Journal of Ukrainian Studies 19, no.

1 (Summer 1994)

Dovzhenko and Montage:

Issues of Style and Narration
in the Silent Films

Vance Kepley, Jr.

The Dovzhenko among Western critics holds

traditional consensus about
that he was Soviet cinema's premier lyric poet and that he based his films
on the pastoral motifs of his Ukrainian peasant heritage.^ This position
is amended, though hardly gainsaid, by recent studies that remind us of

the topical nature of his films and align Dovzhenko with modernist
aesthetics.^ One finds far less consistency, however, in the scholarly
treatment of Dovzhenko's film style. Concentrating on the feature films
of the late silent period, Zvenyhora (1928), Arsenal (1929), and Earth (1930),
Western scholars stress Dovzhenko's montage as the salient stylistic trait,
but they provide little firm ground for stylistic evaluation. Opinions on
his montage range from the claim that he developed a "language of
cinematic symbolism," to the notion that his editing preserved an almost
Bazinian respect for physical reality, to the claim that his editing is

"systematically and disturbingly uncertain.”^

1. See, for example, Ivor Montagu, "Dovzhenko: Poet of Life Eternal," Sight

and Sound 27, no. 1 (1957), 44-8; Marco Carynnyk, "Introduction: The Mythopoeic
Vision of Alexander Dovzhenko," in Alexander Dovzhenko, The Poet as Filmmaker:
Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Marco Carynnyk (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973),
ix-lv.

2. Vance Kepley, Jr., In the Service of the State: The Cinema of Alexander

Dovzhenko (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); P. Adams Sitney,

Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990), chap. 2.
3. Respectively, P. Adams Sitney, "Dovzhenko's Intellectual Montage," in The
Essential Cinema, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: NYU Press, 1975), 94; Gilberto
Perez, "All in the Foreground: A Study of Dovzhenko's Earth," Hudson Review 28,
no. 1 (1975), 68-86; and NoU Burch, "Film's Institutional Mode of Representation
30 Vance Kepley, Jr.

If there is a central theme to discussions of Dovzhenko's style, it

resides in observation that his —

montage seems to be to put the matter
crudely —hard to follow. The common remark about Dovzhenko's editing
is that it presents formidable challenges at the level of narrative
comprehension. One of his most sympathetic Western critics, for example,
voices a shared complaint-cum-accolade in claiming that the "demands
[Dovzhenko] makes on his viewers far exceed those made by any of his
contemporaries, excepting perhaps the French avant-garde of the 1920s."^
And this view is not held solely by Western viewers, who might be
suspected of lacking the cultural context necessary to follow allusions that
were evident to the original Soviet audience. Dovzhenko's immediate
contemporaries also apparently felt the challenge: witness Eisenstein's
first reaction to Zvenyhora, in which he professed to be at once exhilarated
and perplexed by the film's elliptical style.^ There is also reason to
believe that general Soviet audiences had difficulty following Dovzhen-
ko's disjunctive films, and Dovzhenko, in his own statements, remained
unapologetic on this point. He even took a measure of pride in the fact
that his work sometimes left audience members confused.^

and the Soviet Response," October, no. 11 (1979), 88.

4. P. Adams Dovzhenko," in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary,
Sitney, "Alexander
ed. Richard Roud, vol. 1 (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 279. The critical works
cited in n. 3 above allude, in one way or another, to the demanding nature of
Dovzhenko's montage.
5. Eisenstein recounts the evening in 1928 when Zvenyhora was to be seen and
discussed by film-industry professionals prior to general release. Eisenstein
professed to be at once mystified by the film's many disjunctions ("Goodness
gracious what a sight!" p. 142) and impressed by its bold challenge to conven-
tional film language ("The man before us [Dovzhenko] had created something
new," p. 143). However much Eisenstein might have embellished the account, his
proclamation that this film offered special challenges to spectators rings true.
C'The Birth of an Artist," Notes of a Film Director, ed. and trans. X. Danko [New
York: Dover, 1970], 140-5).
6. Dovzhenko, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. lu. la. Barabash et al.,
See, for example,
vol. 1(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966), 253-6; and idem, "My Method," trans. K. Santor,
Experimental Cinema, no. 5 (1934), 23. The question of the original public reception
of Dovzhenko's films deserves further historical investigation of the sort that
cannot be undertaken here. The research of Denise Youngblood {Movies for the
Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992], esp. chaps. 1-2), for one, has suggested that the montage
films of the 1920s may have met with considerable resistance from general
audiences in the USSR. Her argument is convincing, and I can offer no special
evidence to disconfirm it in Dovzhenko's case. The issue is complicated in certain
cases, however, by orchestrated critical attacks on certain Dovzhenko films; the
Dovzhenko and Montage 31

