Arsenal (1929 film)


Arsenal is a Soviet war film by Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko. The film was shot at Odessa Film Factory of VUFKU with the camera of legendary cameraman Danyl Demutskyi and using the original sets made by Volodymyr Muller. The expressionist imagery, perfect camera work and original drama took the film far beyond the usual propaganda and made it one of the most important pieces of Ukrainian avant-garde cinema. The film was made in 1928 and released early in 1929. It is the second film in his "Ukraine Trilogy", the first being Zvenigora and the third being Earth.
The film concerns an episode in the Russian Civil War in 1918 in which the Kiev Arsenal January Uprising of workers aided the besieging Bolshevik army against the Ukrainian national Parliament Central Rada who held legal power in Ukraine at the time. Regarded by film scholar Vance Kepley, Jr. as "one of the few Soviet political films which seems even to cast doubt on the morality of violent retribution", Dovzhenko's eye for wartime absurdities anticipates later pacifist sentiments in films by Jean Renoir and Stanley Kubrick.

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