Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (1929) is one of the great classics of Soviet avant-garde cinema, and perhaps the most candid depiction of the violent struggles in Ukraine one hundred years ago. It tells the story of the Kyiv Arsenal Uprising of 1918, when workers rebelled in support of the Bolsheviks and against the Central Council of Ukraine. Dovzhenko himself fought as a soldier on the government’s side, and his film is not at all heroic. Soviet critics accused him of pursuing a nationalist agenda. From the Ukrainian side, Dovzhenko was later seen as having tragically yielded to a pro-Moscow narrative of the so-called Civil War, in which the brave Bolsheviks are always in the right. The director’s position was more complex. He meditates on the constant eroticization of violence and the seductive and toxic sweetness of revenge. The film’s first episode shows the effects of World War I in Galicia and Ukraine, with Austrians and Germans (and not like now, Russians) playing the role of imperial occupiers. This part of Arsenal is famous for a gas attack scene, in which a soldier’s agony appears as a strange and uncanny form of pleasure. Today, Dovzhenko’s film reads like a prophecy of the violence in current Ukraine, which replays all the elements of older wars: starvation, sexual assault, meaningless battles, and the fear of chemical attacks.

VUFKU (Odesa)
Director, script: Oleksandr Dovzhenko
Cinematography: Danylo Demutskyi
Scenery: Volodymyr Miuller, Yosyp Shpinel

Link

https://2022.steirischerherbst.at/en/program/events/3577/oleksandr-dovzhenko