All this suggests a possible point of entry for discussing Dovzhenko's

montage, that being the issue of narrative comprehension. The matter
might best be framed as an analytical question: What problems of
narrative comprehension are posed by the montage style of Dovzhenko's
silent features? Conceived thus, the issue involves positing what a
spectator must do to assimilate the information provided in sequential
images. It entails a specific understanding of the expression "narrative

comprehension" as deriving from narrative theory, and it must be

understood as a term encompassing the cognitive work spectators
perform to make meaningful the raw visual (and sound) data presented
in films. According to Edward Branigan, for example, "narrative is a
perceptual activity that organizes data into a special pattern which
represents and explains experience,"^ and this premise suggests that
narrative comprehension in cinema involves a give-and-take between the
spectator and the film. As a theoretical problem, the issue is not whether
particular historical audiences were confused or clear about a film's
meaning or the extent which that can be confirmed empirically; it
to
entails, rather, the general cognitive work a spectator must perform to
organize a film's myriad bits of information into meaningful patterns.
Such students of film narrative as Branigan, David Bordwell, and
Noel Carroll have developed this issue. Their work on cognition and
cinema describes the common interpretive processes spectators activate
to make the experience of watching films fundamentally meaningful. It

accounts for the ways film spectators use familiar habits of sensory data
processing as they watch films, sifting through information presented in
rapid sequence on the screen and organizing it into coherent patterns.®
Such work offers an equivalent for film narrative of what E. H. Gombrich
has called the "beholder's share" in the graphic arts, which measures the
extent to which art works are rendered complete by the viewer's labor of

Stalinist press attacks on Earth provide the salient case in point (see Kepley, State,
75-6). All this is by way of noting that the historical reception of Dovzhenko's
films is a related but separable issue that warrants additional research.
7. Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992), 3.

8. See for example, Branigan, Comprehension-, idem, "The Spectator and Film
Space: Two Theories,"
Screen 22, no. 1 (1981), 55-78; David Bordwell, Narration in
the Fiction Film(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Noel Carroll,
Mystifying Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), esp. chaps. 4-5;
idem, "Toward a Theory of Film Editing," Millennium Film Journal, no. 3 (1979),
79-99.
32 Vance Kepley, Jr.

processing data, filling in gaps, and tracing logical relationships.^

A film does not, for example, dictate meaning to a spectator; rather
it "cues a spectator to execute a definable variety of operations."^® The
spectator typically organizes the data into a working schema he or she
has established from patterns elsewhere in the film or from other sources
and experiences outside the film. A schema is an "arrangement of
knowledge already possessed by a perceiver that is used to predict and
classify new sensory data,"” and in developing schemata the film
spectator may draw on other information in the particular movie, prior
experiences of film viewing, or knowledge of the extra-cinematic world.
As a film unfolds over time, the new data presented to spectators by
successive shots are reconciled with such schemata as the spectator may
have already formulated in previous scenes or shots. With particular
respect to film editing, new shots in an edited sequence are not read as
independent images. They are incorporated into proximate schemata
through induction, and, depending on how complex the editing pattern
might be, the spectator may have to "sift through la] package of
templates, searching for the best fit.'”^ The new information of success-

ive shots may cause the spectator to revise a working schema or to shift
to a new one. Occasionally a spectator must retrodict schemata: the
opening shots of a film might have no immediately discernable pattern,
but once story forms begin to emerge, those early images can be
retroactively applied to a developing schema.^®
The process and revising schemata seems to obtain for
of adopting
all cinema, althoughmight prove more or less complex depending on
it

the style of the film. For example, a common observation about the
continuity editing style of mainstream Hollywood cinema is that it
provides consistent spatial and temporal cues from shot to shot, and it
thus allows viewers a considerable inductive ease as they incorporate
successive shots into a schema about a coherent fictional world. Indeed,
Hollywood continuity filmmaking performs this so routinely that
spectators expect to formulate from the edited shots a perfectly stable
fictional terrain inhabited by the film's characters. This fictional land-
scape, or diegesis in the language of narrative theory, is supposed to

9. See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial

Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 179.
10. Bordwell, Narration, 29.
11. Branigan, Comprehension, 13.

12. Carroll, "Editing," 95.

13. Ibid., 93.
Dovzhenko and Montage 33

resemble the three-dimensional world with which spectators are familiar.

