Ivan

The great Ukrainian silent film director Aleksandr Dovzhenko made his first sound film Ivan two years after his masterpiece Earth (1930) was denounced as "counterrevolutionary" and "defeatist" by the Communist Party. Ivan (1932) is far more propagandistic than any of his previous films with all the good Communist characters portrayed as flat, smiling icons that seemed to have stepped straight off a political poster. The bad apples in the bunch are the only interesting characters, particularly Stepan Shkurat, the hero's father here as he was in Earth (1930), but with a much larger and more comic role. Another small but lively part is the wife of a foreman who would rather listen to foreign music on the radio than another live report from the tractor committee. Despite the restrictions, there are moments where the old Dovzhenko shines through, most notably during a beautifully photographed traveling shot over the Dnieper River and the two entrances of the grieving mother where shots are repeated again and again for emphasis. Coincidentally, Ivan (1932) was released during the height of the Holodomor, the Stalin-made famine that starved Ukrainians to death by the millions. One hopes that participating in this unleavened piece of political indoctrination allowed a few of them to survive.