The cinema of Dovzhenko to be featured at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater (05/05/02)

The cinema of Dovzhenko to be featured at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater

NEW YORK - "Landscapes of the Soul: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko" will be presented at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center on May 8-21.

The program will feature all of Dovzhenko's extant works, i.e., 13 films, and will also include "Chronicle of the Years of Fire" ( Povist Polumianykh Lit, 1945), based on a script by Dovzhenko and filmed by his wife and close collaborator, Yulia Solntseva.

A key figure in world cinematography, Alexander Dovzhenko (1894-1956), is, as stated in the Film Society's release "one of the few filmmakers to whom the label 'film poet' could aptly apply. There is an extraordinary delicacy in his use of visual metaphor, a complexity in his use of imagery, that separates him from his more ideologically driven contemporaries" - Russian filmmakers of the Soviet-era Eisenstein, Vertov and Pudovkin. "While all of them were influenced by the Constructivist movement at that time, Dovzhenko drew his inspiration from deep roots in Ukrainian folk culture, in his passionate celebration of his native landscapes [land] and the people who worked them [it]."

As part of the film program, all the silent films in the Dovzhenko series will have live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin, former resident film accompanist at MoMA, and, since 1989, with the American Museum of the Moving Image and, since 1999, with the BAM Rose Cinema.

There will also be two special screenings of "Earth" on Friday, May 10, at 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. with live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra.

There will also be a gallery exhibition, curated by the Dovzhenko Museum in Kyiv, of posters and Dovzhenko drawings. A symposium, titled "The Art and Legacy of Alexander Dovzhenko," will be held on May 11 featuring representatives from the National Center of Alexander Dovzhenko (NCAD), and the Ministry of Art and Culture of Ukraine, as well as Sirhiy Trymbach, film historian, NCAD; Adams Sitney, professor of film studies, Princeton University; and Josephine Woll, professor in the department of German and Russian, Howard University, and author of "Reel Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw." The symposium will be held at 10:30 a.m. at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery at the Walter Reade Theater. The event is free, but seating is limited; passes may be picked up at the Water Reade Box Office effective May 1.

The Dovzhenko program is presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Seagull Films in association with the Ministry of Arts and Culture of Ukraine and the Ukrainian National Center of Alexander Dovzhenko with support from the Consulate General of Ukraine in New York.

The Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center is located at 165 W. 65th St. on the plaza level (between Broadway and Amsterdam). Admission: $9.50; senior citizens, $4.50. For tickets and information call the Box Office, (212) 875-5600. For information in Ukrainian call (212) 875-5367. For tickets and information online visit: http://filmlinc.com/wrt/programs/52002/dovzhenko/dovzhenko.htm.

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