An explosion on an empty field.
A woman stands immobile in a sparsely furnished room.
A title card: "There was a mother who had three sons."
Another explosion. Two dead soldiers on a rolling train. Empty, desolate trenches.
The same woman, still standing immobile in her comfortless room.
Smoke emerging from the trenches. Obscuring our view.
Another title card: "There was a war."
A woman stands on an empty field, next to a dilapidated hut.
A village street. Three women stand immobile in front of their poor houses. An amputee crosses the screen trailed by a small child.
Another street. A Young woman leans against a house. An old officer walks towards her. Stops. Examines her. Smiles. Touches her breasts. And then walks away.
A third title card: "The mother had three sons no more."
On a vast desolate field, an old woman throws seeds. Alone. And then falls to the ground.
If Alexander Dovzhenko is frequently called the poet among the Soviet formalists, it is precisely because of evocations like the one described above, found at the beginning of Arsenal. In a three minute sequence, the Ukrainian director manages to convey all the hopelessness, the senselessness, the dread, the bleakness, the horror of war without showing us a single gun shot or wound. Fragments are assembled, meaning is created. Dovzhenko is "obsessed with the relation between the parts, the unit and the whole" (Cinema 1, 58), writes Deleuze. Or as the French film critic Barthélemy Amengual puts it, Dovzhenko is capable of expressing himself "outside of time and space" thanks to fragmented montage.
Dovzhenko is out and out dialectician. The parts of his elliptical films are always expressions of the whole. Where the director doesn't create meaning within the scene, we creep towards a slow realization of a central idea, of a bigger meaning. In Zvenigora, a frequently hard to follow allegory, two stories run along each other, sometimes intersecting but remaining separate entities always. One is the story of a "Grandfather" who tries to protect a century old treasure, the other one is a confusing disquisition about war and industrialization. At the end, Dovzhenko joins both narratives in a sublime instance of a "qualitative bound" and we come to realize that what was at stake the whole time was Ukrainian national identity. The propagandist element is well there, except Dovzhenko takes a lot of detours to get there.
As Deleuze remarks, Dovzhenko, far more than Eisenstein, knows how to douse the parts and their unity into a new whole "that gives them incomparable depth and extensiveness within their own boundaries." (58) If Deleuze is interested in how the école soviétique combines the parts to express a new whole, Dovzhenko gives him a run for his money. Story is never narrated, it is constructed with disjointed elements. The whole is slowly assembled, the elements melt into the bigger picture. In short, there is a purpose, even if we don't always know what that purpose is.
Earth, on which the consensus seems to be that it's Dovzhenko's best although I found Arsenal to be oftentimes more engaging, pushes the "qualitative bound" to its limit, I would dare to say. If Eisenstein concocted his milk separator sequence to turn a narrative page, Dovzhenko builds and builds anticipation but subtracts narration. When the tractor arrives to the village, separating its inhabitants into two fractions (pro or contra modernization) we get a long sequence in which the appearance of the machine produces incredible exhalation among the population and seems to be integral to the village's survival. It is almost a slow build from hope to triumph like in Old And New. But that build-up is never resolved.
Similarily, the film begins with an old man announcing that he is dying. But he still converses a bit with some villagers and eats an apple. We build and build and build towards his death, but once his life really does extinguish, we haven't had a narrative eureka. Dovzhenko just doesn't operate on those terms. The "qualitative bound" occurs once we as an audience make sense of all these elements, once unity emerges and the whole begins to transpire. Montage here is not used so much on a micro scale as with Eisenstein, but applied to the whole film text. The parts always point to the whole. It is Dovzhenko's genius that he approaches montage on his own terms.
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