The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko, special issue of the journal of

ukranian Studies. Volume 19, Number 1 (Summer 1994). Guest

Editor: Bohdan Y. Nebesio. Canadian Institute of Ukranian
Studies, University of Alberta. 119 pps.

Alexander Dovzhenko: A Guide to Published Sources. Compiled and

introduced by Bohdan y; Nebesio. Canadian Institute of
J'Ukranian Studies Press, University of Alberta, 1995. 106 pps.

Bohdan Nebesio is preparing a Ph.D. dissertation on Alexander

Dovzhenko at the University of Alberta. His preliminary work has taken
the forms of a compiling a bibliography and editing a small but weIl
mounted anthology of critica[ writings led off by a detailed emendation
of Dovzhenko's short 1939 autobiography by the Toronto-based Marco
Carynnyk, the pioneering scholar orthe director and editor-translator of
Dovzhenko's The Poet as Filmmaker: Selected Writings (1973).
Perusing Nebesio's exacting bibliography one notes immediately the
paudty of English-language sources: essays by Brakhage, Sitney, Montagu,
Marshall; two dissertations; in French, a 1968 book by Marcel Ohms; sorne
sustained discussion by Judith Mayne in her Kino and the Woman OJ!.estion
(1989). Undl University of Wisconsin-Madison film professor Vance
Kepley's In the Service ofthe State: The Cinema 0/Alexander DO'llzhenko (1986),
there was no English-language book devoted to the filmmaker. In effect,
there is no well established debate in the West concerning Dovzhenko's
position in film history. though he is commonly regarded as the fourth
great filmmaker of twenties Soviet dnema, and an enduring influence on
[ater work, notably the films Andrei Tarkovsky. Several critics-not the
[east Montagu and Sitney-have c1aimed distinctive qualities for the
Ukranian director's pre-Socialist Realist films: Dovzhenko's religious
imagery, his complex "poetie" montage and his frequent quasi-animistic
passages and metaphors, aU quite at odds with the Futuro-constructivist e1an
of peers Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Vertov. These c1aimed features of
Dovzhenko's films unfortunate1y have been repeated so often they have
hardened by now into unexamined cliches. The essays here reopen

Canadian JDllmal of Film Stlldlu/RevJu: canadienne d'études cinématographique.! Vol 4 N° 2

lfW#!kL :XkXJC2
72 Bart Testa Book Reviews: The Cinema ofA. Dovzhenko... 73

questions about them and subject them to critical scrutiny. Surprisingly, fiction. Shaped by those same sources in forming their heroie character,
cliches or not, they hold up quite weIl. Soviet films of the twenties already could be said to have Sodalist Realism
The tendency lately (and Kepley's book exerts some gravitational pull as a sort of influence in advance of its formulation. This is truly an ass-
here) is to draw Dovzhenko back into the core Soviet school. Kepley backwards way ofputting matters. What would be more sensible for Smith
himself somewhat belies this tendency in his short but finely 'detailed to say (as Bordwell does in his Eisenstein book) is that features of these
analysis of select passages from three films in "Dovzhenko and Montage." films' heroic charactedzations anticipated Socialist Realism because they
He allies the director with avant-garde cinema stylistics. His definition falls drew on the same literary antecedents. But that would not be suffident for
close to that developed by David Bordwell: if the film does not organize cdics bent not Just on undercuttingthe "modernism" of twenties Soviet
its visualmaterial on the basis of narrative schemata (or rather "frustrates" cinema, but on routing Stalinist aesthetics back ioto its most ambitious
the viewer's organization of the material in accord with them), the viewer films. Even so, Smith fails to measure what the Canadian critic Régine
should and will look for alternative patterning, in Dovzhenko's case Robin demonstrated so thoroughly in her Socialist Realism: An Impossible
patterns of graphics of ~hots.On this simple basis, Kepley develops Aesthetic (Stanford, 1992), namely the degree towhieh Socialist Realism
persuasive analyses ofpassages from Zvenybora, Arsenal, and Earth. His point had to pulverize its Russian literary precursors to make doctrine out of il
is modest-that Dovzhenko offers viewers "more room ... to develop highly mixed Russian literary inheritance. (Robin also shows how they paid
myriad readings than might be the case with in conventional continuity for that with the tortuous incoherence of the. Socialist Realist doctrine
filmmaking." The "enlarged share" given to the viewer allows him!her to ïtself.) The filmmakers were much freer and more variable with those
"make-and remake" meanings that the films leave implicit. Modest or not, sources, which is to say that they were more faithful to that inheritance than
this is the beginning of a workable definition of a "poetic" as opposed to the dogmatists who later tortured themselves (and soon everybody else) in
a "prose" cinema in the case of Dovzhenko's practice. In a useful, rangier trying to tame Russian literature and cinema them to Socialist Realism.
pursuit ofthis distinction in historical film poerics, Bruce Williams's "Poetic The last and longest piece is a "formaI semiotie analysis" of Arsenal in
Discourse in Dovzhenko's Eartb" travels back through Pasolini's Heretical the high-octane East-European manner by Wac1aw M. Osadnik of the
Empiricism and Metz's Film Language to the seminal 1927 Russian formalist University of Alberta and Eugeniusz Wilk of the Silesian University. The
anthology Poetika Kino. Williams' intent is to establish links between the piece looks very interesting but it is one of those chart-mad semiotic
director's stylistics and the literary-originated Formalist accounts of a poetie analyses that requires a week witha good video machine and a seminar
cinema. The effect, which is convincing even with a very cursory analysis of smart students to fol1ow and assess.
of the film at hand, is to show that, more than his colleagues, Dovzhenko Nebesio has done a real service for those who teach and study Soviet
closely approximated what Soviet Formalist crities believed a poetie cinema in bringing these very helpful texts together. Before this, our
stylisties in film would be like. available critieal writings on Dovzhenko were severely limited and, as a
University of Kent's Murray Smith's perversely titled "The Influence follow-up to Kepley's book, this anthology suggestive1y widens our
of Socialist Realism on Soviet Montage: The End ofSt. Petersburg, Fragment purview. Whether it fertilizes the ground for renewed debate on the
ofan Empire and Arsenar shows case-by-case how the characterological director remains to be seen, given the narrow circulation of the specialized
mode1s of the "socialist hero" available to Soviet filmmakers from nine- journal of Ukranian Studies. (Both publications are available through the
teenth century Russian literary sources variously impinged upon Pudovkin, Canadian Institute ofUkranian Studies, 352 Athabasca Hall, University of
Elmer and Dovzhenko even before Socialist Realism. Smith's literary Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2E8.)
backstory is briefly and effectively told and the comparisons are weIl
founded analyticaIly. Then, in Arsenal, Smith discerns very sophisticated
"compositional" strategies for generating the "mass hero." The perversity
of his article's tide arises, Smith acknowledges, in that Socialist Realism
could be imagined to have exerted influence in a twisted retroactive fashion.
Socialist Realist theorists later-in the thirties-se1ected from, defined and
tried to synthesize literary sources!origins of Russian nineteenth-century Bart Testa
University of Toronto