Critics reviews

Summer may be drawing to a close, but the Museum of the Moving Image is throwing one last hurrah with a screening of Yuliya Solntseva's Ukrainian Trilogy the final weekend of August. If you can only make it to Astoria for one of these rarely shown treasures, ensure that it is The Enchanted Desna , a kaleidoscopic fairy tale complete with blazing colors, talking horses, biblical floods, and fields of impossibly yellow sunflowers — among other fantasies.

It portrays a village childhood through the memories of a soldier on the front. (There's an autobiographical kick here: Dovzhenko was one of the Soviet directors who'd seen the most combat, during both the Russian Civil War and World War II.) As such, it's a work of stark contrasts — the fiery hellscape of battle set against the supernaturally redemptive power of nature.

[Young Alexander's] paean to the joy of the sound of scythes being hammered launches a brilliant scene of farmers rhythmically massed in synchronized threshing. Solntseva pairs Alexander's idyllic memories with pictorial rhapsody, filling the screen with a molten crimson sunrise, wavering light on a river's surface which looks like animated Abstract Expressionism, mist drifting dreamily along the riverbanks, smoke billowing, and clouds swarming amid the twilit sky.

[Enthusiasm] is ignored in most film literature, and on first glance seems to outdistance nearly all the "official" Russian classics. First glances are often deceptive; but how can we verify them when the films remain so difficult to see, and are so seldom spoken about? ...Surely it is one of the most ravishing spectacles ever made, an ecstatic riot of color and sound that uses 70mm and stereophonic recording with all the freedom and imagination of an inspired home movie.