So. Farewell then Ken Russell, senescent enfant terrible of the British film industry. He will be missed; although I was never much of a fan of his film work, he himself was terrific value, a cheerfully vulgar antidote to the insufferable self-congratulatory politeness of the British film establishment.

While he was hardly cut off in his prime, it’s hard not to rue the timing of his demise. In March, the BFI finally releases the long-awaited DVD of The Devils; it’s a shame the old goat won’t be around to savour the reaction.

There’s no-one in British film history like Ken Russell. British films are supposed to be restrained and tasteful. Even when they get down and dirty, it’s usually for respectable, political reasons (to lay bare the miseries of the lower orders and so forth). Ken Russell stuck two fingers up at all that.

For many years, his films were regarded as something of an aberration in British film, an indication of how standards in British film had plummeted in the early 1970s – a sort-of cultural equivalent of the malaise that gripped Britain during Heath’s Britain.

The official line had it that, after the ‘swinging sixties’, British film collapsed twice in the 1970s – first symbolically, when Ken Russell and his ilk were calling the shots and then (at least partly in consequence) literally; about half way through the decade, the American studios pulled out of the UK, leaving British film in the hands of exploitation merchants who steered it into the gutter – until the clean-cut likes of Chariots Of Fire, with their crinolines and well-pressed blazers, made cinemas safe for ‘nice’ people again.

And yet, start watching the films made in this country during the 1970s and a different story emerges. Dig into British film of this decade and you’ll uncover any number of good, very good and authentically great films made during this supposedly stagnant period.

Don’t Look Now, Gumshoe and O Lucky Man! suggested new horizons for British film. The Wicker Man, Death Line and Sir Henry at Rawlinson End skewer British self-image. In this context, Russell looks not like an anomaly but part of an authentic movement.

Part of the reason this decade has been so traduced is that it has been hard to see the films. With the rise of DVD, however, many neglected titles are finally getting their due. The BFI have released Radio On, Winstanley and Bill Douglas’s Trilogy; their essential Flipside imprint has revived forgotten titles like Little Malcolm, Requiem for a Village and the remarkable Deep End.

There is more. Later this year sees the publication of Offbeat, edited by Julian Upton (of this parish). It looks at overlooked British films from the 1960s onward but it is the surveys of the 1970s that are most interesting, shining a spotlight on genuinely great (if somewhat sleazy) films like The Squeeze, Sitting Target and The Black Panther.

The revival of The Devils, then, comes at a time when the films of this reviled decade are finally getting something like the acclaim they deserve. They might not have made an impact on original release but British film of the 1970s looks, in hindsight, like a time of great experimentation and excitement. Something of a golden age, then – albeit a slightly shabby one.

Here’s a funny thing. Orthodox wisdom has it that DVD is on its uppers. We are told that ‘physical media’ (which is to say shiny silver discs, be they DVD or Blu-ray) will be replaced by internet streaming. DVD will collapse, the futurologists assure us, just as surely as compact discs.

The trouble with this thesis is that no one seems to have told the DVD labels. Rather than winding down their lists or becoming ever more timid, the smaller British DVD manufacturers have given us a year that shows the format in rude health.

Take Masters of Cinema. This year alone, they’ve given us some essential Fritz Lang (the criminally underrated Indian Epic films), early Antonioni, amazing Japanese films (get Harakiri now) and welcome contemporary fare (Colossal Youth). They’re also in the process of expanding their coverage of Hollywood films, starting with a definitive release of Touch of Evil.

And it’s not just MoC: the venerable BFI have been spoiling us rotten. Do you start with their Ozu releases? The first part of their Complete Humphrey Jennings? Their on-going Flipside series (including the long-awaited Deep End)? Švankmajer’s Alice or a collection of films about British folk traditions? Possibly most exciting is The Soviet Influence from Turksib to Night Mail, a scholarly-but-unpretentious exploration of cinematic inspiration that uses the DVD medium brilliantly.

Second Run have a much lower profile amongst DVD labels but are arguably the most important; no label works harder to nurture the obscure and the overlooked. For example: although well regarded in its native Hungary, Szindbád was all-but unknown internationally until Second Run released it this year, causing minds to blow and preconceptions to be reordered.

I don’t think it’s too much to say the UK DVD market is the most exciting in the world. We might not have any single label with the reach and resources of the American Criterion Collection (still the world-beaters of DVD production) but we’ve got a cluster of companies that punch far above their weight.

