Arsenal

It's confusing without knowledge of the cultural context, but at the same time, bypassing that exposition makes it all the more powerful when the context is understood.

# 968

Packs a serious punch in terms of dramatic weight & effective montage narrative. Its portrayal of tangled political & ethnic conflict is impressively severe. It does lack crucial context to present the uprisings coherently but that almost doesn't matter. Instead it focuses on shattered identity & senseless suffering of the masses, finding great power in its expression. Disinterest in clear historical narratives also allows it transcend its arguable propagandist aspects & hold on to its dignity.

The film feels like a series of often striking still images, but without spatial continuity or narrative to link them.

938

Dovzhenko's film about munition workers last stand against an invading Russian army at the end of WW1 is awash in beautiful images. One interesting technique was combining stillness with motion in the frame --having a character progress through a shot in which all of the other actors remain frozen, as if in a painting, or ending a shot full of motion with a frozen pose.

81.00

Difficult to follow (narratively, easy thematically), but visually rewarding.

Dovzhenko's grim telling of a Bolshevik uprising against against a bourgeois Ukranian nationalist movement, resulting in a bloody munitions factory strike. The camerawork and editing are phenomenal, and the film packs a lot of punch. However, much of it is confusing and I needed the audio commentary to clear up a lot of the context (the commentator also notes that Dovzhenko often preferred cryptic narrative styles). I liked it quite a bit more than Earth, though.

this film about the kiev arsenal factory uprising is rather hard to follow without a proper background in the events, but has a lot of great imagery, with unusual staging of actors for a silent. the soundtrack on my copy was ridiculous.

Arsenal estreava há 95 anos em Kiev. Não conheço muito do cinema ucraniano, mas certamente Dovzhenko é o maior cineasta dele, soviético fica apenas atrás de Tarkovski. Como ele era imenso, tudo feito por ele soa como obra-prima imediata, o cinema proletário definitivo. MKO.

I'm not a fan of the stylized way these films are made. The acting is too wooden, the choppy, fast-paced editing is annoying, and the story is impossible to comprehend. It might work for those with some knowledge of the events, or those who like the style, but not for me.

"'We are SMART cinephiles!'" http://illusionpodcast.blogspot.com/2015/12/episode-82-cinema-masters-vol-xi.html

Striking cinematography and editing, as one might expect. Difficult to follow without the historic facts and details of the events.

963

Can't follow the plot, though being Soviet propaganda I probably can tell what it all means. Here there's a horror for the violence of war. Usually soviet products are exultant about it. Grand photography, characteristic soviet editing.

#998