Kathryn Jennings: Analysis of Zelmya

Zelmya. Aleksandr Dovzhenko. 1930. 70 min. Russian.

Writer and director Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s, 1930 film Zelmya or its English translation, The Earth is a Russian film released in 1930. The 73 min. black and white silent film shows the life of Ukrainian proles. This film paints pictures of the social issues this group of collective farmers’ experience. It is a film soaked in propaganda of what opportunities rural collectivization under Communism rule could afford. It centers on the arrival of a tractor, which is to bring with it the great promises of a new technology. Also present is the unending cycle of birth and death.

The first scene in the film is of a man on his deathbed saying goodbye to his peers, after 75 years of servitude to the land. Thus begins the dying as well as and birth to a new way of living. Though the landowners continue to exploit the land, the tractor is a symbol for the onslaught of new technology that will consume society.

The most impressive elements of Earth are its prominent visual compositions and montages. From the exchanging scenes of faces in extreme emotion or lack thereof, the livestock roaming the desolate land, the frenzy of the tractors’ arrival, anguish of death and birth, the film is constantly jumping around. If these farmers were feeling the deep emotions the film portrays they must have been a tired lot.
I appreciated many of the landscape shots. They portrayed the land as vast and very open, agriculture as far as the eye can see. I also noticed the land shots whether of fields or animals were often shot from a low angle, perhaps to show the peoples dependency on the land.

There is much repetition of the same shots throughout the film. While this may or may not be a bad thing I found it aggravating and unnerving. I also disliked the flipped images of film showing women motioning crosses in the reverse. I saw it as a mistake though very well may have been intended.

It is a very silent movie, despite a score composed by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. One cannot take their head from the screen for the likely chance they will miss when people are speaking. The screen would switch to a full black caption screen with the russian words in large print across the top and the quite smaller english across the bottom. The speed of the caption screens made it difficult to always read everything which was said. My eyes were constantly drawn to the larger font of the russian. This led to frequent rewinding of the film.

These caption screen speeds did fit in with the fairly quick still shots that made up the majority of the film itself. However, going from intense dramatic acting shots to the captions was slightly jolting. As soon as I began to take in a shot on the screen it would immediately switch. With these switching screens was Vyacheslav’s score. It was as dramatic as the film itself and so far as I could tell had no human voices although there were some sounds that were reminiscent of human sounds but seemed to lean more towards a howling sweeping wind. I asked myself a few times whether it was the acting, the score, or the montage that made the film appear so dramatic and have concluded it is all three. They all combine to produce a very jittery and highly charged film.

I did notice that the translations to english varied in the film. I noticed the same words said in russian were shown in a different english translation in a later captioning. It makes you realize the unreliability of translations between languages.

The film was as I said intended as pro-collectivization propaganda and for the wheat farmers whom Dovzhenko intended the movie for. I wonder how much these peasant farmers actually gained from this “poetic” film. With its lack of dialogue and at times overly abstract scenes, it may not have succeeded as well as intended.

At times I found the film to be unbearable. While I can appreciate old cinema for its daring and forwardness during its beginnings as well as for its simplicity in filming styles which can be quite pleasant, however, this is just not my pick for a good Saturday night flick.