It’s not just ‘art film’ labels that are flourishing: few releases brought me as much pleasure this year as Cobra Woman and the Charlie Chan sets (all from Odeon). Shameless go from strength to strength (I especially recommend Don’t Torture a Duckling) while Japanese specialists Third Window released Confessions. And I haven’t mention crackerjack releases from Artificial Eye, Second Sight, Exposure Cinema, Arrow….

Of course, you might think this emphasis on ‘labels’ is misleading: what matters is the film, not who puts it out, right? But I think the strong identity these smaller labels have developed is important. Unlike the big boys, their releases are carefully curated. Experience shows we can trust their judgement so we’re more likely try things they put out, even if we’re otherwise unfamiliar with them. I’d say that’s why the UK market is so interesting right now.

There’s one thing missing from this round up – the viewer. If these labels are happy to supply, it’s because they know there is demand, that there is a loyal audience who care about interesting films and want to see them presented well. I would submit that, as long as that holds true, we shouldn’t be in such a hurry to bid au revoir to DVD.

It’s said that pub landlords hated the Quatermass TV serial back in the 1950s. When the BBC first broadcast his adventures in those pre-iPlayer days, hostelries would empty as drinkers hurried home to catch the latest instalment, leaving no-one for barmen to pull pints for.

Professor Bernard Quatermass was the first great icon of British television. The creation of writer Nigel Kneale (himself the first great British TV dramatist), Quatermass has influenced the entire science fiction genre, from Doctor Who to John Carpenter and beyond. Perhaps more importantly, he keeps finding fans in each successive generation: the first three film adaptations have just been re-released, and since they’re on DVD you can enjoy them in your own time – no need to hurry your drinking.

In Kneale’s world, Quatermass was the head of the ‘British Rocket Group’ (oh, for the days when spacecraft boasted a Union Jack on their nose cones!). His position led him to encounter the dregs of the universe: Starting with BBC series The Quatermass Experiment in 1953 and continuing in Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1959), the professor battled with extraterrestrial invasion and, perhaps even worse, intransigent civil service bureaucracy.

Intrigued by the character’s TV success, a small film studio called Hammer Films chanced their arm with a film adaptation of the first story (which they audaciously renamed The Quatermass Xperiment to emphasise its shocking content and capitalise on the decision of the then British Board of Film Censors to award it an X certificate). It was a huge hit in 1955, establishing Hammer as the serious film-biz players they would remain for the next two decades.

Hammer eventually filmed all three serials (Quatermass 2 came in 1957, while his adventures In the Pit had to wait until 1967) and it’s these versions which are most familiar to modern viewers. All three are stories of alien invasion, in which the (largely unseen) enemy first possesses and then transforms their earthling victims so they lose their fundamental humanity.

This being the 1950s there are subtexts galore. We can view the aliens as a manifestation of the existential threat of communism, although this is a very reductive interpretation. Nigel Kneale was a more acute writer than that: the main tension in the film is not between mankind and the aliens but between this planet’s inhabitants – Quatermass is appalled how his inventions are co-opted by the military, who plan to use them to slaughter their enemies.

As with all successes, Quatermass inspired imitations. Hammer’s own (tremendously entertaining) X: The Unknown was even set to feature Quatermass until Kneale – unhappy at the Studio’s use of American tough-guy actor Brian Donlevy in the role in The Quatermass Xperiment – protested. It didn’t dissuade him from letting Hammer make The Abominable Snowman, adapted from another of his teleplays. Maybe the best of the Kneale / Hammer films, it concerns the hunt for the yeti and the terrible consequences for those who find it.

This boom was short lived. Soon after, Hammer discovered tacky Gothic Horror and changed course: apart from one-off efforts like Quatermass and the Pit and The Damned, Hammer steered clear of science fiction.

This is a shame, because they were amongst the best films the company made: mature, sophisticated and still thought-provoking.

It’s often said that Hollywood produces too many sequels. Certainly, the studios seem incapable of getting through a month without itching to return to past glories.
This year, for instance, brought forth the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film. The first (and by some way best) in that series was released in 2003: that’s four films in eight years. But consider this: in the eleven years between 1931 and 1942, Fox studios produced no fewer than twenty-three Charlie Chan films. In sequels, as in so much else, modern Hollywood is but a pale shadow of its forebears.

Chan was by no means unique. Successful series of the 1930s and 40s included Boston Blackie, Sherlock Holmes, The Dead End Kids, Tarzan, Mr Moto, The Whistler and The Thin Man. And that’s just for starters: those years are filled with film series built out of multiple entries, cheap programme fillers for the most part, produced with a frequency that’s bewildering to today’s eyes.

