Zvenigora (Musical Soundtrack)

Dovzhenko’s most audacious film combines ancient folklore with modern events in ranging over many centuries of Ukrainian history with a political aim of obliquely linking modern revolutionary Ukraine with its distant past. For Dovzhenko the fresco-like narrative was what he described as ‘a catalogue of my creative possibilities’. The four part structure with a strange quest for treasure at its centre, incorporates a series of bracketing devices to enclose such eccentric episodes as those involving a vampire-like monk, midsummer rituals on the river and a toytown battle. Also available on 16mm.