Zvenyhora

Although it is Zemlya (The Earth, 1930) that sealed Dovzhenko's world fame as a "filmer of time", the first film of the Ukrainian trilogy, ZVENYHORA, which was completed in 1927, is a kind of aesthetic fuse, a time-image (Gilles Deleuze). Made at the Odesa Film Factory of the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU), the avant-gardist director's first attempt at a great religious and mythological work was immediately denounced as being "bourgeois-nationalist." But Eisenstein saw the lantern of Diogenes, and much later Tarkovsky raved about the film, a key work about Ukrainian history from the Varangians to the Bolsheviks, assembled complexly as an epic spanning centuries, and told in 12 episodes of national significance. Folklore and tradition. The grandfather's tale for his grandson is about the search for a legendary Scythian treasure. (bw)