Rent Earth (1930)

Deserves a better DVD release than this - Earth review by RJ

I don't know too much about the ins and outs of film restoration, distribution rights etc - so it's a mystery to me why some films get lovingly restored and released on dvds/blu-rays crammed with extra features, whilst other films remain neglected and, at best, chucked out on dvds containing terrible quality prints and no extra features. All I know is that, sadly, this film falls into the latter category. This really is an awful quality release. The print of the film is very poor, so blurry in places that you can hardly see what is going on. There are clearly intertitles missing, and the English subtitles for those that remain seem to have been generated using Google Translate. There are no extra features whatsoever and (for me at least) this is exactly the kind of film which would benefit from some supplementary materials to help put it into context. I had to go online and do some reading to aid my understanding, otherwise I would have had real difficulty getting anything out of it. The exact same version of the print is available on Youtube and the physical disc adds nothing to this whatsoever.

All of which is a shame because, struggling to emerge from all of this is clearly a very interesting film, with an equally interesting history. It is ostensibly a propaganda film promoting the Soviet policy of collectivism, however although the film is clearly in favour of this policy, it was nevertheless deemed by Soviet officials to be too ambiguous in its message and to be excessively concerned by man's relationship with nature. Whilst this was bad news for its director (Aleksandr Dovzhenko) at the time, it's good news for anyone watching it now as it elevates it above being purely a simplistic propaganda film. The montage sequence near the end of the film, intercutting a vengeful priest begging God to punish the pro-collectivist revolutionaries, a man driven insane by despair and guilt, a child being born whilst a young man's funeral takes place, and a grieving woman in a primal display of (literally) naked emotion is particularly startling.

So, absolutely worth watching, and if you stick with it long enough the power of the film will transcend the shabby way it has been presented.

Ploughin' in the Wind' - Earth review by CH

In these times when dependence upon food has become paramount, the opening scenes, set in Ukraine, of Dovzhenko's Earth (1930) resonate across a near-century. This is, right now, perhaps even more startling than looking upon those recent telescope images of the way in which the universe gathered force whenever that was (difficult to get a handle upon the eons of time and space).

Here, though, in this, one of the last silent films, is a reminder that, while, for example, people were bustling around Piccadilly for anything ranging from the latest Aldous Huxley to an Edgar Wallace, others were in those remote plains, some on the point of death, as wheat and fruit were fortified by the sun or beset by the wind - as they had been for centuries.

Harvest was all. Every stage of the future depended upon it. As we now find.

As Graham Greene observed a few years later, Earth had a “magnificent drive... a belief in the importance of a human activity truthfully reported”. These eighty minutes' narrative are not the main thing: their essence is one of life itself while collectivisation entails the loss of individual land as machinery cuts across many more acres than a man with a scythe can do. One might recall those scenes in Hardy, some four decades earlier, when steam engines did likewise – and indeed of those years after the Second World War which saw England's hedgerows torn up to give way to combine harvesters and the loss of bees' habitat which now prove vital for us all.

Thankfully, despite all this, and for us, Earth is not a pamphlet; it is something, literally, much more moving: clouds cross the sky, people traverse the countryside in memory of a man killed for his belief in the land as inherently a greater force than bureaucracy's egotistic craving to submit it to a form-filling régime.

Even those who do not read poetry appreciate that the land provides it. An onion, an apple, these have the shape of a sonnet; a field is an epic which we need to celebrate.

What's more, startlingly, Earth celebrates those who find that the land's magnetic force has pulled off all their clothes to bring them to a state of Paganism.

Here is something whose open faces speak to us more cogently than anything the latest masked Marvel character can ever hope to do.