Robert Stebbins reviews the 1935 futurist Soviet film ‘Frontiers’ by Alexander Dovzhenko. A link to the film below.

‘Frontiers’ by Robert Stebbins from New Masse. Vol. 18 No. 2. January 7, 1936.

NO REVIEW of Frontier (Cameo) can hope to be more than a tentative summary. Even Pudovkin, probably the film’s greatest critical faculty, when asked for his opinion of Frontier, replied, “It stirred me too deeply to permit cool professional judgment.” It is the reviewer’s unenviable task, however, to rush in where his superior’s fear to tread. Let me begin at once by stating that Frontier is the most consummate and mature cinematic embodiment of the poetic impulse I’ve ever seen on the screen. If Alexander Dovjenko had no more than vaguely intimated that motion-pictures could on occasion display an evocative power equal to spoken and written poetry we would be grateful. But Dovjenko has done much more. In Frontier he has created a cinema-poem that ranks with the noblest works of the poetic mind.

When I use the term poetry I have in mind its formal significance also; not only poetic intensity but true poetic symbol and methodology. There have been films in which for an isolated moment the director bursts through the hard resisting shell of necessary exegesis to uncover essential truths, but no films save those of Dovjenko, Arsenal, Soil and Ivan, “present entirely, immediately and essentially what prose can only describe from the outside,” to quote Archibald MacLeish’s penetrating distinction between poetry and prose.

The tightly-meshed structure of Frontier supports three themes: first and most important, the building “of another great city on the shores of the ocean, another Vladivostok” (originally Frontier was titled Air-City); second, the struggle between encroaching imperialism and socialism; and last, the defeat of the kulaks by collectivization. All three themes are subtly combined in a plot of simple and pliant facture.

Four traitor Russians and two Samurai are making their way through the Siberian taiga. They carry dynamite with them to destroy the Soviet mines and collectives. Glushak, the “tiger’s death,” who symbolizes Soviet watchfulness, sets upon them and shoots down three of their number. Only one Russian, Shabanov, escapes while Glushak pursues the Samurai, finally overtaking and slaying one of them. The other he tracks to the hut of his friend, Vasil Khudiakov. Vasil assures him that there has been no one about. Convinced he must be mis- taken, Glushak leaves. Vasil and the Samurai then join a village of kulaks who for seven years have been hiding in the forest, living among the wild beasts in preference to the sinful Bolshevik cities. As the Samurai, the imperialist, and Shabanov, who exemplifies the tragic bewilderment of the kulaks, are about to lead the villagers in a foray against the collectives, Glushak and his followers appear. The villagers are overcome; Vasil and the Samurai are taken prisoner. Glushak himself executes his dearest friend, Vasil, for having taken arms against the workers and murdered the Chinese partisan, Van-Lin. Glushak carries the body of Van-Lin to the plane of his son, Vladimir. The plane takes off and lofts into the air. Planes in increasing number, from Zaporgie, from Ob, Leni, Yenisei, from Biro-Burey, from Sakhalin, Suchan, Stalingrad, join to form an air cavalcade. As the planes near the coast where the taiga tapers off to meet the ocean shore, thousands of parachutists leap from them. There they lay the foundation of Air-City.

This bare account of the plot does not even begin to hint at the nobly conceived and magnificently realized passages in the film that make Frontier unforgettable; Glushak’s pursuit of the Samurai, which for cinematic excitement is matchless; the death of Khudiakov, who just before he is shot turns to the hills of the taiga and makes them ring with the echo of his three wild calls; by the remarkable party at which is celebrated the birth of a grandchild to Glushak; the partisans’ leavetaking of their wives as they march against the enemy; the Samurai’s ritual sword dance in the pale of the early morning and Dovjenko’s profoundly sympathetic account of the hara-kiri; and that extraordinary episode relating the joyous and almost frenzied dash of the young Chuikcha from the uppermost north of Siberia to Air-City. Before we see him we already hear his song, at first indistinct and faint. As the song grows in volume and clarity the Chuikcha skiis into and beyond the frame. The song continues as he rushes along. The song continues as the seasons change, as the flora of the lower latitudes changes. We see him leaping over hills, wading through streams. Once he pauses to follow the path of an aeroplane overhead. He promises himself that someday he too will fly. Then his song breaks out again. He finally arrives at Air-City on the day of its founding. He is amazed to find nothing there. “For eighty suns I ran to get here to be among the first to study and I find nothing. But I understand. I will help build Air-City and they will come to learn here, as many as the trees in the forest.”

The endless taiga, teeming with forest life, is matched by the richness of Frontier itself. The daring of its tonal conception and rhetoric recalls to mind the “high astounding terms” of Marlowe. Its characters are humanly understandable, and at the same time the exalted symbols of the poet’s intention. Somewhere Marx speaks of the power that a work of art has to develop and actually add to the senses of man. Frontier is that kind of work. It is not a film that one sits back and views complacently with but half an eye and no mind. It is a film that demands absolute and even strained participation, but afterward we feel rewarded by a fuller capacity to view and understand life in its wholeness.