Most of these series are little known today, which is a shame. Watching the Charlie Chan films, recently re-released in two splendid box sets, I was reminded how entertaining they were. True, this is production line cinema. But it’s a production line staffed by skilled artisans.

Indeed, since these series were often the studio’s bread-and butter (it’s said Fox studios wouldn’t have survived the thirties without Charlie Chan), they were usually entrusted to reliable craftsmen. The two directors behind most of Fox’s Chan films, H. Bruce Humberstone and Harry Lachman, handle things adroitly; each would be far better known if they hadn’t worked on ‘production line’ films like this. (See also Roy William Neill, who made Universal’s Sherlock Holmes films much better than they have any right to be.)

As I watched these films, I couldn’t help wondering about how they were perceived on first release. Were they ‘event’ pictures, with audiences queuing around the block for each new instalment? Or were they taken for granted, drawing audiences through familiarity and force of habit?

Such questions make us realise just how much the cinema going experience has changed – these films date from a time when people went to the pictures without knowing what was playing. It’s easy to mythologise that era as a ‘golden age’ based on the number of great films that were produced but audiences then were essentially indiscriminate: the reason that producers made sequels was the same then as it is now. A tried and tested format gives a brand recognition, adding a slight edge at the box-office – something that was even more important in an age of routine cinema going.

I nearly wrote that the old-style movie series died with television, when viewers could enjoy recurrent characters on a weekly basis. Then I realised it wasn’t true: the movie series is still with us, albeit looking very different.

The most obvious example is James Bond but there are others. The Fast and the Furious keeps throwing out follow-ups; the Saw series has become a Halloween staple and I’ve lost track of how many Final Destination films there have been (I’d guess about 208. Am I right, sir?)

Perhaps future generations will watch them as I watch films from long ago. I hope they enjoy them as much as I enjoy the honourable Chan.

Goodness. There’s a right old brouhaha blowing up over newspaper journalism. But it’s beyond the remit of this column to raise comment on such matters: we just natter on about movies. However, since journalism is a subject much beloved of filmmakers, what better way to spend this column than by looking at the lengthy relationship between the press and the picture business?

No matter what the rest of us think about them, the movies just love journalists. Forget All The President’s Men, the golden age of cinematic reporters was the 1930s, when Hollywood made being a news hound look like the best job in the world – short hours, plenty of excitement and an indefinite tab at your favourite bar. What a life! Oh boy, wouldn’t it be something to live like that?

True, there are downsides: a spot of light typing every now and again and the occasional argument with a bull-headed editor, but that aside, movie reporters had it sweet. Take Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, the coolest character ever to have a byline: tall, dashing, cynical-yet- romantic, he makes being a hack seem the sexiest profession on earth.

It’s hardly surprising that Hollywood eulogised the gentlemen of the press since Hollywood was infested with former journalists. After movies switched to sound, the studios discovered that journalists had a better ear for the terse rat-a-tat rhythms of movie dialogue than the playwrights they initially hired. The first (and arguably the best) was Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Mankiewicz’s best-known work was his script for Citizen Kane. It’s famously a portrait of nostalgia, loss and the isolation of power. But it’s also a film for journalists, saluting honest newsmen and sticking two fingers up at execs like Kane who rain on their parade. Stick to the typewriter, it tells us: ignore the politics, the opera houses and compulsive antique collecting – it’s much less fun.

One of the writers brought to Hollywood was Ben Hecht who, with his sometime writing partner and fellow hack Charles MacArthur, helped create the definitive newspaper film: His Girl Friday, taken from their play The Front Page. Howard Hawks claimed to have transformed the play by adding a romance but, in truth, the love affair was always there: it’s a valentine to newspaper life.

Of course, not everyone holds the press in such high esteem. We in Britain have always held a more jaundiced opinion of the fourth estate, even before the present commotion. This view is reflected by (ex-reporter) Billy Wilder in Ace in the Hole. Kirk Douglas plays the sleaziest pressman in history, an utter heel who manipulates an accident to improve his career. Such things might seem tame in this age of ‘blagging’ but the film remains corrosively cynical and thus most apposite, given recent events.
But things change. All the films above date from a time when newspapers were the only game in town. They’ve been eroded since, first by TV (as demonstrated in While The City Sleeps) and now the internet (the movie version of State of Play).

Who knows how long newspapers can last in this digital age? Well, here’s a prediction: they’ve got until the movies can give us a blogger (shudder) as cool as Clark Gable. The wait, I suspect, will be a long one.