Continuity filmmaking, with its familiar devices such as matches-on-

action and matched character glances, works to preserve an illusion of

spatialand temporal consistency from shot to shot so as to place little or
no burden on the spectator to organize information. Noel Burch calls this
the "diegetic effect" and suggests that it supports a purely anthropocen-
tric version of reality that subordinates film space to the simple function
of providing a dramatic terrain for characters.
At the other extreme might be avant-garde films with highly elliptical
editing. They may not offer the cues necessary to reconcile successive
shots into a stable diegesis. The relationship between shots may prove so
open and uncertain that the spectator cannot reconstruct a consistent
space of action, and characters may or may not even be prevalent. In
such films the spectator may have to find other patterns outside the
familiar conventions of mimetic fictions. An avant-garde film might offer
—
only a repeated visual motif a certain shape or quality of light, for
—
example as the source of patterning. The spectator's labor may prove
the more difficult (and rewarding) for the effort involved in establishing
such a pattern after a possibly frustrating interval of trying to invoke
more familiar narrative conventions.^^
The finding that there are reasonably consistent tasks undertaken by
spectators, but that these tasks may be performed more or less easily
depending on the style of the film, takes us back to a consideration of
narrative comprehension in Dovzhenko. If it is the case that Dovzhenko's
— —
films are according to some intuitive measure demanding at the level
of narrative comprehension, perhaps the challenge resides in the
difficulty of forming schemata and incorporating information from new
shots into them. Either the degree of disjunction of Dovzhenko's montage
or the relative obscurity of the fictional world his films evoke might be
provisionally cited as sources of that challenge. The pursuit of this
concern would therefore involve discussing how particular passages from
his silent features illustrate the process of schema formation and modification.
Such an effort would be posited on the critical construct of an ideal

14. Noel Burch, To Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema,

the Distant Observer:
revised and ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley and Los Angeles; University of
California Press, 1979), 18-23; see also ibid.. Life to These Shadows, ed. and trans.
Ben Brewster (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990),
esp. 151-5, 244-63. On continuity editing and its conventions, see Bordwell,
Narration, chap. 9; and David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson,
Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

15. Carroll, "Editing," 88.

34 Vance Kepley, Jr.

spectator.^^ This heuristic device does not describe an actual historical

subject, neither an American academic watching Dovzhenko's films in an
archive nor a Ukrainian peasant watching the films in the village theatre.
A minimal level of familiarity with the cinematic conventions of the 1920s
as well as a knowledge of Ukrainian and Soviet history would, however,
represent the basic level of narrative competence of such a theoretical
viewer, and those qualities could well be shared by both the academic
and the villager.^^ The spectator must take up the challenge of Dovzhen-
ko's montage style by applying previous experiences of film-going and
by appealing to his or her knowledge of Ukrainian /Soviet history, which
is by the films' referentiality.
activated
The process is best explored by appeal to particular sequences in
Zvenyhora, Arsenal, and Earth, the films most frequently invoked in
discussions of Dovzhenko's allegedly opaque style. As a working
hypothesis, 1 submit that Dovzhenko's montage frustrates tendencies on
the part of the spectator to appeal consistently to a simple set of narrative
schemata in the manner of continuity cinema's diegetic effect. Dovzhenko

frequently violates narrative conventions that would normally create a

stable topography of character action, and he calls on viewers to
formulate a variety of alternative schemata. In that variety may reside
both the difficulty and the aesthetic richness of Dovzhenko's work.
* * *

Consider something seemingly as simple as the opening of Earth.

Duly famous for its lyricism, the first shot series forestalls any inclination
on the spectator's part to establish a coherent fictional world. The
opening four shots show grain fields, but they offer no temporal or
spatial cues to indicate whether this is one field in a given setting or
several separate locations. No character action motivates the images.

16. On this construct and its application to fi lm theory, see Judith Mayne,
Cinema and Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), esp. chaps.
3-5.

