Arsenal
is an account of the Ukraine from the World War, through the February and October Revolutions, to the suppression of a workers' revolt in 1918. Dovzhenko presents harsh, realistic scenes of Czarist brutality and war's destruction, but his juxtapositions are impressionistic and symbolic. In the film's most famous sequence, Czar Nicholas writes in his diary, “Today I shot a crow,” and Dovzhenko cuts to an old peasant collapsing from exhaustion in a field. Arsenal is filled with many powerful, disturbing images. A Ukrainian lights a candle before a portrait of the national poet; the picture suddenly comes alive, and the face in it blows out the candle. In another scene, revolutionaries carry a dead comrade home in a sleigh, with the horses “singing” as they gallop across the snow; when the soldier is left at the feet of his mother, the horses cry: “Such is our revolutionary life and death.”
“The first masterpiece of the Ukrainian cinema broke entirely with traditional film structure and subject, depending solely on a flow of ideas and emotions rather than upon conflicts between individual characters... the extraordinary dependence on image and symbolism in Arsenal can no more be fully translated into concrete meanings than the imagery and rhythm and color of a poem....”
-Jay Leyda, “Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film”