1,001 Films: "Earth/Zemlya" (1930)

Earth, Aleksandr Dovzhenko's account of life on a Soviet farm collective, is distinguished by its pictorial brilliance. Watch Battleship Potemkin, and once you get beyond the exhilarating technique, you see the levers, pulleys and cranes required in the construction of its message, the barriers keeping its anonymous crowds in check. Dovzhenko, by contrast, shows you (and proves genuinely, stirringly engaged with) specific people in specific places. A dying old man, surrounded by his infant great-grandchildren playing with the pears he enjoyed so much in life, the first of several bodies lying in state here; mourning mothers heaving their bosoms towards the camera; a community eagerly anticipating the arrival of its first tractor, the men lining up alongside the oxen in formation; and all the while, the seasons change, the fruit ripens and falls from the tree, and the wind continues to blow through the fields.

Narratively, it's slender, verging on the opaque - in this, it's badly served by the titles (and content) of the current UK DVD edition, for this is a film that needs context. There's a stand-off with neighboring rich farmers that leads to bloodshed, and a sense the old (workers and habits) will have to give way to the new - as one intertitle puts it (in caps, so we can't fail to spot it) "WE WILL PROSPER WITH MACHINES". More generally, however, industrialisation is handled with a lightness of touch: the direction and montage seeks to turn hard work - the cutting and collection of corn, the commercial-scale baking of bread - into a joyful dance, almost a celebration of labour, and of man's ability to work with the soil. It may just be a question of rhythm - that Eisenstein, working in the city, the engine room of the Revolution, was always likely to turn out something more mechanical than the lyricism Dovzhenko arrives at by removing himself to the countryside. Still, stretches of it rival Sunrise as the most purely beautiful work of cinema produced in this period, and cinephiles will see where Aleksandr Sokurov looks to have cribbed several of his best moves from, particularly in relation to death and slow-motion, and the bond that exists between mothers and sons.

Earth is available on DVD from Mr. Bongo Films.