Dovzhenko - Zemlia, subtitles

[Natalia Pylypiuk]

Hello!
       My colleague, Dr. Bohdan Nebesio, who defended a PhD thesis
on the silent cinema of Dovzhenko within our Ukrainian Language &
Literature program at the U of Alberta, kindly offers the following comments
concerning Simon Krysl's query.  Bohdan's e-mail address is also cited below.
Cheers,
Natalia Pylypiuk

>>>  Quoted text below<<<<
The intertitles in silent cinema were never meant to be synchronized with
the speech of the characters. During the late silent era to which Zemlia
belongs there was a trend to avoid titles altogether (see for example
Murnau's Sunrise), or to use them only as dialogue titles and not as the
so-called explanatory titles that were used earlier.

I do not think Dovzhenko's titles were censored. There were both Ukrainian
and Russian versions of the titles. Selections appeared in print in 1930
and they are consistent with what we have commonly available. The quality
of the English translation is a totally different story.

The disparity between the image and text was intentional as was the
disparity of the images themselves. In the beginning of the film, for
example, no consistent space is being established. We simply do not know
where the characters are in relation to each other. This was not a
Hollywood movie after all. See, for example, Vance Kepley's article
*Dovzhenko and Montage: Issues of Style and Narration in the Silent Films,*
which was published in a special Dovzhenko issue of the *Journal of Ukrainian
Studies,* which I edited (vol. 19, no. 1, Summer 1994).

I have explored in detail the issue of intertitles in Dovzhenko's films in
"A Compromise with Literature? Making Sense of Intertitles in the Silent
Films of Alexander Dovzhenko" which appeared in the *Canadian Review of
Comparative Literature* (vol. 23, no. 3, September 1996) pp. 679-700.

Bohdan Nebesio
University of Alberta (bnebesio at ualberta.ca)
>>>  End of quoted text <<<<

>Dovzhenko's
>Zemlia (Earth),  [...]

>  that (this is a silent movie) never appears on the intertitles,
>not
>even as a 'summary,' so the viewer is left in wonderment what kind of
>conflict(s), what kind of crises are brought into the open.
>I only have the film with English subtitles - so, one question is if
>this
>is a 'translation censorship', how rich are the intertitles in Russian.
>But
>as this is a "transition-era" film (between silent and sound film too),
>this seems interesting - are there other analogies and more concretely
>(for
>my current purposes more importantly) has this been written about
>regarding
>Dovzhenko? What would one make of this kind of disconnection between
>image
>and text, and what would you make of it (viz. what is made of it for
>Zemlia?)
>I hope this is not entirely 'beside the point'...
>With many thanks,
>Simon Krysl

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