Film 『 Zvenigora 』 ( ＊A )
Directed by Alexander Petrovich Dovzhenko ( ＊B )
Release 1928
Starring Nikolai Nademsky
Semyon Svashenko
Aleksandr Podorozhny
( ＊A )
■ Zvenigora ( Звени́гора ) was produced under the Soviet Union, so it has been considered a Soviet film, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it should probably be considered a Ukrainian film. This film, in which Ukrainian-born Alexander Dovzhenko lyrically depicts the "independence of the Ukrainian nation," is a film about the enduring differences between "two axes" that have never been sublated : "the Ukrainian national spirit" and "the communist revolution" that seeks to destroy class society in order to liberate the proletariat ( the workers ).
■ In this work, Dovzhenko subconsciously depicts the history of the gap between the communist revolution, a movement of the entire workers' movement moving into the future, and the frictional rebellion, the ancestral return to the archaic national spirit, which is generated in the present day. It could be said to be the personal history of Dovzhenko's own internal conflict from being a member of the polarizing Ukrainian Communist Party ( Bolotivists ), which upheld nationalist struggle, to being absorbed into another Ukrainian Communist Party ( Bolsheviks ), which embodied the communist ideology of the Soviet Union and was closer to the center of the country.
( ＊B )
■ The name Aleksandr Dovzhenko is a Russian name, and in Ukrainian, Dovzhenko Oleksandr Petrovich ( Довженко Олександр Петрович ) is the official name.
■ The film begins with a scene in which Ukrainian resistance group, known as the Haidamaks, against the Poles who ruled Ukraine's right bank in the 18th century, asks an old man ( Nikolai Nademsky / Ukraine name : Надемський Микола Захарович ) "Are there any Poles in here ?"
■ The old man replies that the Poles are around Zwenigora, trying to find the Scythian treasure ( 5~6 ). Haidamak joins the old man and tries to attack the Poles, but they are nowhere to be found. They find a sake cup that they think is part of the treasure, but as soon as they hold it in their hands, it turns into just a broken glass ( 7~8 ).
■ They intercepted the Poles hiding in the trees, but then fled in fear of the monks, the guardians of the treasure, who emerged from their underground hiding place ( 9~12 ).
■ Times have changed and the old man is now a grandfather with two grandchildren ( 13~14 ). The grandfather, who has nightmares about monk, tells his brother Tymish to pray because the devil is in the house, but Tymish will not listen to him ( 15~17 ). His brother Pavlo laughs at him ( 18 ). He later becomes a nationalist, known as the Petliurist ( *C ), and splits off from his brother Tymish, who becomes a soldier in the Red Army.
( *C ) The common name of Nationalist, derived from the iconoclastic Ukrainian nationalist Symon Vasylyovych Petliura ( 1879~1926 ). He was president of The Ukrainian People's Republic ( Українська Народна Республіка ) based on Ukrainian nationalism, which existed for only three years, from 1917 to 1920. The fact that this independent state existed is the foundation of the Ukrainian state today.
■ Scenes ( 19~24 ) depict the Ukrainian land and the people who engage in farming work there. It is important to note that this is not just Dovzhenko's anthem of nature to the Ukrainian land. The "peasants" working on the land depicted in this scene are not the same as the "workers" in the factories depicted later in the film, i.e., "ex-national Revolutionary Subject" who embody ideology of communism, but are the "Indigenous people" who symbolize Ukraine.
■ Within the Russian-led communist bloc led by Lenin and Stalin, which expanded as the supra-political system beyond a single state, these sequences show that Ukrainian independence and Ukrainian identity remained Dovzhenko's problematic internal conflict. In this case, Dovzhenko's "internal conflict" means that he was torn between "his fascination" with the ideology of communism, which subjectifies the workers, and "his attachment" to his roots in his homeland, which demands Ukrainian independence.