Visit MovieMail’s Stop Press! Newspapers and Reporters in Cinema DVD Sale

Cast your mind back to the early days of DVD; no doubt you’ll remember the seductive blandishments of the electronics manufacturers tempting us with their product. They promised this new format would revolutionise film viewing, offering much improved A/V quality and contextualising extras.

True enough, those things are still much appreciated (even if we never quite find the time to listen to all those commentaries or watch every featurette… sorry). But in retrospect, I think the most significant benefit of DVD has been something few predicted: the way it’s broadened our understanding of movies.

Let’s not pretend VHS was a wasteland. There were many fine films available on tape (some of which have yet to show up on disc). But VHS concentrated on the ‘classics’; the economics of DVD allows for many more releases. Coupled with the parallel revolution in retailing – MovieMail offers you many thousands more titles than even the most comprehensive high street shop – this has massively expanded the number of movies that film fans can watch.

This column is preoccupied – unkind souls might even say obsessed – with the deficiencies of orthodox film history. The cinematic canon is, after all, derived from what was available. Now we can easily access so many more films, that canon must be revised, excluding some once-compulsory films and including former obscurities.

But let’s not be complacent. The DVD revolution is far from complete, as a couple of new releases show us. Take Deep End, for example. This is probably the most important title yet released by the BFI’s Flipside imprint (a label dedicated to excavating neglected films).


Although much acclaimed on first release, Deep End has been hard to see since then (which gave bragging rights to those of us who managed to see it). That it’s finally available, restored and lavishly appended with extras, is fantastic news, even if it does mean I can’t swank about having seen it any more.

Deep End, of course, is a British film. The problem becomes even more acute when you consider films made in languages other than English. That’s why we should be grateful to Second Run, the DVD label most committed to expanding our perceptions of cinema.

By happy coincidence, they’re also putting out an essential and much anticipated release this month: Szindbád. Not to be confused with the sailor from the Arabian Nights, this Hungarian classic is eulogised by those who’ve seen it.

A rapturous meditation on life and love (and one of the most ravishing colour films ever made), it’s been hailed as one of the great ‘lost’ masterpieces of world cinema. And because of Second Run, it might now finally penetrate the consciousness of international cineastes in the same way that one of their earlier releases, Marketa Lazarová, did.

So, thanks BFI, thanks Second Run. And thanks DVD. The past ten years or so have been a golden age for those of us who love movies and, as Deep End and Szindbád show, the good times ain’t over yet.

However, these releases should remind us just how incomplete our knowledge of cinema is and how many films are still unavailable. As you enjoy Szindbád and Deep End, consider how such films could go AWOL for so long. How many more masterpieces are there, mouldering in the vaults?

Let us know about your unavailable favourites in the comments below.

BTW There’s a BFI Flipside sale on at the moment.

Cecil B DeMille liked to boast that he made the very first movie in Hollywood: The Squaw Man, in 1914. It was his efforts, he modestly claimed, that established the film colony in Los Angeles.

Like so many stories, it’s baloney – DeMille followed an established trail to California – but there’s a spiritual truth to the idea DeMille founded Hollywood: the brash, bombastic Tinsel Town is just the sort of place that the brash, bombastic DeMille might have imagined.

Always more popular with audiences than with critics, DeMille enjoys little posthumous reputation. Generally he’s only cited as an example of the worst excesses of the film industry (brash, bombastic etc). So why are we talking about him here?

Specifically, it’s because the past few months have seen a trickle of his films appear on DVD. As a fan, I want to promote them. But more generally, I think DeMille has been a little hard done by. True, his early work has its admirers. While he might not have invented Hollywood, he was a pioneer in every sense. He should be rated alongside D.W. Griffith as one of the directors who established the great tradition of American film; moreover, his films of this period are much more watchable than Griffith’s antiques and are still praised for their beauty and restraint.

But while his films were well-received, DeMille wanted more. He wanted huge audiences. So he developed a formula – approximately N x Y = $ (where n = giddy melodrama, y = garish sensation and $ = ker-ching!) – that made him perhaps the most consistently successful filmmaker ever.

How can we embrace such a shameless figure? Surely DeMille is one of the most utterly cynical of filmmakers, a puffing Victorian hypocrite who smuggled his predilection for sin and scandal into the most unimpeachably respectable material (the Bible!).

I gravitated for DeMille first as a guilty pleasure, amused by his cheerfully brazen cynicism. But I’m not sure that’s fair. You see, cynicism suggests that he was making films he didn’t believe in or that he had contempt either for his material or, worse, his audience.

