (Love's Berry; Yagodko lyubvi) (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 1927: Teka dypkuryera (The Diplomatic Pouch; Sumka dipkuryera) (+revised scenarist/scriptwriter, role). 1928: Zvenyhora (Zvenigora) (+revised scenarist/scriptwriter). 1929: Arsenal (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 1930: Zemlya (Earth) (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 1932: Ivan (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 1935: Aerograd (Air City; Frontier) (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 1939: Shchors (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1940: Osvobozhdenie (Liberation) (co-director, editor, scenarist/scriptwriter). 1945: Pobeda na pravoberezhnoi Ukraine i izgnanie Nemetskikh zakhvatchikov zapredeli Ukrainskikh Sovetskikh zemel (Victory in Right-Bank Ukraine and the Expulsion of the Germans from the Boundaries of the Ukrainian Soviet Earth) (co-director, commentary). 1948: Michurin (co-director, producer, scenarist/scriptwriter).
1940: Bukovyna-Zemlya Ukrayinska (Bucovina-Ukrainian Land) (Solntseva) (artistic supervision). 1941: Bohdan Khmelnytsky (Savchenko) (artistic supervision). 1942: Alexander Parkhomenko (Lukov) (artistic supervision). 1943: Bytva za nashu Radyansku Ukrayinu (The Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine) (Solntseva and Avdiyenko) (artistic supervision, narration). 1946: Strana rodnaya (Native Land; Our Country) (co-editor uncredited, narration).
Teacher, 1914-19; charg? director'affaires, Ukrainian embassy, Warsaw, 1921; attached to Ukrainian embassy, Berlin; studied painting with Erich Heckel, 1922; returned to Kiev, expelled from Communist Party, became cartoonist, 1923; co-founder, VAPLITE (Free Academy of Proletarian Literature), 1925; joined Odessa Film Studios, directed first film, Vasya-reformator, 1926; moved to Kiev Film Studios, 1928; Solntseva began as his assistant, 1929; lectured at State Cinema Institute (VG1K), Moscow, 1932; assigned to Mosfilm by Stalin, 1933; artistic supervisor, Kiev Studio, 1940; front-line correspondent for Red Army and Izvestia in the Ukraine, 1942-43; denounced as "bourgeois nationalist," transferred to Mosfilm, 1944; theatre director, 1945-47; settled in Kakhiva, 1952. Julia Solntseva directed five films based on Dovzhenko's writings, 1958-69.
Lenin Prize, 1935; Honored Art Worker of the Ukrainian SSR, 1939; 1st Degree Stalin Prize for Shchors, 1941; Order of the Red Flag, 1943; Order of the Red Labor Flag, 1955.
Sosnytsia, Chernigov province of Ukraine, 12 September 1894.
Hlukhiv Teachers' Institute, 1911-14; Kiev University, 1917-18; Academy of Fine Arts, Kiev, 1919.
1919-20.
Married 1) Barbara Krylova, 1920 (divorced 1926); 2) Julia Solntseva, 1927.
In Moscow, 26 November 1956.
Unlike many other Soviet filmmakers, whose works are boldly and aggressively didactic, Alexander Dovzhenko's cinematic output is personal and fervently private. His films are clearly political, yet at the same time he is the first Russian director whose art is so emotional, so vividly his own. His best films, Arsenal, Earth, and Ivan, are all no less than poetry on celluloid. Their emotional and poetic expression, almost melancholy simplicity, and celebration of life ultimately obliterate any external event in their scenarios. His images?most specifically, farmers, animals, and crops drenched in sunlight?are penetratingly, delicately real. With Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Dovzhenko is one of the great inventors and masters of the Russian cinema.
As evidenced by his very early credits, Dovzhenko might have become a journeyman director and scenarist, an adequate technician at best: Vasya the Reformer, his first script, is a forgettable comedy about an overly curious boy; The Diplomatic Pouch is a silly tale of secret agents and murder. But in Zvenigora, his fourth film, he includes scenes of life in rural Russia for the first time. This complex and confusing film proved to be the forerunner of Arsenal, Earth, and Ivan, a trio of classics released within four years of each other, all of which honor the lives and struggles of peasants.
In Arsenal, set in the Ukraine in a period between the final year of World War I and the repression of a workers' rebellion in Kiev, Dovzhenko does not bombard the viewer with harsh, unrealistically visionary images. Despite the subject matter, the film is as lyrical as it is piercing and pointed; the filmmaker manages to transcend the time and place of his story. While he was not the first Soviet director to unite pieces of film with unrelated content to communicate a feeling, his Arsenal is the first feature in which the totality of its content rises to the height of pure poetry. In fact, according to John Howard Lawson, "No film artist has ever surpassed Dovzhenko in establishing an intimate human connection between images that have no plot relationship."
The storyline of Earth, Dovzhenko's next?and greatest?film, is deceptively simple: a peasant leader is killed by a landowner after the farmers in a small Ukrainian village band together and obtain a tractor. But these events serve as the framework for what is a tremendously moving panorama of rustic life and the almost tranquil admission of life's greatest inevitability: death. Without doubt, Earth is one of the cinema's few authentic masterpieces.
Finally, Ivan is an abundantly eloquent examination of man's connection to nature. Also set in the Ukraine, the film chronicles the story of an illiterate peasant boy whose political consciousness is raised during the building of the Dnieper River dam. This is Dovzhenko's initial sound film: he effectively utilizes his soundtrack to help convey a fascinating combination of contrasting states of mind.
None of Dovzhenko's subsequent films approaches the greatness of Arsenal, Earth, and Ivan. Stalin suggested that he direct Shchors, which he shot with his wife, Julia Solntseva. Filmed over a three-year period under the ever-watchful eye of Stalin and his deputies, the scenario details the revolutionary activity of a Ukrainian intellectual, Nikolai Shchors. The result, while unmistakably a Dovzhenko film, still suffers from rhetorical excess when compared to his earlier work.
Eventually, Dovzhenko headed the film studio at Kiev, wrote stories, and made documentaries. His final credit, Michurin, about the life of a famed horticulturist, was based on a play he wrote during World War II. After Michurin, the filmmaker spent several years putting together a trilogy set in the Ukraine, chronicling the development of a village from 1930 on. He was set to commence shooting when he died, and Solntseva completed the projects.
It is unfortunate that Dovzhenko never got to direct these last features. He was back on familiar ground: perhaps he might have been able to recapture the beauty and poetry of his earlier work. Still, Arsenal, Ivan, and especially Earth are more than ample accomplishments for any filmmaker's lifetime.?ROB EDELMAN