RetroClips

Earth regularly turns up on critics' all-time-greatest-films lists, which is a strange fate for something the Soviet state commissioned as straightforward collectivization propaganda. Dovzhenko instead delivered an almost pantheistic hymn to nature and rural life, so lyrical and ambiguous that Soviet authorities were reportedly unsettled by it and partly suppressed it at home even as it was celebrated abroad. Its rhythmic montage of extreme close-ups, a single apple, sunflowers, rippling wheat, became hugely influential on poetic and art cinema well beyond the Soviet Union.