17. The point may not warrant extended digression, given the heuristic quality
of the ideal-spectator concept, but there is no necessary reason to assume that
actual historical spectators in Soviet Ukraine were particularly ignorant of
cinematic conventions by the late 1920s. International cinema was prominent in
the entire Soviet market in the 1920s. Ukrainian villages were not excluded from
this market, and they had better film distribution and exhibition services than
their counterparts in theRSFSR. See A. Katsigras, Kino-rabota v derevni (Moscow:
Kinopechat, 1926), 18-19, 37; and E. Lemberg, Kinopromyshlennost SSSR (Moscow:
Teakinopechat, 1930), 128, 149-50.
Dovzhenko and Montage 35

Indeed, the first representation of a character is the film's fifth shot, in

which a woman's head and a sunflower are framed against the sky. Any
temptation one might have to reconcile the prior four shots as the visual
perspective of the woman in shot five would be spoiled by an inconsist-
ent spatial cue: the horizon line changes for each shot. The only
continuity of the first four images is the rhythm of the grain swaying in
the breeze and the shifting graphic pattern of light and dark within the
frame. The only patterned variation among shots is the horizon line,
which rises with each successive image.
Dovzhenko has designed the passage to frustrate the schema
formation that might be most tempting for viewers steeped in conven-
tional continuity cinema —
that the opening shots are presented so as to
establish a story setting, that the shots provide the location for some
narrative action. Nothing will transpire in the space established in these
four shots. Instead the viewer is left to develop a pattern only from the
graphics of the shots. The quality of the mise-en-scene is the dominant
pattern, not an emerging story world. The diegetic effect, in which a
recognizable dramatic terrain is created for the benefit of character action,
is negated in this passage.
This resistance to the possible formation of schemata from conven-
tional story films characterizes much of the rest of the film's opening
sequence. There follows a series of shots of apples on trees. Tight
framings focus attention on individual apples or branches and offer little

spatial context.The shot series concludes with a medium shot of an

— —
elderly man old Semen, we will eventually learn lying in a setting that
certainly appears to be an orchard. The first sense of narrative trajectory
emerges when Semen exchanges remarks with another character, Petro,
and shortly one can infer that this is a death watch. The delay of this
narrative information is planned. Dovzhenko makes us attend first to the
physical characteristics of the fruit in those long-held shots. Although
Semen's death will prove to be set in the orchard (as subsequent shots
will confirm), and although a grain field may be nearby (as some
cutaways might suggest), the nature shots are there not so much to create
a setting for the scene as to sustain attention on graphics. Indeed, the
strongest association comes in the graphic match between the apples and
the figure of Semen (figs. 1, 2).

This sequence provides an example of a retroactive formation of a

logical explanation by appeal to a narrative schema; the spectator can,
after considerable delay, establish that a death watch is taking place in a
pastoral setting. But by retarding Dovzhenko
that schematic formation,
brings out other relationships that are not subordinated to the demands
of story-telling. For example, the graphic match between the apples and
36 Vance Kepley, Jr.

Semen suggest an association between humankind and nature that will

be developed elsewhere in the film and is contrary to the anthropocentric
strategies that dominate conventional continuity cinema.
Earth thus gives spectators the opportunity to create logical relation-
ships along lines other than those assigned to traditional diegetic
narrative. Continuity cues, for example, will be obscured or displaced,
leaving the spectator the opportunity to develop alternative schemata.
The scene of an argument between Opanas and his son Vasyl provides
a telling example. The scene is staged in such a way that the backs of the
characters figure most prominently in the shots as Dovzhenko cuts
between the two (figs. 3, 4). He does not cut with conventional eye-line
matches that would establish the location of each character and present
their facial expressions as part of the narrative information.
There is some uncertainty about where Opanas and Vasyl are
standing, whether they have their backs to one another or are perhaps
sideby side, and this ambiguous staging violates the diegetic effect. The
dominant feature of the scene, however, is the graphic similarity of the
two backs. This is something that a spectator is free to recognize and to
apply to information ascertained elsewhere in the film about these
characters and their class identity—that they have more in common than
they appreciate at this point. That commonality is suggested in this
graphic match, and the link can be applied to other schemata working in
the film about the need for class unity. Dovzhenko's editing obscures the
spatial relationship between the two figures but presents a potential
association deriving from a graphic similarity.
Another graphic match plays off this same schema. When the tractor
is scheduled to arrive in the village, Dovzhenko shows three oxen framed
against the sky. They are then transformed in a Melies-like jump cut into
three kulaks. Similar framing from below against the sky solidifies the
matching effect (figs. 5, 6). The association between the oxen and kulaks
is suggested graphically. The viewer must complete it, however, by

applying it to other patterns in the film concerning the idea of prog-

ress —that political and technological change
will render both the oxen
and the kulaks, in some sense, obsolete.
These examples of schemata development based on graphic editing
rather than narrative economy might initially seem peculiar to Earth.
Dovzhenko's strategy throughout that film is to retard narrative progress
and to challenge the spectator to explore other patterns, to form other
schemata, as it were. Graphic editing as a part of schemata formation can
figure in busier narratives as well, however, as indicated in Zvenyhora. In
an extended montage sequence Dovzhenko depicts the effects of
Ukraine's entry into World War I. Much of the depiction, however, is
Dovzhenko and Montage 37

