Oleksandr Dovzhenko was the most lyrical of the great Soviet film directors of the 1920s. His cinema broke entirely with traditional film structure to convey a flow of ideas and emotions in impressionistic imagery and editing whose rhythms can only be compared to poetry. His masterful film uses symbolic juxtaposition, metaphor, pantomime, and even fantasy to pay tribute to the Ukrainian workers and their struggles in Czarist Russia during and immediately after World War I. Without aiming for character development as we know it, Dovzhenko nevertheless makes the experiences he shows—from the trials of war to the heightened expectation of revolution—incredibly personal.