Workers of the world unite with these classic films for Labor Day

Inspired by Communist dogma, Soviet filmmakers staged a political and cinematic revolution with silent-era masterpieces like Sergei Eisenstein’s and Strike or Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother. But for sheer visual poetry, Alexander Dovzhenko’s has no equals. Opening with majestic shots of lush fields swaying in the wind before harvest—cue in Love And Death: “fields of rippling wheat”—and persistently setting its characters against the sheltering sky, the film presages Terrence Malick’s obsession with the relationship between humans and the natural world. Once it settles into the simplest of stories, Earth hails the glories of collectivism by showing a community of Russian peasants rally around the tractor that will bring prosperity and sustenance to all of them. There’s violent resistance from some of the locals, but Dovzhenko’s poetic idealism proves too overwhelming. It takes a village to raise a loaf of bread.