distended and rendered oblique by the relative absence of continuity

clues. The sequence begins with many seemingly random shots of typical
village life, including shots of livestock, fields, wheat harvests, domestic

activities, and the like. The sequence does not provide a specific diegetic
setting; the images could perhaps be taken to represent a single village
or a composite. The schema might organize out of these
that a spectator
images might be something like "village life and the land's richness."
An intertitle marks a break in the sequence: "You see, they would
have lived and grown as corn in the fields, if only...." There follows a
series of shots of a bell ringing and peasants from a variety of indetermi-
nate locations apparently responding to it. They seem to abandon field
work and domestic chores to gather in reaction to the bell. Eventually
men gather and march off. The viewer gradually discerns the direction
of the larger sequence: that war has broken out and it disrupts village
life. Dovzhenko ultimately provides a graphic match that confirms this

reading. He shows an open field with haystacks scattered about, and he

then dissolves to stacks of rifles in the field. The framing of the field and
the distribution of the guns form a precise graphic match (figs. 7, 8).
These final images cannot be motivated realistically, since guns
would not be thus stored in an open field. The dissolve can best be
treated as a trope about peaceful rural life giving way to war, a reading
that might derive from the earlier trope in the intertitle. The dissolve
summarizes and confirms retroactively the fact that the sequence
addresses the effect of war on village life. Dovzhenko has organized the
sequence to retain some initial ambiguity about a possible dominant
schema and then to confirm a retroactive reading with a trope. The
engagement of the spectator is to develop a hypothesis as the sequence
unfolds and then to retrodict the final trope to it.

When Dovzhenko develops such open montage sequences, he does

not always provide a rhetorical capstone like this final dissolve. In many
montage passages the spectator is left to work out a set of associations
intrinsically present in the montage without the benefit of a summary
statement. An extended montage sequence in the latter half of Zvenyhora,
for example, shows the rebuilding of Ukraine under Soviet power. The
sequence begins with miscellaneous images depicting an industrial
—
infrastructure shots of factory exteriors, scaffolding, and the like. Images
of mining, rail service, and the operation of blast furnaces follow. Soon
finished machines are shown, including agricultural technology, and
these images lead to shots depicting agricultural labor and harvests.
Dovzhenko finally moves to groups of marching peasants, workers, and
young people, including several shots that stress the apparent robust
health of the marchers. As this pattern emerges, an association with
38 Vance Kepley, Jr.

industry is kept alive by shots of manufacturing that are peppered

throughout the sequence, including its final moments.

The diegetic location of these images remains indeterminate. No
specifically recognizable terrain from the film's prior story is invoked, nor
do the story's established characters make appearances. The montage thus
abandons diegetic orientation and moves to a more abstract, essayistic
presentation of the relationship between industrialization and social well-
being. The spectator cannot appeal to the familiar diegesis for a working
schema, and he or she must find a more rhetorical logic in the sequence.
The image patterns of the sequence present such a logic: industrialization
increases agricultural production, and the enhanced harvests yield a
healthier population. That logical pattern is present implicitly in the
montage design, but it assumes a measure of rigor on the viewer's part
to draw it out.^®
Nowhere in Dovzhenko's work is this sort of associational montage
more rigorous than in Arsenal. A case in point occurs early in the film in
a passage that shows the consequence of Ukraine's participation in World
War I. The sequence warrants a full shot breakdown:
(1) (Intertitle) "And the mother had no sons." (2) Woman sows grain in

field. (3) Disabled, uniformed man in hut. (4) Woman sowing in field. (5)
Tsar at writing table. (6) Woman sowing in field. (7) (Reverse angle)
Woman in field staggers and falls. (8) Tsar at writing table. (9) Worker
in munitions factory. (10) Tsar begins to write. (11) (Reverse angle) Tsar
writing in diary. (12) (Insert) "Today I shot a crow." (13) Woman lying
in field. (14) Tsar pauses and writes again. (15) (Insert) "Today I shot a
crow. Splendid weather. Nikky." (16) Tsar puts down pen. (17) Woman
lying in field. (18) (Dissolve) Soldier in grain field. (Fade out).

