Alexander Dovzhenko

Alexander Petrovich Dovzhenko, also Oleksandr Petrovych Dovzhenko (Russian: Александр Петрович Довженко, Ukrainian: Олександр Петрович Довженко; September 10 [O.S. August 29] 1894 – November 25, 1956), was a Soviet film director and screenwriter of Ukrainian origin. He is often cited as one of the most important early Soviet filmmakers, alongside Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, as well as being a pioneer of Soviet montage theory.

Oleksandr Dovzhenko was born in the hamlet of Viunyshche located in the Sosnitsky Uyezd of the Chernihiv Governorate of the Russian Empire (now part of Sosnytsia in Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine), to Petro Semenovych Dovzhenko and Odarka Yermolayivna Dovzhenko. His paternal ancestors were Chumaks who settled in Sosnytsia in the eighteenth century, coming from the neighbouring province of Poltava. Oleksandr was the seventh of fourteen children born to the couple, but due to the deaths of his siblings he was the oldest child by the time he turned eleven. Ultimately, only Oleksandr and his sister Polina, who later becomes a doctor, survived to adulthood.

Although his parents were uneducated, Dovzhenko's semi-literate grandfather encouraged him to study, leading him to become a teacher at the age of 19. He avoided military service during World War I because of a heart condition, but during the Civil War he may have served for some time in the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic. In 1919 in Zhytomyr he was taken prisoner and sent to the prison on suspicion of intelligence for the UPR army. At the end of 1919, he was released at the request of Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny. After his release, for some time he taught history and geography at the officers' school of the Red Army. In 1920 Dovzhenko joined the Borotbist party. He served as an assistant to the Ambassador in Warsaw as well as Berlin. Upon his return to USSR in 1923, he began illustrating books and drawing cartoons in Kharkiv. At that time, Dovzhenko was also a member of VAPLITE.

Dovzhenko turned to film in 1926 when he landed in Odessa. His ambitious drive led to the production of his second-ever screenplay, Vasya the Reformer (which he also co-directed). He gained greater success with Zvenigora in 1928, the story of a young adventurer who becomes a bandit and counter-revolutionary and comes to a bad end, while his virtuous brother spends the film fighting for the revolution, which established him as a major filmmaker of his era.

His following "Ukraine Trilogy" (Zvenigora, Arsenal, and Earth), are his most well-known works in the West. The trilogy was produced by the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration during the New Economic Policy(NEP) and the 'korenizatsiya'. These provided an interesting environment for the revival of Ukrainian culture in the Soviet Union. Arsenal was badly received by the communist authorities in Ukraine, who began harassing Dovzhenko - but, fortunately for him, Stalin watched it and liked it.

Dovzhenko's Earth has been praised as one of the greatest silent movies ever made. The British film director Karel Reisz was asked in 2002 by the British Film Institute to rank the greatest films ever made, and he put Earth second. The film portrayed collectivization in a positive light. Its plot revolved around a landowner's attempt to ruin a successful collective farm as it took delivery of its first tractor, though it opened with a long close-up of an elderly, dying man taking intense pleasure in the taste of an apple - a scene with no obvious political message, but with some aspect of autobiography. The film was panned by the Soviet authorities. The poet, Demyan Bedny, attacked its "defeatism" over three columns of the newspaper Izvestia, and Dovzhenko was forced to re-edit it.

Dovzhenko's next film, Ivan, portrayed a Dneprostroi construction worker and his reactions to industrialization, which was then summarily denounced for promoting fascism and pantheism. Fearing arrest, Dovzhenko personally appealed to Stalin. One day later, he was invited to the Kremlin, where he read the script of his next project, Aerograd, about the defence of a newly constructed city from Japanese infiltrators, to an audience of four of the most powerful men in the country - Stalin, Molotov, Kirov and Voroshilov. Stalin approved the project but 'suggested' that Dovzhenko's next project, after Aerograd, should be dramatized biography of the born in Ukraine communist guerrilla fighter, Mykola Shchors.

In January 1935, the Soviet film industry celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with a major festival, during which the country's most renowned director Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, who was in trouble with the authorities, and had not been allowed to complete a film for several years, gave a rambling speech that jumped from one esoteric topic to another. Dovzhenko joined in the criticism, raising a laugh pleading: "Sergei Mikhailovich, if you do not produce a film at least within a year, then please do not produce one at all... All this talk about Polynesian females, I will gladly exchange all your unfinished scenarios for one of your films." At the end of the conference, Stalin presented Dovzhenko with the Order of Lenin.