DeMille’s work is so consistent and so unforced, one starts to suspect that it is an authentic projection of his personality: that these films are honest expressions and that he really believed in what he was doing. Viewed this way, the films become not cynical but perversely innocent, the statements of a born entertainer.

Moreover, many of his pictures stand up very well, especially those films he made about American history – Union Pacific, North West Mounted Police and The Plainsman are first rate potboilers, beautifully composed and tremendously invigorating. Unconquered has some questionable moments (a native American tribe led by Big Chief Boris Karloff for example) but zips along with great brio. Reap The Wild Wind might be best of all, not just for its involving love triangle but the climax, where John Wayne battles a giant squid.

These are grand operas, which might not find favour with modern tastes that favour work in minor keys; they might even be laughed at (now who’s being cynical, eh?). But if you want big, bold escapism, then our Cecil remains the benchmark. He was not a great artist. But there’s never been a better showman.

View MovieMail’s Cecil B. DeMille films

Here’s a story, for your consideration. In 1945, in those final few months of war and the beginnings of the uncertain peacetime world, the British people were in the mood for a bit of escapism and romance.

That was the year of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, the most famous romance of all time, and Powell & Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going!, that most beguiling of love stories. But neither of them came even close to the success of that year’s big winner, which was seen (it is estimated) by some seventeen million paying customers.

That film was The Seventh Veil, starring James Mason and Ann Todd. According to the BFI’s Ultimate British Film poll (conducted in 2006) it was the tenth most successful film ever at the British box office and the third most successful indigenous production. And now? It’s largely forgotten.

I offer this by way of an illustration of how film history gives us only a partial, often distorted view of the past. It’s sobering to realise how things that were once so popular can simply slip from the collective memory.

Nowhere is this more poignant than in the case of ‘stars’. Of course, all stardom is perishable: most kids queueing at the multiplexes will no more be able to identify Tony Curtis than their grandchildren will recognise Will Smith. Yet there are some people who enjoyed successful careers who are obscure even amongst those who call themselves film buffs.

Take Jack Holt. Who? My point exactly. I’ll confess I was ignorant of him until watching a film he top-lined. Have I been missing out? Does the rest of the world revere his achievements and cherish his memory? Probably not: at the risk of attracting hate mail from the Jack Holt appreciation society, I’ll wager I am far from alone in my unfamiliarity.

Yet he was a big star back then: you don’t get your name above the title unless serious numbers of people are prepared to fork out good money to see you. He was, I discover, also the model for Dick Tracey. But what happened? Why has his fame simply … dissipated? How many more are there like him?
There’s something desperately sad about all this. Stars who were once immensely famous have faded away. All fame is ephemeral but there are still those of us aware of, say, James Cagney or Marlene Dietrich from the same vintage as Holt. Why do some still sparkle while others go into eclipse?

Perhaps it’s something to do with directors. John Wayne’s most famous films are those he made with John Ford and Howard Hawks; those films keep the legend alive. It’s instructive that Kim Novak – a box office queen in the 1950s – is popularly remembered almost exclusively for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, rather than the films she made with the less-regarded Richard Quine.

But this might be auteurist snobbery. Recently, MovieMail held a sale of films starring Miss Deanna Durbin. The sales chart was dominated by her films: this set me thinking about posterity. After all, she’s rarely mentioned in film histories.

Once upon a time, though, she was the highest-paid female film star in the world. Plainly, she is still remembered with affection. This suggests a definition: the mark of a true star is someone the fans refuse to forget.

Attentive MovieMail customers will have noticed that a number of films with a pastoral theme have made their appearance on DVD these past few months. Last month’s cover girl Tamara Drewe joins F.W. Murnau’s beautiful City Girl and Alexander Dovzhenko’s rapturous Soviet silent, Earth.

It’s hardly a trend but it’s enough to justify a further excursion into the countryside because there’s another side to rural films. Movies don’t always portray the countryside as a bucolic idyll; there are pictures that use those elysian fields as a backdrop for something altogether darker. It’s those that are our subject for today.

More specifically, it’s the domestic variety; British filmmakers seem to excel at pastoral horror films. Most famously, there’s The Wicker Man. Set on the remote Scottish isle of ‘Summerisle’, it’s a grand and disturbing union of the ancient and modern. What’s interesting is how it subverts the usual narrative of pastoral films.

