The memories of a soldier, Ivan, set the elegiac tone for this tribute to the Ukrainianpeasants' struggle against the Nazi invaders. Ivan is the ultimate patriotichero-he is the Ukraine, he saves himself. But Julia Solntseva (director, actress,wife and collaborator of Alexander Dovzhenko), in the spirit of Earth, transcendspolemics with poetry: just as Dovzhenko interpreted both the Revolution and thewar in terms of the Ukraine, so she brings every image, every idea back to thehuman, the personal. She does so through extraordinary montage sequences andsuperimpositions. A soldier walks on moonlit water; the door of a hut opens to anunknown world of horror; a love sequence has such an ethereal otherness as tomake the Surrealists weep. "That was war," we are told in the end,"this is life." That was life, we might add; this is cinema.