Cheap Arsenal (DVD) (Aleksandr Dovzhenko) Price

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Dovzhenko's lyrical masterpiece on the Kiev arsenal strike
"Arsenal" is Alexander Dovzhenko's lyrical 1929 masterpiece, which is a polite way of saying that this silent film disdains conventional narrative form in favor of big time symbolism. The result is the oxymoronic notion of an avant-garde Soviet film. The story. Set during the war of in both the countryside and at the front, is based on a real incident in 1918. In Kiev the Revolutionary struggle is embodied by the strike of the arsenal Bolshevik workers, who are defeated by counter-revolutionary troubles, thereby engendering moral outrage on the part of the audience. There is a sense in which "Arsenal" is like "Battleship Potemkin" without the "happy" ending, although American audiences will clearly see a parallel with the battle of the Alamo. The idea here is for the Ukrainian director to show how feudal Russia became the communist Soviet Union, with a heavy dose of elements from ancient Ukrainian folklore to ease the message along. The most memorable sequences in this film include a starving horse and the death of a Revolutionary hero being riddled with bullets. Many critics argue that Dovzhenko has the most complex montage style of any of the Soviet directors, and this film is the one they usually point to as proof. Given that Dovzhenko is working on a much more symbolic level than Eisenstein and the other masters of early Soviet cinema, this would only make sense. "Arsenal" runs 65 minutes, with a music track and English titles. To the best of my knowledge two of Dovzhenko's other three silent films, "Zvenigora" and "Earth" ("Zemlya"), are also available on videotape. Final note: This Kino on Video release is longer than any previous version of "Arsenal," digitally mastered from 35mm archive materials.

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Gorgeously Intriguing
I'm sure there's plenty of people who would normally pass on this movie, for two reasons:

1) It's silent.

2) It's Soviet propaganda.

See it anyway. Dovzhenko's visual style is bracing, showing an astounding range of black-and-white palettes, from dusty grays to hard-edged chiaroscuro effects. His editing is even more audacious than that of his countryman, Eisenstein; parallel narratives, extended atmospheric montages, long, tense scenes suddenly bursting into flash cuts of near-subliminal effect.

Yes, the narrative line is somewhat confusing, with juxtapositions of abstract battle scenes, flurries of political agitation, allgorical action, and stark, fable-like tableaux. But keeping in mind that Dovzhenko is trying to capture the transition of an entire country from war to chaos to corruption and back to war again actually can help wean the viewer off of the need for a linear story. Unlike a lot of standard movie fare, "Arsenal" actually makes more sense the more you think about it: the dream-like structure gives the movie a marvelous retrospective clarity.

And, yes, the movie is propaganda, but it is far less didactic than most other examples, not to mention leavened with instances of black humor that give the film a curiously independent, humanistic streak. (There was only one scene that made me wince in light of later Soviet history.) In the end, Dovzhenko seems less interested in winning converts to his cause than in simply giving the viewer a chance to experience what it's like to be in the middle of epochal change. It's also a movie that at times is positively giddy at the possibilities of the medium. A real breath of fresh air, even now.