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IMDbPro

Arsenal

  • 1929
  • Not Rated
  • 1h 33m
IMDb RATING
7.2/10
2.5K
YOUR RATING
Vladimir Stenberg and Georgii Stenberg in Arsenal (1929)
DramaWar

A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists.A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists.A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists.

  • Director
    • Aleksandr Dovzhenko
  • Writer
    • Aleksandr Dovzhenko
  • Stars
    • Semyon Svashenko
    • Georgi Khorkov
    • Amvrosi Buchma
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.2/10
    2.5K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Aleksandr Dovzhenko
    • Writer
      • Aleksandr Dovzhenko
    • Stars
      • Semyon Svashenko
      • Georgi Khorkov
      • Amvrosi Buchma
    • 19User reviews
    • 22Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 1 win total

    Photos15

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    Top cast15

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    Semyon Svashenko
    Semyon Svashenko
    • Timosh - the Ukrainian
    • (as S. Svashenko)
    Georgi Khorkov
    • A Red Army Soldier
    • (as G. Khorkov)
    Amvrosi Buchma
    Amvrosi Buchma
    • Laughing-Gassed German Soldier
    • (as A. Buchma)
    Dmitri Erdman
    • A German Officer
    • (as D. Erdman)
    Sergey Petrov
    Sergey Petrov
    • A German Soldier
    • (as S. Petrov)
    M. Mikhajlovsky
    • A Nationalist
    • (as Mikhajlovsky)
    Aleksandr Evdakov
    • Tsar Nikolas II
    • (as A. Evdakov)
    Luciano Albertini
    Luciano Albertini
    • Raffaele
    • (uncredited)
    Nikolai Kuchinsky
    • Symon Petliura
    • (uncredited)
    Pyotr Masokha
    Pyotr Masokha
    • Workman
    • (uncredited)
    Osip Merlatti
    • The actor Sadovsky
    • (uncredited)
    Nikolai Nademsky
    Nikolai Nademsky
    • Grandpa
    • (uncredited)
    Aleksandr Podorozhnyy
    • Pavloo
    • (uncredited)
    T. Wagner
    • A Nurse
    • (uncredited)
    Boris Zagorsky
    • Dead Soldier
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Aleksandr Dovzhenko
    • Writer
      • Aleksandr Dovzhenko
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews19

    7.22.4K
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    Featured reviews

    10M-Lunatique

    Cinema-Poetry

    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.
    10Flak_Magnet

    One of the 1920's Most Modernists Films - a Masterpiece

    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?
    10sean4554

    Brilliant, multi-layered masterpiece

    For several years I had a decent quality print on video and was always fascinated by this film. Very few motion pictures are as visually striking and intense, but little of the story came through. I just purchased the DVD and the audio commentary track by Vance Kepley really illuminated "Arsenal". Undoubtedly the finest commentary I've yet heard. If this classic movie isn't your cup of tea, get the DVD anyway. Dovzhenko was an artist like few others. His work really deserves rediscovery; hopefully future releases of "Zvenigora", "Earth" and "Aerograd" will have Kepley's commentary as well. But even as they are, Dovzhenko's films are truly essential.
    10lee_eisenberg

    all quiet on the Ukrainian front

    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.
    chaos-rampant

    Eye whipped into motion

    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.

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    Storyline

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    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      The film concerns an episode in the Russian Civil War in 1918 in which the Kiev Arsenal January Uprising of workers aided the besieging Bolshevik army against the Ukrainian national Parliament Central Rada who held legal power in Ukraine at the time.
    • Goofs
      In a scene early in the film, a soldier lies dead, covered with sand, but the sand can be seen to rise and fall with the actor's breathing.
    • Connections
      Edited into Le tombeau d'Alexandre (1993)

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • February 25, 1929 (Soviet Union)
    • Country of origin
      • Soviet Union
    • Official sites
      • VUFKU
      • VUFKU
    • Language
      • Russian
    • Also known as
      • Арсенал
    • Filming locations
      • Kyiv, Ukraine(street scenes, procession in front of St Sophia Cathedral)
    • Production companies
      • Odeska Kinofabryka
      • Vseukrainske Foto Kino Upravlinnia (VUFKU)
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 33 minutes
    • Color
      • Black and White
    • Sound mix
      • Silent
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.33 : 1

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    Vladimir Stenberg and Georgii Stenberg in Arsenal (1929)
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