Product: Arsenal [VHS] (1929)
Rating: 3.0
Reputation supercedes total merit
Alexander Dovzhenko's silent war film about the 1918 struggle of Bolshevik workers at a Kiev munitions factory against White Russian troops, which he intermingles with Ukrainian myth. It's an intriguing relic of European filmmaking, clearly influenced by the virtuoso montage editing of Sergei Eisenstein, though it is dated and hampered by the feeling that it was commissioned as propaganda at the time. A multifarious moral examination of war none the less.