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I38 CELLULOID
remarkable piece of work as Dovjenko's Earthy one must either join a film society or journey to some remote part of London, where a cinema exhibitor has possibly booked the picture at random or has been influenced by the chance of a little free publicity. To convey my point, I would mention that of the several times which I have seen Earth, certainly the most curious was at a small theatre in the east of London, in a district that can hardly be described as attractive, and where at least two-thirds of the audience was composed of people who had come from the West End to see this film by Dovjenko, about which they had read.
I have been at pains to stress the difficulties surrounding the presentation of Soviet films in England in general, and the difficulty of seeing Earth in particular, because without having seen portions of Dovjenko's film it is impossible for anyone to come to a full realization of what contemporary cinema can mean. If it were as easily possible for the vast general public to see Earth as it is for it to waste hard-gotten money on Whoopee, Resurrection and Kismet, there would be no cause for discontent. But the position remains that whereas Whoopees and Charley's Aunts are as thick as the pebbles on the beach, such a film as Earth happens only on the rarest occasions and then is hidden away out of all reasonable reach.
With Room's Ghost That Never Returns, and Trauberg's The Blue Express, Dovjenko's Earth is presumably one of the last of Russia's contributions to the silent cinema before the Soviets turn their attention to the problems of the sound film. It is all the more