ARSENAL

In 1917, in the middle of the First World War, the Russian army is in great difficulty. Back from the front, Timos, a Ukrainian worker, arrives in Kiev where he becomes one of the leaders of the resistance in the Arsenal arms factory, the centre of the struggle against the nationalist counter-revolutionaries. He took part in the popular strike that shook the city in 1918. The strikers, under siege, waited in vain for help from the revolutionaries. They are brutally massacred by the militia and Timos is mortally wounded during the fighting, but manages to get up and move on, offering his bare chest to the soldiers’ blows. Aleksandr Dovzenko’s lyrical epic masterpiece, written in a fortnight and shot in six months, was produced to commemorate the uprising against the Ukrainian nationalist government. It begins by showing us atrocious scenes of a battlefield, a miserable village where only old people remains, a pudgy tsar, and a group of exhausted survivors. Arsenal has no shortage of symbolic references and strong images, enhanced by the use of the blocking technique: from the soldiers dying on the front line, their mouths smiling grotesquely due to the laughing gas, to the twisting accordion symbolising the derailment of the train, from the unreal dialogue between the horses to Timos’ final death.