■ So we can say that this is "Complex work" that depicts the double-bind psychology of Dovzhenko, who refuses to easily decide whether this is a work of Ukrainian nationalism or a work of communist ideology that advocates workers' liberation.
■ The armies of the House of Romanov took part in World War I. Ukrainian villages become in the state of exhaustion as many young men from the countryside are drafted into the army. However, after hearing a complaint that many young men are deserting from the army, an old general ( another role by Nikolai Nademsky ) comes to personally inspect the situation. Tymish shows defiance to the general's call ( at that time, he had not yet joined the Red Army ). ( 25~26 ). The general orders the other soldiers to shoot Tymish in order to maintain discipline ( 27~28 ). However, the soldiers shoot the general instead of Tymish ( 29~30 ). This depicts the dissatisfaction with the House of Romanov that led to the later Russian Revolution.
■ In contrast to the previous sequences ( 19-24 ), which idyllicly depcited Ukrainian farm workers, the activity of factory workers is depcited with a certain speed and collective power as if the driving force of society ( 31-36 ). We can see in Dovzhenko the contrast between the contradictory Subject of "the peasants" who symbolize Ukraine and "the workers" who embody the transnational communist ideology.
■ If Dovzhenko still had thought that the peasant and the factory worker were separate and contradictory Subject, there would only remain the unresolvable conflict between "Ukrainian nationalism", symbolized by the peasant, and "Communism", symbolized by the factory worker. If, however, Dovzhenko had thought that both Subjects were essentially the same workers ( farm "worker" = factory "worker" ), just working in different areas, then this would have led to the de-national solidarity of labor Subject in the sense that Lenin had in mind ( For example, Lenin repeats over and over the following phrases "the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" ), but this cannot be determined from this film alone.
■ On the mountain of Zwenigora, the grandfather tells Pavlo the Scythian legend about the treasure ( 37~38 ). Once upon a time, Roxana falls in love with Scythian leader and poisons him for the people who suffer under his rule ( 39~41 ). However, the leader puts a curse on the treasure so that no one can get to it, dying along with Roxana ( 42 ).
■ However, the grandfather's love for Ukraine, as expressed in this sequence, was transformed into more radical nationalism and patriotism in his grandson, Pavlo, who came into conflict with the Bolsheviks.
■ When Pavlo becomes a nationalist, Tymish also deserts his fiancée and leaves the village to join the Red Army ( Bolsheviks ). Tymish shoots mercilessly ( 43-48 ) his fiancée, who tells him to kill her if he leaves the village, or return to the village if he cannot kill her. Here we can see the ruthlessness of the Bolsheviks, who would affirm combativeness for the sake of the revolution.
■ A sequence ( 49-51 ) implicitly depicts the hardness of labor in an increasingly industrialized society. In this sequence, there is only a small glimpse of the Ukrainian peasants left behind by industrialization and the rural villages that are being collectively farmed.
■ Pavlo, a nationalist, would walk the streets of Prague, where he had fled, dressed as a Cossack to attract attention, or pretend to be an exiled Ukrainian prince and stage an announced suicide in front of an audience ( after all, he did not commit suicide and the audience booed him ) to raise funds for his counterrevolutionary activities ( 55~60 ).
■ Returning to Ukraine, Pavlo tries to deceive his naive grandfather into burying a bomb to blow up the train carrying the Bolsheviks, telling him that the train is a monster that will destroy Ukraine's treasures ( 61~62 ). However, when Pavlo's grandfather notices the train coming toward him, he mistakenly believes that the Devil is coming and confronts it, waving the bomb in his hand as if it is a cross ( 63~66 ).
■ The train stops just in time to see his grandfather ( 67 ). After failing to blow up the train, Pavlo thinks he is finished and shoots himself ( 68, 70 ). His grandfather is rescued by the Bolsheviks, including Tymish ( 69 ).
