The poetic lyricism of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth makes it one of the great works of cinema, using the emotional power of the image to express the director’s love for his homeland. The film is a portrait of a Ukrainian village, and the plot line is quite simple: an old man dies, the local collective buys a tractor, and the young farm chairman is gunned down by a kulak. These dramatic moments underpin Dovzhenko’s hymn to a people and their relationship to the land. Painterly wide-angle shots of vast wheat fields blowing in the wind are framed such that the land is the dominant element; other compositions are four-fifths sky. Sunflowers in full bloom, apple trees heavy with fruit—these serene vistas are juxtaposed with montage sequences of villagers shown close-up in an enduring expression of the cyclical nature of life. “Earth was a magnum opus for the young Dovzhenko, but also a swan song for the entire Ukrainian silent era. The film, which was expected to be the first Ukrainian sound film, became the first big target of proletarian critics and of Stalin’s censorship, which accused it of pantheism, sympathizing with landowners, and female nudity. However, this fact didn't hinder the sensational international distribution of the film” (Oleksandr Teliuk).