+ LOST +
Downpour
1929, First Film Studio VUFKU (Odesa), 6 parts / 1,540 m
The film is about the peasant rebellion of the 18th century in Ukraine, led by Maksym Zalizniak and Ivan Honta. The history of the haidamak movement became a trigger for authors to have experiments in the field of film language: shooting against the background of black velvet, focus on the static character of the picture, the sculptural nature of composition mise-en-scène solutions, replacement of dramatic collisions with cinema engravings depicting the historical past.
The work on the film started on 26 September 1928 and finished on 30 March 1929.
Première: 18 April 1929 (Moscow); 13 June 1929 (Kyiv)
The film is lost.
- Kavaleridze shared his thoughts about his idea and its implementation,
“…Light and shadow are a powerful language… Light is the sculptor’s chisel. The nature of sculpture, love with the shape, strong, laconic, monumental, lead into sin, make you dispute with the tradition. I choose everything I need using the light, with such strength which I need.”
“… The plougher with the plough, bulls and the bull driver were filmed in the studio on a set of thirty meters to twenty. There is no real soil, the plough plows clumps made of wood, fixed to the wooden platform with the help of curtains. Why isn’t the soil real? The real soil falls apart and the way it wants, and not the way the director wants. The director wants the clumps to be large, to menacingly raise and fall, creating the required rhythm interchanging light and shadow. And yet, by its pattern and size, these clumps must be of such a character and proportion towards the bulls and the plougher so that there is an impression that it is the powerful Earth Mother, fantastic, and not photographic, inexpressive, compared to Kherson bulls with long pointed horns and the mighty back of Stepan Shkurat, the plougher. The background is the black velvet instead of the high sky and the water reflection.”
