of high praise – receiving a standing ovation at its debut and the endorsement of the Red Army – and sharp criticism. Soviet authorities and journalists simultaneously lauded the film for its "formal mastery" and derided it for perceived ideological shortcomings. Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, praised the film's visual style but called its political content "false". The Soviet poet Demyan Bedny attacked Earth, calling it "counterrevolutionary" and "defeatist" in the newspaper Izvestia. Film critic C. A. Lejeune praised the film's main section, saying that it "contains perhaps more understanding of pure beauty in cinema, more validity of relation in moving image, than any ten minutes of production yet known to the screen." Lewis Jacobs compared Dovzhenko's work to Eisenstein and Pudovkin, stating that Dovzhenko "had added a deep personal and poetic insight … [his films] are laconic in style, with a strange, wonderfully imaginative quality difficult to describe." Film director Grigori Roshal praised the film, writing, "Neither Eisenstein nor Pudovkin have achieved the tenderness and warmth in speaking about men and the world that Oleksandr Dovzhenko has revealed. Dovzhenko is always experimental. He is always an innovator and always a poet." Dovzhenko's biographer Marco Carynnyk lauded the film's "passionate simplicity … which has made it a masterpiece of world cinema" and praised its "powerful lyric affirmation of life." It was ranked #88 in the 1995 Centenary Poll of the 100 Best Films of the Century in Time Out magazine. The work also received 10 critics' votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the world's greatest films. The British Film Institute said of Earth that its plot "is secondary to the extraordinarily potent images of wheatfields, ripe fruit and weatherbeaten faces". Legacy Earth is widely considered to be Dovzhenko's magnum opus, and among the greatest films ever made. The National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Center considers Earth to be the most famous Ukrainian film made. Earth was voted one of the twelve greatest films of all time by a group of 117 film historians at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair and was selected as one of five films to be screened at a festival to celebrate the 70th anniversary of UNESCO in 2015. See also Dovzhenko Film Studios Holodomor List of Soviet films of 1930 Soviet propaganda References Books Articles External links (English subtitles) Ray Uzwyshyn's Earth (1930): Philosophy, Iconology, Collectivization Senses of Cinema Poetry in