DVD: Arsenal & Zvenigora

Two silent Soviet classics from the 1920s

by Tom BirchenoughSaturday, 19 February 2011

'Arsenal': Its iconic imagery resembles the photographic style of Rodchenko

What a time of ferment of artistic revolution the 1920s were in the Soviet Union. Pioneering arts techniques overlapped for an all-too-brief period with the progressive ideology of communism. Alexander Dovzhenko’s Arsenal and Zvenigora were at the forefront of such trends, but as a Ukrainian his feelings about Moscow’s new leaps forward were ambiguous. Dovzhenko had a deep visual love for the old order, even while he celebrated the dynamism of the new.

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