Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

144 CELLULOID in a manner befitting the new spirit, with songs and hymns to the future instead of with the mockeries of religious pomp. The funeral takes place and Vassily's friend addresses the crowd. A branch of leaves sweeps across the calm face of the dead boy. Thomas can keep his secret no longer, and running across the fields, looks down on the people. He clutches at the ground, buries his hands in the earth — his earth by hereditary possession. He shrieks to the crowd that he killed their Vassily — in the night — but they take no notice. He is puzzled and angry, and he shouts. But the peasants are too occupied with their singing to listen to him. He screams with dismay, dances the dance of a madman, buries his face in the bare soil. Until finally the film closes with a beautiful series of shots of fruit splashed with rain, and the gradual breaking through of the sun. A cluster of apples, three apples, two apples, one apple filling the screen. So moved am I by Dovjenko's film that I find it difficult to express in words the full meaning of the moving images that are at once lovely in themselves, lovely in sequence, and lovely as a unified work of art. So well has Dovjenko welded his separate images into a single, vibrating, immensely powerful whole, that it is almost sacrilegious to probe and dissect its construction. The images sweeping from cloud to earth, from fruit to sunflower, from graceful steeds to sturdy oxen, from small figures of men on the distant horizon to great close ups of heads, are so beautifully arranged that they defy literary description. The gradual changing of mood from silent calm to noisy excitement, from sun to wind and rain, is so skilfully effected