Earth (1930) Zemlya

Director: Aleksandr Dovzhenko
Writer: Aleksandr Dovzhenko
Stars: Stepan Shkurat, Semyon Svashenko, Yuliya Solntseva

Dovzhenko's "film poem" style brings to life the collective experience of life for the Ukranian proles, examining natural cycles through his epic montage. He explores life, death, violence, sex, and other issues as they relate to the collective farms. An idealistic vision of the possibilities of Communism made just before Stalinism set in and the Kulack class was liquidated, "Earth" was viewed negatively by many Soviets because of its exploration of death and other dark issues that come with revolution.

Earth is usually considered Dovzhenko's best film, and is often cited alongside Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin (1925) as one of the most important films of the Soviet era. Dovzhenko's biographer Marco Carynnyk lauded the film's "passionate simplicity…which has made it a masterpiece of world cinema" and praised its "powerful lyric affirmation of life." It was ranked #88 in the 1995 Centenary Poll of the 100 Best Films of the Century in Time Out magazine. The work also received 10 critics' votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the world's greatest films.In the British Film Institute page for Earth, it is noted that the plot "is secondary to the extraordinarily potent images of wheatfields, ripe fruit and weatherbeaten faces […] Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) is in a similar rhapsodic tradition."

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