Arsenal

Alexander Dovzhenko's fiercely poetic account of the Ukrainian struggle during World War I and the subsequent civil war. A Ukrainian soldier survives the horrors of the front, returns home through a surreal train crash, and finds himself caught between competing forces — nationalists, Bolsheviks, and the eternal pull of the Ukrainian earth itself. Dovzhenko's style here reaches full maturity: the film abandons conventional narrative in favor of a torrent of extraordinary images — a one-legged soldier dancing, a worker standing defiantly before a firing squad, an entire arsenal of weapons seeming to come alive. The result is less a war film than a war poem, deeply rooted in Ukrainian identity and landscape. Controversial then and now, and utterly unlike anything else in cinema.