On July 23, 2023, the Academy Museum of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles will host a screening of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s silent film ‘Earth’ (1930) with the premiere of a new original soundtrack by composer Luke Corradine. Tickets can be purchased on the Museum’s website
The film will open the special program ‘Silent Sundays’ with a live performance of the score by a chamber symphony orchestra. The Ukrainian film will be shown for the first time at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
The project was initiated by the European public organization UFACE (Ukrainians For the Arts, Culture and Education), which was founded by Ukrainian film producer and cultural manager Kateryna Shevchenko.
‘Ukrainian art and culture have given the world many masterpieces. Dovzhenko’s film Earth is one of them, — Kateryna says in a press release. — However, the world still associates it with Soviet, not Ukrainian cinema (and Soviet cinema is automatically perceived as russian). We strive to change this vision, to form an understanding of the special place of Ukrainian art during the Soviet times in the world community, to present Ukrainians as a talented, educated and creative nation’.
The author of the new soundtrack for ‘Earth’, Luke Corradine is a British musician and composer who wrote the music for Stephen Baldwin’s 2018 film ‘No Panic With a Hint of Hysteria’. Today, Luke lives in Kyiv and produces James Bamford’s (‘Superman & Lois’) sci-fi series ‘Black Rose’.
‘Earth’ by Oleksandr Dovzhenko took 9th place in The Guardian’s list of the top ten silent films ever made. At the International Referendum of Film Critics in Brussels in 1958, this film was named one of the 12 best films in the history of world cinema. In the present-day ranking of the best films of all time, conducted by the British magazine Sight & Sound, as a result of a survey of 846 film critics, historians and directors in 2012, the film ‘Earth’ took 171st place.
This is not the first time a new soundtrack has been created for the film. After the restoration of the film in 2015, the ethnic chaos band ‘DakhaBrakha’ recorded a new musical accompaniment at the request of Dovzhenko Centre, and in 2017 Mariana Sadovska recorded her own version.
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, where ‘Earth’ will be shown, opened in September 2021 and is dedicated to the history, science and cultural impact of the film industry. Read more about its first exhibition in our article.