Once again the editing does not invite the spectator to posit a diegetic
connection among the different figures. One cannot establish the relative
locations of the individuals depicted in the sequence. The spectator is

thus develop a logical connection outside of immediate story time

left to

and space. The fact that there is little forward trajectory of narrative
information would support the strategy of looking for a logical rather
than narrative pattern. Indeed, there is little movement in the shots, and
the only narrative progress concerns the fact that the woman eventually

18. This scene and the ones described in the next several pages resemble the
celebrated practice of "intellectual montage" developed by Eisenstein in October.
Variants on this rigorous, openly rhetorical convention of montage may be found
in passages of other Soviet filmmakers in the late 1920s (e.g., Pudovkin's End of
St. Petersburg). On its application to problems of narrative theory and film, see
Bordwell, Narration, chap. 11.
 Dovzhenko and Montage 39

falls and that the tsar eventually makes a journal entry.

What the sequence does instead of pushing the narrative forward is

present several figures as being, in some sense, simultaneously present,

as though deployed across the surface of a tapestry painting. The
spectator must deal with the lateral associations of such a deployment,
not the forward trajectory of the sequence. This is suggested by the
rhythm with which Dovzhenko returns to certain figures (woman: shots
'

2, 4, 6, 7, 13, 17; tsar: shots 8, 10, 11, 14, 16). At the very least, such
repetition encourages the spectator to posit a link between the tsar's

I
actions and those of the woman, and one may draw out of that associ-
ation a conclusion about the monarchy's indifference to the plight of the
peasantry ("Today I shot a crow").
The sequence has other images that the spectator must incorporate
I
into a developing schema about autocratic power and its effect on
peasants. Why is the disabled war veteran present (shot 3), and what
I

does one make of the shot of a munitions factory worker (shot 9)? The
I
schema might be expanded in light of logical relations deriving from
i
these images. The intertitle about the mother not having sons may offer
ironic commentary on the disabled man: a husband or son has been
! rendered inanimate, as it were, by war wounds. The mother, in turn, is
I
left to sow the field. The munitions worker's image might encourage one

to broaden the schema even more. The worker produces the materials of
I

war that rendered the war veteran an invalid.

Finally, a spectator must appeal to an extended intellectual map
about class and power relations to work out all the associations of the
sequence: the worker produces the munitions of war under the authority
of the tsar; those munitions have left the war veteran disabled and unable
[
to work the fields; the woman, in turn, must do this work, and she
suffers under that burden. A schema deriving from the spectator's
knowledge of class relations and Russo-Ukrainian history would make
this reading possible. Whether one stops short with a more local reading
of the scene as displaying the tsar's petty indifference or traces out these
more elaborate allusions, meaning accumulates in proportion to the
spectator's intellectual labor of following logical paths and developing
patterns.
The subsequent sequence in Arsenal assumes a similar level of
interpretive activity on the viewer's part. The sequence begins with shots
showing artillery shells being manufactured. It then moves to a barren
field where a one-armed man in a tattered military uniform leads a horse.
Shots at that location are crosscut with the interior of a peasant hut where
a tired, dispirited woman is implored by two children. At one point the
man lifts a single, meagre stalk, which confirms for the spectator how
40 Vance Kepley, Jr.

depleted this field actually is. Dovzhenko then cuts to a shot of one of the

children crying to the woman. The scene climaxes when the man turns
in frustration and begins beating his horse, and the woman is seen
repeatedly striking the children. Dovzhenko cuts back and forth for
several seconds on this parallel action. When the beating stops, the man
falls exhausted in the and Dovzhenko cuts from that image to one
field,

of the children crying from the abuse. Dovzhenko then returns to the
field and ends the sequence with the horse speaking to the man, telling
him that he was "wasting blows on me."
The anthropomorphic gesture of the talking horse may be the most
memorable ingredient of this scene for many viewers, but the beholder's
share throughout much of the sequence involves finding a way to
reconcile the two strains of the crosscutting. The spectator must posit a
relationship between those two sets of events. Dovzhenko's pattern of
crosscutting on the repeated rhythm of the blows being struck cues the
spectator to associate the two sets of violent actions. Common coding of
cinematic crosscutting might suggest that the two episodes are happening
in the same story-time, and there is nothing in the sequence to gainsay
such an assumption. Nevertheless, there are no temporal clues on the
order of a D. W. Griffith last-minute rescue to confirm a story-time
simultaneity. Nor does the narrative provide any information that would
confirm a particular link between the man and woman depicted in the
two editing chains; they are not specifically introduced as spouses, for
example.
The spectator is thus left to locate a common ingredient from the
material in the parallel passages. In this case it would be food, a link that
suggests a causal connection between the sequence's two strains: the
failure of the land to produce food, as revealed in the section in the field,

