TSPDT

Key Production Country: USSR
Key Genres: Drama, Biopic, War, Rural Drama, Propaganda Film, Political Drama
Key Collaborators: Nikolai Nademsky (Leading Character Actor), Semyon Svashenko (Leading Actor), Daniil Demutsky (Cinematographer), Stepan Shkurat (Leading Character Actor), Pyotr Masokha (Character Actor), Yuri Yekelchik (Cinematographer), Stepan Shagaida (Leading Character Actor), Dmitri Kabalevsky (Composer), Vasyl Vasylovych Krychevsky (Production Designer), Iosif Shpinel (Production Designer), Yelena Maksimova (Character Actress)

"The great poet of Soviet cinema, Dovzhenko was able to animate the spirit of the Russian people without shackling it with propaganda. - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)

"While ostensibly designed to speak effusively to the masses, his pooled output was, at the same time, a deeply personal and profoundly poetic accumulation. Time and again, enlightening and simultaneously impeding his productivity, he flaunted a conspicuous aesthetic with relentless formal and narrative invention, all while attempting to toe the party line. Films likes Aerograd, Shchors, and Michurin outwardly demonstrate Dovzhenko’s political loyalty, George Liber argues, but a “subversive subtext softens their central, politically approved messages.” And at the risk of alienating anyone not conversant in the obscurities of Ukrainian history and culture, usually rendered through poignant visuals and dense reference points, Dovzhenko reinforced a fundamental depiction of the common man in harmony and opposition with nature, transcending the era of his undertaking and besting any obstacle he may have encountered." - Jeremy Carr (Senses of Cinema, 2018)

"Considered a cinematic poet, Dovzhenko was part of the trio of great Soviet filmmakers, along with Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevelod Illarionovich Pudovkin, but his vision, linked to his native Ukraine, was decidedly different. His loyalty to Ukraine is obvious in the way his films poetically evoke the landscape and folkways, but his films, made in the service of the state, could not be evocative of Ukrainian nationalism, especially during the Stalinist regime, and he had to walk a tightrope politically, lest he fall out of favor." - John C. Tibbetts (The Encycopedia of Great Filmmakers, 2002)

"A pagan mystic whose masterful films look as wildly experimental, as dreamlike, as hysterically funny, as fiercely tragic, and as beautiful today as they did a century ago… To understand Dovzheko’s visionary talent, one has to factor in his ecstatic love of nature and all the other arts that fed into his cinema: not just painting but also sculpture, literature (according to Ray Uzwyshyn, “Dovzhenko’s literary output is considered seminal in Ukrainian literary history”), theater (especially in Zvenigora and Aerograd), music (both classical and folk, and complete with singing horses in Arsenal), and dance — perhaps even landscaping if one considers his lyrical ways of capturing and harnessing (or unleashing) sunflowers, fields, rivers, and forests." - Jonathan Rosenbaum (Jonathan Rosenbaum.net, 2020)

"Unquestionably one of the giants of early Soviet cinema, Aleksandr Dovzhenko was not associated with the theoretical school of Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, and his films, while no less radical or political, were appreciably more personal… After Dovzhenko's death in 1956, many of his unfinished projects were completed by his wife, Yuliya Solntseva, eponymous star of Aelita (1924), and a distinguished director in her own right." - Richard Bell (501 Movie Directors, 2007)