Pulled from Theaters After Nine Days: Dovzhenko’s Film Earth

On April 8, 1930, director Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s silent film Earth (Ukrainian original title: Земля, Zemlia) was released in a Kyiv theater. According to the Dovzhenko Centre, Ukraine’s largest film archive, the film was pulled from theaters just nine days later. 28 years afterward, in 1958, international film critics gathered in Brussels named it one of the 12 greatest films in cinema history.

In a 2021 poll by the same center on the “best films in Ukrainian cinema history,” Earth ranked second. It stands as a landmark of Ukrainian cinema that was first rejected within the Soviet Union and only later recognized abroad.

A Village Story About the Coming of a Tractor

According to the Dovzhenko Centre’s film data, Earth was made in 1930 at the Kyiv studio of the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU, Vufku), the film agency of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It runs 79 minutes, was shot by cinematographer Danylo Demutsky, and stars Semen Svashenko, Stepan Shkurat, and Yuliia Solntseva, among others.

It is set in a Ukrainian village at the end of the 1920s, as agricultural collectivization is beginning. The center’s synopsis sums up the plot this way: Vasyl, a young Communist Party member, obtains a tractor with the help of the village party organization and plows away the boundaries of the “kurkul (kulak) fields.” For his zeal, he pays a heavy price.

In a commentary for the Ukrainian history magazine Local History (April 8, 2024), film critic Serhii Ksaverov describes how the film opens with the old man Semen dying quietly in an apple orchard, how Vasyl is shot while dancing home along a night road, and how his father Opanas turns away the priest as villagers carry the coffin singing a “new song.” In Ksaverov’s reading, death is portrayed as the start of new life, making this a very different film from an ordinary piece of Soviet propaganda.

Filming began in the village of Yareski, in Poltava Oblast, at the end of June 1929 (Vufko, the Dovzhenko Centre’s film-history website).

The Nine Days to Its Disappearance

Vufko, the Dovzhenko Centre’s film-history website, traces the events from production to withdrawal.

The Dovzhenko Centre calls Bednyi “Stalin’s court poet.” According to Vufko, his review faulted the film for being incomprehensible to the masses, for not condemning the kurkuls harshly enough, and for its scenes of female nudity. The center writes that the film was pulled after being denounced as “biologism” and “naturalism.” The Local History commentary cited above states that, on April 17, the central film-censorship body (the Central Repertoire Committee) recommended halting screenings. Reception within Ukraine was more favorable: poet Mykola Bazhan wrote an admiring review, though it was not published until May 1930, after screenings had already been stopped.

The Summer It Was Recognized Abroad

Even as it was being suppressed within the Soviet Union, screenings began in Western Europe from June 1930. According to Vufko, Dovzhenko toured Europe from the summer into the autumn of 1930 with his wife, actress Yuliia Solntseva, and cinematographer Demutsky, and the film was shown in Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Britain, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The Dovzhenko Centre writes that reviews in the foreign press were “largely favorable.”

The Director’s Later Move to Moscow

According to the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, published by the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Dovzhenko was born in 1894 to a peasant family in Sosnytsia County, Chernihiv Governorate. After working as a teacher, he was detained by the secret police in Zhytomyr in December 1919 on suspicion of having served in the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. In the early 1920s he worked in Warsaw and Berlin as part of a Ukrainian diplomatic mission, then drew satirical cartoons for a newspaper in Kharkiv before becoming a film director at a studio in Odesa in 1926.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta — CIUS; hereafter IEU) calls Zvenyhora (1927) the film “regarded as the beginning of Ukrainian national cinema,” and names it, along with Arsenal (1929; released in Japan under the title 武器庫, Buki-ko) and Earth, as the trio of silent films that stand as Dovzhenko’s principal works. IEU further writes that Dovzhenko was harshly criticized as a “Ukrainian nationalist” for Earth and his next film, Ivan (1932), was forced to move to Moscow, and lived “as if in exile” until his death on November 25, 1956. Stalin banned the publication of his wartime film-novel Ukraine in Flames as nationalist.

1958: The 12 in Brussels

In 1958, an international poll of film critics from various countries on the “best films in the history of cinema” was held in Brussels. IEU writes that “an international jury counted Earth among the 12 best films in world cinema” in 1958, and the Dovzhenko Centre likewise states that it was chosen as one of the 12 at an international gathering of film critics held in Brussels that year. The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine records the same, calling it “one of the 12 best films.”

A film pulled from theaters nine days after its release was thus named a world classic two years after its director’s death. The Dovzhenko Centre writes that the film “was rediscovered only after the director’s death and won worldwide fame.”

Watching Earth Today

The Dovzhenko Centre restored the film in 2012 and premiered a version with a new score by the Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha at the Odesa International Film Festival on July 21, 2012. In 2017, another score was created by singer Mariana Sadovska.

In Japan, the film is known by the title 大地 (Daichi, meaning “Earth”), and some Japanese film databases list its country of production as the “USSR.” That is why Japanese sources call a film made in 1930 at a studio of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic a “Soviet film”; what the phrase “Ukrainian film” can mean is discussed in our article “Ukrainian Film” Can Mean Five Different Things — Country of Production, Setting, and Makers. The director’s name, too, is commonly rendered in Japanese-language sources using the Russian pronunciation, “Alexander Dovzhenko”; even a paper published by Hokkaido University’s Slavic Research Center uses the Russian form after noting that, based on Ukrainian, it would be “Oleksandr.”

The collectivization the film depicts led, two years after its release, to the Holodomor famine in Ukraine of 1932–33 (see our article, How Many Died in the Holodomor? Why Estimates Range from 2.6 to 5 Million). Ksaverov writes that Dovzhenko himself “genuinely believed” in what he had filmed. Earth captured the beginning of collectivization, before that famine came.