Earth

Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (Земля / Zemlya) opened in 1930 and is the high point of the Ukrainian Soviet director's career, a fixture in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll. Dovzhenko belongs with Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin among the founding montage film-makers of Soviet silent cinema, but Earth moves differently from the work of his Russian colleagues: it is slower and more pastoral, and far more attentive to the cycles of agricultural life.

Collectivisation, and a tractor, arrive in a small Ukrainian village in the late 1920s, and the older landowners and the younger collective-farm members respond in their different ways. The film follows several generations of one peasant family through the change, in a sustained celebration of bodies, soil, sun, fruit and the weather of the Ukrainian steppe. Semyon Svashenko plays the young Komsomol activist at its centre, and Stepan Shkurat the old grandfather.

Dovzhenko's editing sets long static frames of faces, fruit and ploughs against sudden bursts of rapid montage, and the pastoral lyricism that results runs on through Russian and Ukrainian cinema as far as Andrei Tarkovsky's later work. The film was officially backed as propaganda for collectivisation, but what audiences find in it now is a near-mystical celebration of Ukrainian peasant life that the propaganda framing never managed to contain. The 2022 restoration is the standard version today.