Product Description

This avant-garde masterpiece from renowned Ukranian director Alexander Dovzhenko employs the most complex and elliptical montage style of any Soviet masters in this treatment of events from the Ukranian Civil War. Based on an actual incident from 1913, the story concerns a group of Bolsheviks who battle counter-revolutionary nationalist troops in Kiev, putting up an Alamo-like defense of their cause inside the city's "Arsenal" munitions plant. Outnumbered by the nationalist troops, the defenders demonstrate their revolutionary spirit in the climactic battle which displays a dazzling mixture of traditional Ukranian folklore with modernist film techniques for a dazzling collage!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #106617 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-02-11
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, Full Screen, Silent, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 73 minutes

Amazon.com
Alexander Dovzhenko's films are composed of astounding images and exciting dramatic moments, often in hard-to-follow narratives. Arsenal is no exception, a cinematically thrilling but narratively confusing story of a small band of factory workers who rise in rebellion and hole up in the Kiev munitions plant as nationalist troops surround the city. Based on a true story, the film explores conflicts in the Ukraine between the White Russians and the communist Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Worker Tymish (Semyon Svshenko) breaks with his fellow citizens to join the people's army and returns to face his countrymen in an impossible battle. A true document of the Soviet avant-garde at its most idiosyncratic, the film doesn't always make the finer points clear to the non-Soviet audience, but the stunning images and expressionist moments--as when Tymish miraculously survives point-blank fire from the enemy, symbolic of the enduring revolution in the face of sacrifice--give it a powerful cinematic life. Dovzhenko, considered by many critics to be the poet of Soviet cinema and a Ukrainian himself, invests the film with a sense of purpose and an astounding visual beauty. Kino's new edition, digitally mastered by David Shepard, presents the most complete version of this Soviet masterpiece ever seen. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Gorgeously Intriguing
I'm sure there's plenty of people who would normally pass on this movie, for two reasons:

1) It's silent.

2) It's Soviet propaganda.

See it anyway. Dovzhenko's visual style is bracing, showing an astounding range of black-and-white palettes, from dusty grays to hard-edged chiaroscuro effects. His editing is even more audacious than that of his countryman, Eisenstein; parallel narratives, extended atmospheric montages, long, tense scenes suddenly bursting into flash cuts of near-subliminal effect.

Yes, the narrative line is somewhat confusing, with juxtapositions of abstract battle scenes, flurries of political agitation, allgorical action, and stark, fable-like tableaux. But keeping in mind that Dovzhenko is trying to capture the transition of an entire country from war to chaos to corruption and back to war again actually can help wean the viewer off of the need for a linear story. Unlike a lot of standard movie fare, "Arsenal" actually makes more sense the more you think about it: the dream-like structure gives the movie a marvelous retrospective clarity.

And, yes, the movie is propaganda, but it is far less didactic than most other examples, not to mention leavened with instances of black humor that give the film a curiously independent, humanistic streak. (There was only one scene that made me wince in light of later Soviet history.) In the end, Dovzhenko seems less interested in winning converts to his cause than in simply giving the viewer a chance to experience what it's like to be in the middle of epochal change. It's also a movie that at times is positively giddy at the possibilities of the medium. A real breath of fresh air, even now.

Still tremendously powerful after 80 years
This film is remarkable and enjoyable. It's silent and from a different era, so some of the story elements are portrayed with a heavy hand, but the visuals remain powerful and unique. The director draws characters just from their faces, and powerful action simply from standing still. The plot is linear enough for this kind of art- if you like powerful artistic expression, you'll like this film.

Reputation supercedes total merit
Alexander Dovzhenko's silent war film about the 1918 struggle of Bolshevik workers at a Kiev munitions factory against White Russian troops, which he intermingles with Ukrainian myth. It's an intriguing relic of European filmmaking, clearly influenced by the virtuoso montage editing of Sergei Eisenstein, though it is dated and hampered by the feeling that it was commissioned as propaganda at the time. A multifarious moral examination of war none the less.