FILM AND VIDEO PROGRAMS AT THE SOUTHEAST MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY

CLASSICS OF SOVIET/RUSSIAN CINEMA
REPERTORY SEASON CONTINUES

In conjunction with the exhibition, ZONA the museum continues the season of vintage and modern classics of Soviet/Russian cinema.

WEDNESDAYS 7 pm
FREE
Southeast Museum of Photography, Building 1200
Daytona Beach College
Daytona Campus

April 9
Earth
Alexsandr Dovzhenko (USSR, 1930)

On the eve of collectivization in the Ukraine, an old farmer dies peacefully in bed. His grandson Vasil has a new vision: the village council will buy a tractor to be shared among the farmers. Struggling against the superstition, rich landowners, and nature itself, Vasil is ultimately the victim of a tragic murder, but the dawn brings forth a new life and the promise of prosperity to the poor village.

April 23
Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR, 1979)

In the near future, an unseen alien force has taken possession of an area of Russian wilderness that authorities have dubbed The Zone. The only thing known for sure about the region is that few who enter it ever return. Led by a Stalker, one of a small group of outlaws able to safely navigate the Zone, a renegade scientist and a cynical, burnt-out writer penetrate the dangers outside in search of the power and transcendence rumored to exist inside. The Stalker longs to un-do a mysterious physical transformation the Zone has performed on his young daughter. The scientist will risk anything to see that reason triumphs over faith. The writer seeks a germ of inspiration that the crumbling and corrupt world beyond the Zone no longer provides.

May 7
Russian Ark
Alexander Sokurov (Russia, 2002)

A visually hypnotizing cinematic feat, RUSSIAN ARK is Alexsandr Sokurov's spellbinding ode to St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum. Shot in one fluid take using High Definition video cameras, the photography floats and careens through the lavish corridors of the museum, examining its architectural details while following a dreamlike plot.

MUSEUM HOURS
OPEN - Tues, Thur, Fri: 11 - 5 p.m. Wed: 11 - 7 p.m. Weekends: 1 - 5 p.m.
June, July and December Hours: Tuesday -Sunday: 1 - 5 p.m.
CLOSED - Mondays and for the following dates: Daytona 500, July 4, Thanksgiving Weekend, August 1 -August 13 (Summer Recess).

MUSEUM LOCATION
Unless noted otherwise, all museum exhibitions and events are presented on the Daytona Beach Campus of Daytona Beach College at 1200 International Speedway Blvd, three miles east of I-95. The museum is located in Building 1200. Admission is free. Visitor parking is available. For detailed exhibition and program information visit www.smponline.org or call the museum information hotline at (386) 5064475

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Exhibitions continuing until April 25, 2008
PERSIAN VISIONS - Contemporary Photography From Iran
WITNESS TO INFINITY - Jim Vecchi

Exhibitions continuing until May 23, 2008
ZONA - Carl De Keyzer
IMAGE AND IDENTITY

About EARTH
Alexander Dovzhenko is regarded as Ukraine's premier filmmaker and the nation's most revered artist of the twentieth century. In nine fiction films and three documentaries, as well as a number of literary works and drawings, Dovzhenko gave creative form to Ukraine's difficult historical progress toward modernity during the Soviet era. His film work takes up themes of the social and economic modernization program sustained by the Soviet regime, while also invoking traditional motifs from Ukraine's national heritage.

Dovzhenko was born in rural Ukraine and raised in a conservative peasant culture that stressed national and folk traditions. By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917-1918, however, he was drawn into radical political activism and allied himself with the Bolshevik Party. He subsequently sought to fashion a role in the community of revolutionary artists who emerged in the early years of the Soviet system. After a brief career as a painter and political cartoonist, Dovzhenko entered the cinema in 1926, working first on comic shorts and then on a series of features that addressed the effect of Soviet modernization and industrialization on Ukrainian society.

He is best known for his three silent epics on the Ukrainian revolution and its consequences, Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1929), and Zemlya (Earth, 1930). The films manifest support for revolutionary change under the Soviets, but they also reference Ukrainian pastoral art and folklore. This is evident in the conclusion of Arsenal, for example, which celebrates the heroic last stand of a group of Ukrainian Bolsheviks battling nationalist counterrevolutionaries in 1918. When the Bolshevik hero proves invulnerable to enemy bullets in the final scene, Ukrainian audiences would have recognized the reference to a venerable folk legend about an eighteenth-century peasant uprising.

Dovzhenko sustained his account of economic development during the sound era. Ivan (1932) deals with the construction of a massive hydroelectric complex in Ukraine that served as a symbol of the region's move toward industrialization, and Aerograd (Frontier, 1935) takes up Soviet efforts to secure the Siberian frontier as a step toward developing the Soviet far east. Dovzhenko returned to the Ukrainian revolution with his 1939 film Shchors (Shors), treating the exploits of a martyred Red Army commander, and he spent World War II making propaganda documentaries on behalf of the war effort. In his only postwar feature, Michurin (Life in Bloom, 1948), Dovzhenko revisits the modernization theme in a biopic about a Soviet horticulturist whose research promised to improve nature's bounty through modern science.

The increasingly stringent censorship of the Stalin regime frustrated Dovzhenko through the second half of his career, and he completed only four features in the last twenty-five years of his life. He left behind a number of scripts and unfinished projects at the time of his death, some of which were eventually filmed by his wife and creative collaborator, Julia Solntseva. His greater legacy was the body of finished work that chronicled his homeland's uneasy developmental progress under the Soviets.