Arsenal

Aleksandr Dovzhenko was not a bad director but I consistently find his films to be choppy, poorly-paced, and fairly uninteresting, making him one of my least favorite propaganda filmmakers. Of course, many would attack me for daring to dismiss Dovzhenko as merely a propaganda filmmaker, but all three of his films that I have had the chance to see have undoubtedly been propaganda, although "Arsenal" is perhaps less obviously propagandistic than "Earth" or "Aerograd" are.

"Arsenal" features several arresting sequences and an interesting narrative from a stylistic viewpoint, but beyond that it really is rather void of any substance (which wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't trying so hard to be a grand statement about how great communism is). There's also some awful, awful scenes where Dovzhenko seems to think a lot of emaciated-looking people staring into space makes for great drama.

The only ares of "Arsenal" worth any significant praise are the war scenes, which feature the famed and excellent 'laughing gas' sequence, and the scene with the horse team rushing to bury their comrade before going back to battle. Other than that, there's some captivating editing in the early stages, before it becomes laughable later on as Dovzhenko insists on editing every other scene the exact same way.

"Earth", despite being fairly sickening when you understand the aftermath of the actual events it was arguing in favor of, was a captivating and intriguing film. "Arsenal" is, much like "Aerograd", fairly worthless outside of using some interesting editing and forming a different sort of narrative from the norm, and even at a mere 70-odd minutes a real chore to sit through.

4/10

Dovzhenko is the one who most differs from his brilliant colleagues, who based a considerable part of the structure of their films on a sophisticated construction of scene montage, Dovzhenko has always followed a more naturalistic line, pure dramatic narrative, poetry and visual beauty, master to its time in capturing natural rhythms, "Arsenal" is a modern classic with a visionary conception, oscillating between raw and immediate images like a documentary and also almost expressionist, exaggerated, playing with framing or inverted symmetries, employing quite varied forms of reach a state of abstraction. Just imagine a cinematographic composition inspired by the classic icons of the Byzantine orthodox code, that is, sacred figures painted on wood with a background without perspective, except that, in place of the sacred figure, a potentially revolutionary worker appears. Dovzhenko adapted the religious "aura" of the icons to the characters emanating from the Marxist dialectical materialism prevailing in the aesthetic-ideological vision of the party.

Not only in the close-up portraits of the heroes, villains and victims of the historical process, but also of objects and nature. Surrounded by a halo resulting from a subtle out-of-focus, the foreground images - faces, flowers, mechanical objects - acquire a "corporeal significance", as defined by a Ukrainian critic, who crosses the Byzantine tradition and refers to the sacredness in pictorial representation. In Europe and in the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance.

These images seem to contain a self-sufficient solidity, almost arousing a sense of touch in the viewer. Cinema-poetry, of course, that articulates itself with the urgency of the historical moment of the socialist revolution to produce an awareness of historical transition and overcoming, sustaining at the same time a fruitful and original subjectivity. The source, finally, to which filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Paradjanov and Sokurov referred.

While often a bit obscure, this Dovzhenko classic is also filled with interesting and often thought-provoking images and themes. "Arsenal", as with his better-known feature "Earth", defies easy description. "Earth" is probably the more artistic of the two, but "Arsenal" is more complex, and it might also be a little closer - at least in places - to a conventional narrative.

The first ten minutes or so of "Arsenal" are quite abstract, with a succession of mini-montages depicting a variety of subjects. It would be hard, and perhaps inadvisable, to assign a specific meaning to all of the symbols, but they are clearly meant to convey some general ideas that apply to the story that follows, which is set in the Ukraine as World War I (or the Great War) is coming to an end.

The war sequences might be the most memorable part of the movie, and the chilling "laughing gas" sequence is a more compelling comment on war than are the great majority of complicated carnage-filled scenes in other movies.

The main story starts with the demobilization, and it is clearly influenced by Dovzhenko's own perspective. He does his very best to resolve two seemingly contradictory priorities, with his devotion to the Ukrainian people and his support for the Soviet state. He uses all his skills, with interesting montages and other techniques, including some creative camera angles that would even have impressed Orson Welles.

As politics, not all of it is convincing by any means, but as cinema, it is quite interesting, and at times it provides good food for thought. The specific issues considered in the film may be limited to their own time and place, but in asking what is best for his people, Dovzhenko also raises some broader issues that allow the movie to retain some relevance in later eras as well.

I call this a near-masterpiece because of the basic purpose of it, which is propaganda. This film exists as agitprop, and while it contains phenomenal and ferocious imagery, ultimately the single-minded viewpoint hobbles it as art and undercuts its slight attempts at humanity. While it can be viewed as a Revolutionary piece, exhorting a 'proper' spirit of energy, knowing it was made by a Ukrainian in 1929 while the Stalinist regime was either plotting or bumbling their way to the Great Famine makes this film deeply questionable in a moral sense. The theme of a Ukrainian learning Revolutionary values in the Great War, then returning to destroy the 'corrupt' forces of 'old Ukraine' made me deeply uneasy. That said, the imagery and sequences in this (quite late) silent film are second to none. The toothless, laughing soldier is one of the most stunning single images ever committed to film; and the general pacing, with a deliberate, lingering sense of time, forces concentration on the set-pieces. Much of the film is brutal, inhuman, and cruel. This is both an accurate representation of the setting itself and of the type of violent us-vs.-them propaganda produced by the Soviets at the time. I find this film VERY unsettling from a moral standpoint, something I don't often find myself saying. But, again, the masterful and stunning imagery makes it well worth viewing more than once.

Don't be discouraged by this Soviet film's age or obscurity - it is one of the finest movies ever made, and it stands alongside Carl Theodore Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc," as the most modernist film of the 1920's. This is a spectacular visual achievement, and its visionary conception of cinema is moderinism that we've still failed to catch up with. Unlike most recognized masterpieces of Soviet silent cinema (e.g. "The Battleship Potempkin," "Earth," "The End of St. Petersburg," etc.), however, "Arsenal" is a surprisingly approachable film, and its strangeness and abstraction are consistently fascinating. Originally intended as a propaganda film, "Arsenal" is the second component of director Alexander Dovzhenko's "Ukraine Trilogy," and it details an episode in the Russian Civil War (~1918) in which the Kiev Arsenal workers aided the Bolshevik army against the ruling Central Rada. Dovzhenko's approach is somewhat similar to Sergei Eisentein, in that he relied heavily on montage, but his pace was less frenetic, and his Expressionism was more exaggerated. As detailed in the film's academic commentary, Dovzhenko was previously a political cartoonist, and you can see traces of this background in "Arsenal." The characters in this film are caricatures, sometimes grotesque and sometimes funny. Similarly, there is a strangeness and remoteness in "Arsenal," which makes the film's few intentionally lucid passages quite dreamlike. The DVD commentary is concise and informative, and a terrific primer for the first time viewing. If you have any interest in silent cinema, modernism, or film as art, "Arsenal" is a film you SHOULD NOT MISS. ---|--- Was this review helpful?