Zvenyhora
About Zvenyhora
An old man tells his grandson Timosh about treasure buried in the mountain Zvenyhora, and the film jumps across a thousand years of Ukrainian stories. The other grandson, Pavlo, takes money from reactionaries in a Paris theater for a staged suicide, then uses it for sabotage back home. On a duke's orders the grandfather tries to stop a Red train and fails. Timosh brings him over to the revolution. Pavlo kills himself.
Cast & crew
More about Zvenyhora
Alexander Dovzhenko directed at the Odesa studio of VUFKU. The project started in June 1927. Maik Johansen and Yuri Tiutiunnyk wrote a script that the studio disliked. Dovzhenko rewrote it, took their names off, and left them out of the credits. Boris Zavelev photographed the film. It was first shown on April 13, 1928. Dovzhenko later said he made it in a hundred days.
Themes
Background
VUFKU, which ran film production in Soviet Ukraine, backed the picture in 1927–28, as arguments over Ukrainian subjects and modernist form were getting sharper.
Making
Pavlo Nechesa, head of the Odesa VUFKU studio, remembered almost everyone in the room opposing the script until Dovzhenko said he would make it. VUFKU officials in Moscow are quoted as saying nobody could understand the finished film.
Reviews
Kino attacked the script in 1927 as bourgeois and nationalistic. After a Moscow screening Sergei Eisenstein wrote that Zvenigora leaps, and that he was delighted by its mix of the modern and the mythological, the humorous and the heroic. In the 2012 Sight and Sound directors' poll, Guy Maddin put it on his top ten.
Look
Boris Zavelev photographed the film, cutting folklore, the steppe, and factory images into the grandfather's treasure story.
Preservation
Prints survive, including copies used by archives and on home video. Internet Archive holds a version under the identifier Zwenigora.
Notes
- Mykola Nademsky plays the grandfather. Semen Svashenko plays Timosh. Aleksandr Podorozhny plays Pavlo.
- It is the first film of Dovzhenko's Ukraine trilogy, before Arsenal and Earth.
- It was the fourth film he directed, the first that drew wide press, and the last for which he was not the only writer.
- In 2021 the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centre ranked it 19th on its list of the 100 best films in Ukrainian cinema.
- Anthology Film Archives put it in the Essential Cinema collection in the early 1970s.
Awards
- Number 19 on the Dovzhenko Centre list of the 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema, 2021
Scenes
- The grandfather tells Timosh that treasure has lain in the mountain for a thousand years.
- Pavlo sells a fake suicide to a Paris audience and takes the receipts.
- The old man fails to wreck the Red train, which the film treats as a fire monster.
Also available
- Internet Archive (Zwenigora)
- Wikimedia Commons (Zvenigora (1928) by Alexander Dovzhenko.webm)