results in domestic hunger, as manifested in the images of the woman

and children. The spectator may be able to apply this retroactively to the
shots of the munitions being manufactured and to the fact that the man
is an amputee. This can induce the spectator war with domestic
to link
violence: war's damage to the land (and to men who would normally till
it) produces hunger, which leads to domestic violence. The spectator may

or may not then work out more subtle relationships within the sequence;
for example, certain framings of the old man's face and those of the
children equate the two and possibly suggest that both are victims. In any
event, the beholder's share is enlarged by the absence of conventional
cues about the diegetic situation of these two strains, but so might the
viewer's intellectual reward be enlarged in working out the sequence's
possible puzzles.
Even episodes that involve a stable diegesis can include strategic
Dovzhenko and Montage 41

ambiguities. In a sequence early in Earth, old Petro visits the grave of his
dead friend Semen while Opanas plows his fields:

(1) Petro at graveside. (2) Four children hiding behind another grave.
They gaze and one calls out. (3) Petro at graveside. Leans down
off right
toward grave. (4) (Match on action) Petro puts ear to grave and speaks.
(5) (Dialogue title) "Where are you. Semen?" (6) Petro with ear to grave.

(7) Children hiding behind grave call out and laugh. (8) Semen over

grave. (9) Children call out. (10) Petro glances back left and speaks. (11)
Opanas's oxen pulling plow. (12) Petro at graveside. (Fade out).

In this instance the conventional continuity cues are present to permit a

spectator to establish a reliable terrain of activity. The glances of the
children off right (shots 2, 7, 9) are consistent with the return glance of
Petro when he responds to their teasing by glancing back left (shot 10).
This confirms the locations of these characters. Also the matches on action
(shots 3, 4) and sound (Petro's response to the children's noise: shots 2,
3 and 9, 10) provide exact continuity of time. This sequence is thus "tied
together" much more securely than others discussed in this study.
Within this diegetically secure passage Dovzhenko nevertheless plays
on a spatial uncertainty. Where is the plowing taking place (shot 11)? Is

it near the cemetery? That uncertainty offers an opportunity for variant

readings. Petro apparently thinks he hears something from the grave, as
though Semen can indeed answer from the dead ("Where are you.
Semen?"). He then notices the impish children and suspects that he may
have heard them, and the spatial cues certainly confirm that he would
have heard their teasing calls. Dovzhenko leaves open, however, the
possibility that Petro heard —
or even perhaps felt through a gentle
—
vibration the oxen plowing and that he took this as a response from the
grave. Wherever the plowing might actually happen in space, one is cued
to understand that it takes place during this encounter. Petro's immediate
sensory response to the land, its sound and even its feel, is given
dramatic form in this reading of the scene.
A revised schema based on such a reading permits the spectator to
pursue other potential associations. The sound of the plowing might
metaphorically provide Semen's response to Petro's all-too-literal
question. Semen might, in some sense, be a part of the earth Opanas tills.
Or Semen might seem to be, in some way, reincarnated in the children
who play nearby, since they represent a subsequent generation. Themes
about death and replenishment have been well established by this point
in the film, and the spectator could well draw on them for a schema that
produces some of these conclusions.
Dovzhenko does not always use sequence-length patterns to
challenge viewers. He often employs very local montage devices that
42 Vance Kepley, Jr.

contain disjunctions or violations of spectator expectation. In some cases

he plays off the conventions of continuity editing to cue particular
responses.
An example provided by a false match-on-action in
of this is

Zvenyhora. At the end of a montage sequence depicting the industrializ-

ation of Ukraine, Dovzhenko shows coal carts being pushed along rails
in a mine shaft. The carts move from screen right to screen left, presum-
ably toward the mine's entrance. Dovzhenko then cuts to a hillside and
shows the Grandfather backing out of a hole. Grandfather's right-to-left
movement as he exits the opening picks up the movement of the carts,
and the hole from which he emerges displaces a mine-shaft entrance in
the continuity pattern of the two shots. The false match seems to be
designed to develop an irony —that Grandfather has extracted a meagre,
rusty sword instead of riches. The viewer's momentary dislocation
resulting from the false match gives way to a recognition of the irony and
to a possible comparison of the land's true wealth (natural resources such
as the coal) to its alleged wealth (mythical treasures). This ironic joke and

its larger implications derive from the tropic quality of the false match.

