Arsenal

It boggles the mind to contemplate how far back was cinema set with the advent of sound; not sound per se, but the whole political environment that was concurrent at the time. So many fascinating experiments with film were afoot by the late 20's and would be put on hold for the next twenty, thirty years.

With DW Griffith ten years before, cinema was a transliteration. The narrative was straight-forward, time, even when broken apart, was a straight line that rushed towards climax that revealed our placement in destiny, the chain of causality was clearly defined - this begat that, and we perfectly understood why. Film was merely a tool of chronicle, with the gods - the mechanisms above - and shadows - the internal image outwardly recast - largely taken out.

But just ten years later, something like this was already so far ahead. So, the causality of events is left to our sphere of imagination, narrative is fragmented, purposely eliptic into modernist abstraction. Images require our folding in them to be complete with meaning, or channel their imports across different levels of experience; there is a scene of men rushing on horses to bury their comrade, they could be rushing into a number of things; and back at the weapons foundry where a strike is holding up, eloquent shots of machinery whirring in motion suggest afoot the social machinations at large. Life here is not passed down to us whole, with purpose or meaning; but is rather the process of coming into being.

This is far-reaching stuff in terms of what can be done with cinema. It posits that the image can directly depict private, inner states and larger, collective worlds as bound together by common soul - the oppressed peasants motionless like zombies, the military officer mechanically shooting at partisans. The shots of galloping horses are frenzied, but up above the clouded skies ebb with time. So, what started only a couple of years before in Soviet studios had reached this apex; image was engineered - or perhaps intuited in the case of Dovzhenko, who was the least of the theorists - to unify vision. The empire is inland as well as out, and stretches across the one space.

There are few words in all of this, our safe passage with logic is made perilous, adventuresome. Germanic cinema offered us the world of noir and I am grateful to them; but when it comes to what we often call 'pure cinema' as a quick resort, they could not match here - or France.

Oh, there is The Last Laugh, which is a marvellous study. But purely in terms of images Dovzhenko is worth two or three of those.

It goes without saying that silent cinema requires emphasis on the imagery. Alexander Dovzhenko's "Arsenal" is no exception. The look back at World War I over the past year should draw attention to this movie. Like Lewis Milestone's "All Quiet on the Western Front", this movie looks at the futility of war. The focus in the Kiev Arsenal January Uprising in 1918. Probably the most effective scene is the laughing gas: a man artificially laughs while surrounded by all manner of horror, a perfect metaphor for the disconnect between the image and reality of war.

The only other Dovzhenko movie that I've seen is "Earth". I understand that "Arsenal" and "Earth" are the second and third installments of his Ukraine Trilogy. I'll have to see "Zvenigora", as well as the rest of Dovzhenko's movies. Despite the obvious propaganda, this is still a movie that you have to see just for the imagery if nothing else. Like Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin", it contains some of the most unforgettable images in cinema history. Definitely see it.

Arsenal seems to be a direct challenge to idea that films are intended to be digested in one sitting. Apparently even Sergei Eisenstein had a tough time making sense of the narrative of some of Dovzhenko's work. Arsenal's narrative only emerges if you concentrate on what you've seeing - comprehending and reassembling the puzzle of the images and movements that Dovzhenko has arranged to create causal and symbolic associations. Dovzhenko's camera is like the eye of God, taking in a half dozen settings, all of them connected though disparate in space and time. Dovzhenko also is perfectly comfortable inserting the fantastic (a talking horse or a faith in communism that deflects bullets) into his retelling of a historical event. I watched the film several times before the plot was clear to me.

I'd recommend this film to anyone who wants to see a whole different approach to story telling. There are many great images and some of the acting is very good (the way Semyon Svashenko glances with disgust at one of the Ukrainian nationalists and slowly reaches out to touch his ribbon, feeling it's lightness, is an example), but there is no easy way of getting past Dovzhenko's style. You have to want to figure out this film. Dovzhenko's narrative technique is as unique as Robert Altman or Tsai Ming-Liang.

A group of Ukranian soldiers return from World War One to more fighting in the Communist Revolution.

This is an extraordinary, kinetic and moving piece of film making, full of metaphor and of great relevance for people throughout the world today. It isn't necessary to understand the complexities of the times to understand the rich emotional resonance. Particularly innovative is Dovzhenko's use of rhythm and inter-spliced scenes.

I was lucky enough to see a restored version of this at the Cambridge Film Festival 2003, with live musical accompaniment. Particularly memorable scenes are the undefeatable worker, the laughing gas, and the horse team rushing to take a fallen comrade to burial before returning to battle.

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.