Most rural movies revere tradition and present the countryside as a place of spiritual rebirth (the townie who’s lost their way in the metropolis re-connects with something more meaningful). Not on Summerisle though: there’s no sense in the old ways but they are followed blindly, whatever the cost.

At the other end of the country, Michael Reeves set Witchfinder General in the Suffolk countryside, filming at many of the actual locations where odious sadist Matthew Hopkins – whose life the film dramatises – plied his trade. The beauty of the scenery is a counterpoint to Hopkins’ barbarism. It’s not really a horror film at all: its use of landscape is closer to American westerns rather than British gothics.

The best of the crop, however, might be Blood on Satan’s Claw. Pay no heed to that sensationalist title. This is a remarkable, richly atmospheric work, constructed around a series of set pieces: a ploughman uncovers something ancient and evil; a man is terrorised by something and ends up hacking off his own hand; a children’s game develops into something more malicious. Director Piers Haggard makes brilliant use of his locations; it’s at once beautiful and unnerving. If they’d given it a better title, it would be as well regarded as The Wicker Man.

The British Pastoral Horror as been in eclipse for some years now but there are signs that something is budding. Christopher Smith’s recent film Black Death draws deeply but imaginatively on The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General (as well as Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God) to create the most effective British horror film since 28 Days Later. Set in medieval times, it tells of a band of warriors and an unwitting monk who journey into the wilds to find a village that has supposedly been spared the plague because of a pact they’ve made with the devil.

Although filmed in Germany, it’s a film well attuned to the savagery of the countryside and the dark things that crawl out once you lift up the rocks. It’s a film that every fan of British horror should support.

The countryside isn’t all rolling fields and rosy-cheeked yokels. There’s a darkness in the soil and things with a nasty bite. Let us cherish those films that remind us that escaping to the country isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

It’s always a treat when a DVD label takes a punt on a great-but-not-necessarily-well-known filmmaker. So, three cheers for the redoubtable Mr. Bongo, who have taken the trouble to release three films by the great Soviet-era director Aleksandr Dovzhenko; their new releases of Zvenigora and Arsenal join their earlier edition of Earth.

Although it’s not well represented on DVD, the early years of the Soviet film industry produced some of the greatest films ever made – and Dovzhenko was at the vanguard of this artistic ferment.

Watching these films again certainly confirmed my high opinion. But it brought more than that, revealing more troublesome aspects amongst the undoubted genius, aspects that can’t easily be overlooked. It’s these I want to focus on.
As with so many Soviet films, the problems are political. As talented as that generation of Soviet filmmakers were, they were essentially churning out propaganda. To modern eyes, this compromises much of their work

This isn’t just ideology; we’re so far from the events in question that the points being made can seem obscure. Dovzhenko’s cinema is much concerned with his native Ukraine; I’ll wager few modern, British viewers – even those with a working knowledge of Soviet history – will even half-way understand the complex interplay of history and symbolism in his films.
Better to concentrate on the remarkable poetry. Zvenigora is at once bewildering and beautiful. It’s a rapturous, ecstatic celebration of the director’s homeland that draws more on folklore than strict Soviet realism. You don’t need to understand the references (or at least, I didn’t) to be enthralled as the images and sequences flow into each other.

Arsenal is a more orthodox work – it tells the story of soldiers who returned from the great war, then participated in the revolution – but perhaps even more effective; it contains some of his greatest passages, evoking not just the horror of war but also the psychic fallout of the conflict on the home front – the loss, the emptiness, the rage…

But all too soon, this remarkable empathy dissipates; once the revolution begins, the film becomes a display of Bolshevik machismo, pitting the iron-willed workers against the effete reactionaries. It’s effectively done but lacks the humanity that makes the earlier sequences so startling.

Earth is the film which causes me most difficulty. It is a brilliant work, a marriage of the pastoral and the progressive, showing how a village is revolutionised by the arrival of a tractor that allows the peasantry to slough off the old restrictions and move towards a new dawn. Dovzhenko’s imagery is glorious and he creates indelible moments; there is a rare – and profound – harmony in the film.

And yet, it’s a film about what would later be seen as perhaps the Soviet era’s most appalling events: the farm collectivisation policy and the liquidisation of the kulaks (rich farmers). Something like two million people were killed and it led directly to a famine in which many more died (including five million in Dovzhenko’s beloved Ukraine).

Dovzhenko can hardly be blamed for this, of course, and – in mitigation – his film is less interested in ideology than in celebrating the people. It is possible to overlook that aspect. But should we? Would we be so forgiving if these films weren’t – cinematically at least – essential masterpieces?