■ Grandfather is given food and drink in a passenger coach and is treated kindly ( 71~74 ). What we can read here is that Tymish's grandfather, despite his attachment to his native Ukraine, chose not to live as a nationalist like Pavlo, but to live in sympathy with the Bolshevik ideals of espousing workers' solidarity , which Tymish also chose. This is what Dovzhenko consciously depicts, and it represents his own desire to realize "Ukrainian national self-determination within communism" in the sense that Lenin preached ( *D ).
■ In light of the current Russian Putin's invasion of Ukraine, some may be offended that the consequences of this work seem to represent Ukraine's subservience to Russia. However, unlike the Great Russianist Stalin, Lenin recognized Ukrainian national self-determination, which he believed was the necessary part of "the revolutionary process" of annihilating the ruling structure of the state and achieving solidarity among the workers. Perhaps it is precisely because Dovzhenko understood Lenin's thought that he constructed his next film, "Arsenal ( 1929 )" just in the Bolshevik viewpoint.
( *D ) For example, in "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination ( 1914 )", Lenin says the following :
"In Russia, the creation of an independent national state remains, for the time being, the privilege of the Great-Russian nation alone. We, the Great-Russian proletarians, who defend no privileges whatever, do not defend this privilege either."
"we firmly uphold something that is beyond doubt : the right of the Ukraine to form such a state. We respect this right; we do not uphold the privileges of Great Russians with regard to Ukrainians; we educate the masses in the spirit of recognition of that right, in the spirit of rejecting state privileges for any nation."
■ However, a theoretical problematic still remains beyond the interpretation of this work. Even if Lenin undoubtedly recognized Ukraine's national self-determination, what would have happened if Ukraine had in fact chosen to abandon the communist revolution and survive only as "the independent Nation-State", namely, "the Capitalist State" as Lenin called it ? Herein lies the core political consequence of Lenin's "dialectical materialism", which is rarely discussed or understood today, namely, the abolition of the State. Lenin, who believed that the State should ultimately be abolished as the system of ruling and oppressing the workers and other ethnic groups, is forcibly trying to separate the linkage between national independence and the apparatus of the State. We cannot dismiss the possibility that he might have condemned the establishment of such the State as Act of more than national self-determination, in other words, Dangerous Symptom that is as close as possible to the Capitalist Act.
■ And, in fact, the person who actually had such suspicions about Ukraine was none other than Stalin. For he accused the Ukrainian nationalists of being bourgeois. Yes, in Stalin, the perverse logic that all nationalism is bourgeois has been established, not the half-baked logic that a part of the bourgeois is nationalist. In other words, for him, The word called "bourgeois" has been secretly transformed from the original term for the hostile class against the workers to Another term for the resistance forces that stand up against Russia.
■ It is precisely this problematic that concerns the de-nationalized image of the communist bloc as "one political sphere" composed of Russia ( the central leader of communism ) and its satellite states that follow communist ideals, rather than as the conglomeration of independent states.
■ Herein lies the realization of "the historical contradiction". Because some Nations seek to dominate and oppress others, the subjugated Nations seek to wear the apparatus of the State to protect themselves. No matter how much Lenin condemns domination of other peoples, there is "the real contradiction" in the fact that some actually do so ( e.g., Stalin's Great Russian political acts, which Lenin himself condemned ) and therefore must become the Nation. In Hegelian terms, the Nation emerges out of the contradiction and struggle between the two poles of dominating other peoples and at the same time protecting one's own people from others.
■ If the inability to protect oneself without becoming the Nation is the historical necessity, it can be said that Dovzhenko, no matter how much he sympathized with communism and found hope in it, secretly felt frustrated that he could not do so because of the ideals of communism, even though he wanted to call themselves the Ukrainian Nation with pride. In other words, it can be psychoanalytically suggested that very "the oppression" as communist who could not call themselves the Nation-State, gave Dovzhenko the substitute of depicting the Ukrainian land in his own works. Instead of naming the Nation, he celebrates the fertility of the Ukrainian land. This is precisely the rhizome wriggling beneath the ground's surface that leads to his work "The Earth ( 1930 )."