A similarly tropic gesture is to be found in Arsenal, and it also

involves disjunctive montage. As fighting continues in the streets of Kyiv,
a Rada official threatens to execute a captured Bolshevik. In a test of
wills, however, the Rada supporter cannot pull the trigger, and he
surrenders the gun to the Bolshevik. With little hesitation, the Bolshevik
points the pistol at his adversary and fires. At the instant that he pulls
the trigger, however, Dovzhenko cuts away to a stack of spent, smoking
artillery casings in an unspecified location of the running battle.Then he
cuts back to the prior location to show the Rada official lying dead at the
Bolshevik's feet, the smoking pistol still in the latter's hand (figs. 9, 10,
11 ).
Dovzhenko does not show what one might normally think of as the
most important moment of the confrontation, the shooting itself. He
violates a cardinal rule of continuity editing by cutting away from an
action at its dramatic climax. But in doing so, he encourages the spectator
to trace a new association. The spectator must reconcile the image of the
artillery shells with the execution scene that brackets it. A tropic
association comparing a single part (one and a larger whole
pistol shot)
(an entire artillery barrage) provides the connection. The synecdochic
cutaway breaks the narrative continuity of the execution scene, but it
might encourage the spectator to link this single execution to the larger
consequences of warfare.
An even more disruptive editing tactic in Earth plays on viewer
expectation. This occurs at the end of the scene depicting Semen's death.
Dovzhenko and Montage 43

Semen lightly folds his hands over his breast and lies back, and Dov-
zhenko shows several reaction shots of family members that suggest their
acceptance of his death. Dovzhenko concludes the scene with a medium
close-up of Semen lying on the ground. After a partial fade, Dovzhenko
cuts abruptly to shots of women wailing wildly in apparent grief. The
transition is not accompanied by information (a narrative intertitle, for
example) that would reorient the spectator. The background has changed
to an interior, but the tight framing of the shots makes the animated
behavior of the characters, rather than the setting, the salient ingredient
of the images. One is momentarily unsure who these people are (since
they have not been introduced previously) and where the new action is

taking place.
In the absence of other continuity cues, one is at least momentarily
apply these images to a schema from the opening scene of Semen's
left to

death. The recency effect of the death scene provides the only explanation
of the characters' behavior, and one's first hypothesis is likely to be that
they must be lamenting Semen's death. One is thus likely to absorb these
shots into a schema about death and mourning. Dovzhenko has withheld
information, however, and he soon reveals that the figures are kulaks
(something some viewers might have picked up from clues such as
clothing) who are bewailing their imminent loss of power. One's
momentary uncertainty and possible false hypothesis reveal how viewer
expectation can be exploited narratively, and they make one aware of the
process of schema formation and revision in narrative comprehension.
Indeed, those many occasions when Dovzhenko's montage style
disrupts viewing conventions and challenges spectators to work out
secondary patterns of meaning point to the larger consequence of the
alleged difficulties posed by The issue is not so much that there
his style.
are special, preferred readings some spectators are acute enough
and that
to discern them while others are not. The issue is more that Dovzhenko's
elliptical style provides more room for spectators to develop myriad
readings than might be the case in conventional continuity filmmaking.
The beholder's share, which is restricted (though certainly not eliminated)
by continuity cinema's predictable practices, is enlarged and made
manifest in Dovzhenko. The brief inventory of scenes and devices
presented in this essay suggests some of the ways that Dovzhenko's
montage implicates the viewer in the art work by calling on him or her
to make and remake meanings that are only implicit in the text. The
variety of schemata invoked in the scenes studied from large-scale—
socio-political patterns to specific tropes —confirms the richness of
Dovzhenko's aesthetic project.
44 Vance Kepley, Jr.

Since this account is necessarily incomplete, one might rightfully ask

what other types of schemata could come into play in Dovzhenko's films.
One could well imagine viewers who were steeped in the national and
peasant cultures of Dovzhenko's background drawing from such forms
as folklore or peasant art in forming schemata. Or a consideration of
Dovzhenko's early sound films (e.g., Ivan [1932]) might show how certain
associations are developed through sound-image counterpoint. And one
might note how the later films, produced under the pressures of "high
Stalinism" and the dictates of socialist realism (e.g., Michurin 11949]),
revert to a more conventional continuity style that might restrict the
viewer's interpretive possibilities. Indeed, one way to discuss the effect
of socialist realism on Soviet film style would be to ascertain whether the
style offered only a very narrow set of schemata to spectators, thus
limiting the spectator's response.
Any or all from an appreci-
of these concerns could derive logically
ation of the extent towhich Dovzhenko's montage makes one aware of
narrative processes. Unlike such colleagues as Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and
Eisenstein, Dovzhenko did not develop a sustained theoretical account of
his montage style. The style itself, however, is not without considerable
theoretical interest.