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On Dovzhenko
On Dovzhenko
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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