Man With A Movie List

Director: Alexander Dovzhenko Year: 1929 Run-time: 1 hr 32 min Source: Bootleg DVD, although the quality wasn't much better than Youtube Wikipedia One Man's Extremely In-depth Analysis of Dovzhenko's War Trilogy Notable for : Dovzhenko's second film in his "War Trilogy" focuses more specifically on World War I, and how Ukraine joined the Soviet state.  On a shot-by-shot basis, Dovzhenko's style matured since Zvenigora , and there are very few directors of the era who can match his cinematography.  Although the film doesn't mix genres in the same way as Zvenigora , it is still very much an avant-garde work. Verdict :  To be overly simplistic for a moment, Dovzhenko is David Lynch, except Ukrainian and several decades early.  Both of these films are difficult to decipher in the best of conditions, but without proper care and translation, I can't recommend that you seek out these films.  Which is a shame, because even devoid of proper conte...

Director: Alexander Dovzhenko Year: 1928 Runtime: 1 hr 31 min Source: Youtube Zvenigora  is a fascinating film, one that seems utterly unmoored to its time, but its also mystifying - I ultimately couldn't break into the layers of meaning that I know are present.  It's the first film on the list that I was compelled to watch a second time, when a poor print online with Google-translated subtitles got me searching on Ebay for an only slightly better bootleg DVD collection of Dovzhenko's works. But after two viewings, there are still basic questions about this film that I can't answer, such as the complicated feelings that Dovzhenko, as a native Ukrainian, held towards communism and the Soviet takeover.  Many of the images of rapid industrialization are shared with Vertov's nightmarish Eleventh Year , but it's hard to know what to make of them, since so much of the film is shrouded in abstract symbolism.  There's a strange mix of genres on display here, ...