4/6/2024 0 Comments Breaking the quiet part 3![]() ![]() Eisenstein set out to tell the story of a 1905 naval mutiny, a key moment in the Russian revolution, which was sparked by the serving of rotten meat to the crew of the Potemkin. In common with the beginning of Touch of Evil, the end of Some Like It Hot and the middle of Psycho, there is a sequence some way into Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 Battleship Potemkin that has overshadowed the work as a whole and infiltrated the consciousness even of those who have not seen the entire film. ![]() This is living cinema, as refreshing and vital as the film's own climactic downpour. Perhaps its most celebrated sequence is the magnificent opening scene: the painful counterpoint between a dying man, his infant grandchildren and the bursting fruit of his orchard. His scope comprises vast pastoral landscapes, and intimate fleshy nakedness. Dovzhenko's symbolism is both rich and audacious. In the UK, the Observer's CA Lejeune hymned its rare "understanding of pure beauty in cinema". But while there was dismay and censure in the Soviet Union, critics elsewhere were overawed. It was also snipped by censors who objected to the nudity, and the infamous scene in which farmers urinate into their tractor's radiator. Sketched as tribute to the boons of collectivisation, but released as those schemes were falling out of favour, Earth was condemned on its home turf on political grounds. A kulak-ordered bullet stops the dance, and Vasyl, mid-action: a brutal execution, starkly underplayed. The young man performs an impromptu hopak on a dusty path as the sun rises, exemplifying passion, vigour and virility with every cloud that rises from his stamping feet. This is never more apparent than in the heart-stopping sequence when Vasyl dances home after a night with his true love. As Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in this paper: "In Dovzhenko's world, the events often turn out to be the shots themselves."Įarth is the final part of Dovzhenko's silent trilogy (following the nationalist fantasy Zvenigora (1928) and the avant-garde anti-war film Arsenal (1929), and is brimming with exuberant youth, but haunted by the shadow of death. ![]() ![]() Officially, this Soviet-era Ukrainian silent is a paean to collective farming, crafted around a family drama, but its director, Alexander Dovzhenko, was a born renegade, for whom plots were far less important than poetry. EarthĮarth, capped by that avowedly secular title, is a lyrical, carnal movie about birth, death, sex and rebellion. Blind no more, the girl slowly realises that the hobo in front of her is her secret benefactor, and the flicker of conflicting feelings on Chaplin's face – humility and joy – vindicate his decision to stay silent. Nothing, though, is more important than the final scene, still powerful in its ambivalence. Though there are the usual sight gags in the Little Tramp's quest to find the money with which to restore the girl's sight, City Lights is more a film about personal relationships: a key figure in the film is a rich businessman who only recognises his new friend when drunk. (Critic Andrew Sarris described the character as being a model of sophisticated self-containment – "his own Don Quixote and his own Sancho Panza"). Indeed, the whole film hinges in some way on the Little Tramp being outside time: Chaplin deliberately plays him as a relic, a figure of fun for the street-corner newspaper boys, yet at the same time self-aware. In retrospect, this isn't so much the precious behaviour of a purist but the smart reaction of an experienced comedian Chaplin's films rarely used intertitles anyway, and though it is technically "silent", City Lights is very mindful of it own self-composed score and keenly judged sound effects.Īt its heart, Chaplin's film is a mismatched love story in the vein of DW Griffiths' Broken Blossoms, made some 10 years earlier, but Chaplin knowingly modernises it, moving the location from the seedy docks of Limehouse to the bustle of the city centre, where Chaplin's vagrant falls for a blind flower-seller. City Lights was arguably the biggest risk of Charlie Chaplin's career: The Jazz Singer, released at the end of 1927, had seen sound take cinema by storm, but Chaplin resisted the change-up, preferring to continue in the silent tradition. ![]()
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