Story of the Flaming Years sets an elegiac tone for a tribute to the Ukrainian peasants' struggle against the Nazi invaders. The protagonist Ivan is the ultimate patriotic hero-he is the Ukraine, he saves himself. But Solntseva, in the spirit of Earth, transcends polemics with poetry: just as Dovzhenko persistently interpreted both the Revolution and the war in terms of the Ukraine, so she brings every image, every idea back to the human, the personal. She does so through extraordinary montage sequences and double- and triple-superimpositions: a soldier in silhouette walks on moonlit water; the door of a hut opens to an unknown world of horror; a girl returns from enslavement to find that her soldier boyfriend has become a statue; a love sequence has such an ethereal otherness as to make the Surrealists weep. (JB)