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| Alexander
Dovzhenko |
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| Director
/ Screenwriter / Editor / Producer |
| 1894 - 1956 |
| Born September 11,
Sosnivka, Chernigiv Province, Ukraine |
| Key
Production Country: USSR |
| Key Genres:
Drama, Rural Drama,
Propaganda Film |
| Key
Collaborators: Nikolai Nademsky (Leading
Character Player), Semyon Svashenko (Leading Player), Stepan Shkurat (Leading
Character Player), Danylo Demutsky (Cienmatographer), Pyotr Masokha
(Character Player), Stepan Shagaida (Leading Character Player), Vassili Krichevsky (Production Designer),
Iosif Shpinel (Production Designer), Yelena Maksimova (Character Player) |
| Worth
a Look: Zvenigora
(1928), Arsenal (1929), Earth (1930), Aerograd (1935) |
| Links: [
IMDB ] [
TCMDB ] [ All-Movie
Guide ] [
Film Reference ] [ Kinema
Feature ] [ Russian
Culture Navigator Profile ] [ Film
Comment Article ] [
Undercurrent Article (2006) ] |
| Books: [
Alexander
Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film ] |
| DVD's:
[ Amazon
] |
| 1,000
Greatest Films: Arsenal
(1929), Earth
(1930) |
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"Ukraine-born
Dovzhenko was a poet on celluloid. Once seen, the landscapes and
images from his films will be with you for a lifetime. If the
propagandist element in his films is occasionally intrusive (he
was made head of Kiev studios after pleasing Stalin with
Shchors in 1939), the best of his works are pastoral
masterpieces whose greatness is undeniable. Dovzhenko captured
the backbone of the country, its real life, in a way that
directors in few other countries even attempted." - David
Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999) |
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"The films of
Alexander Dovzhenko, who was brought up on a farm in Ukraine,
are lyrical panegyrics to the life and history of the area. The
first of Alexander Dovzhenko's films on which he had total
freedom was Zvenigora (1927), an allegory, which was the
last flowering of the exciting avant-garde Russian cinema." -
Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006) |
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"Whereas
other directors seem aggressively theoretical or populist,
Dovzhenko is the first intensely personal artist in the Russian
cinema. Although his career was subject to the problems that
faced any filmmaker in Soviet Russia, the films themselves are
free from them...Dovzhenko's cinema is poetic, lyrical,
possessed of a Blake-like somber innocence and a burning passion
for existence." -
David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002) |
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"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) |
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