Oleksandr Dovschenko

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Memorial plaque on the house at Bismarckstrasse 69 in Berlin-Charlottenburg

Oleksandr Petrowytsch Dowschenko ( Ukrainian Олександр Петрович Довженко , scientific transliteration Oleksandr Petrovyč Dovženko ); Alexander Petrovich Dovzhenko ( Russian Александр Петрович Довженко ; born August 29 . Jul / 10. September  1894 greg. In Sosnytsia , Chernigov Governorate , Russian Empire ; † 25. November 1956 in Moscow ) was a Soviet director and writer of Ukrainian origin.

Life

Dowschenko came from a peasant family. His parents had fourteen children, but only two of them reached adulthood. After successfully completing a pedagogical college in Hluchiw in 1914 and briefly teaching at a high school in Zhitomir , Dowschenko enrolled at the Kiev University of Economics in 1917 , but the October Revolution and the civil war that followed prevented him from completing his studies. During the civil war, he fought alongside the Ukrainian national forces under the command of Symon Petlyura, who had both the Tsarist generals and the Red Army as their enemies. However, in 1919 he switched fronts in time to avoid possible persecution by the victorious Bolsheviks later .

From 1921 he worked in the diplomatic service, first in Poland, then in Germany, where he attended painting courses and discovered his fondness for the then new art of cinematography . After his return, Dowschenko approached the “left” wing of the “Ukrainian Renaissance” movement, whose stated goal was to build a society that had never been seen before. After working as a cartoonist, he moved from Kiev to Odessa in 1926 , where the first Ukrainian film studio was founded. In the same year he made his debut as a co-director with the silent film Vanya, the Reformer , which was then followed by the film Die Liebesfrucht .

Dowschenko made his breakthrough with the film Zvenigora in 1928, in which he carried the myth of the heroic past into the present and used the theme of an enchanted treasure as a metaphor for the secrets of nature. This leitmotif permeated the entire work of the director in the pre-war years and culminated in the film Arsenal in the declaration of the Bolshevik main hero for immortality, since the enemy bullets ricochet off him without harming him. Dowschenko used the last achievements of German Expressionism (especially those of Fritz Lang ) and Sergei Eisenstein's in the assembly process and refined it in his next film Die Erde (1930), which was to achieve enormous popularity in western countries.

After 1932, Dowschenko was exposed to ever greater reprisals from the official Soviet art authorities and had to contact Josef Stalin several times directly with the request to protect him against the attacks. On Stalin's orders, he moved to Moscow in 1933, where he shot his next successful film Aerograd (1935), in which he showed the whole tragedy of recent Soviet history (the highlight of the film is seen as the scene in which a Siberian hunter has to shoot his best friend because he helps the enemy divers ). Two years later he received the Stalin Prize for his film Shchors , which appeared in 1939 and whose main hero was the Ukrainian communist Nikolai Shchors .

Dowschenko's film narrative Burning Ukraine , which was supposed to show the horrors of the German occupation regime from 1942 to 1943 and whose completion was planned for the end of 1943, aroused strong displeasure from Stalin and political censorship, which led to its ban. His next project, a film about the famous Russian biologist Ivan Michurin , also met with great resistance in its original version and was only allowed to be shown in cinemas in 1949 after a thorough revision. This reworked version received the Stalin Prize in the same year.

At the same time as his career as a filmmaker, Dowschenko began to write books about his native Ukraine, which he saw as a contribution to the development of a national consciousness of the Ukrainian people. In his autobiographical novel The Enchanted River Desna (1942–1948) and in the stories Die Götterdämmerung and Das Junge Blut (both 1950–1951) he continued to destroy the traditional customs of the common people and the gradual decline of social cohesion apart in the country. This subject was rejected by the official censorship, so that his works could only appear after his death. They then served his wife Julija Solnzewa as the basis for her films The Tale of the Years of Fire and The Unforgotten , which appeared in the 1960s .

Since 1955 Dowschenko taught at the State University of Cinematography in Moscow. His early death prevented the emergence of new projects that he wanted to dedicate to the thaw period .

Along with Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dowschenko is considered to be one of the most important directors of early Soviet film. His merit consists in overcoming the revolutionary pathos and in creating a genuinely Ukrainian film art, whose leitmotif was always dedicated to the homeland. The Ukraine trilogy (Arsenal, Erde and Iwan) is regarded as the main work . As a special honor, the old film studios in Kiev were named after Dowschenko in 1957.

Filmography (selection)

Awards

literature

  • George O. Liber: Alexander Dovzhenko. A Life in Soviet Film. British Film Institute, London, 2002, ISBN 0-85170-927-3 (English)
  • Лариса Брюховецька; Сергій Тримбач: Довженко і кіно ХХ століття. Зб. статей. Ред. жарн. "Кіно-Театр", Вид-во Поліграфцентр "ТАТ", Київ 2004, ISBN 966-8012-33-X (ukr.)
  • Hans-Joachim Schlegel: Aleksandr Dovshenko in Berlin. A research. In: FilmGeschichte , ed. from the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation , Berlin 1996, no. 7/8, ISSN  1431-3502

Web links

Commons : Oleksandr Dowschenko  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Dowschenko, Oleksandr
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dowschenko, Olexandr Petrowytsch (full name); Довженко, Олександр Петрович (Ukrainian); Dovženko, Oleksandr Petrovyč
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ukrainian director and writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Sosnytsja , Chernigov Governorate , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH November 25, 1956
Place of death Moscow , Soviet Union