Arsenal

I think this film easily ranks among the greatest of early Soviet cinema. Alexandre Dovzhenko retains the kind of poetic and lyrical imagery that sustained his earlier film Earth, but I think that this a more mature work that utilizes the tools of cinema. This film plays out like a Soviet version of All Quiet on the Western Front, though I would argue that this a greater film. It involves Russians fighting in WWI as the impending revolution starts coming to fruition. It's Soviet propoganda, to be sure, but rises above the propoganda of say, Pudovkin, in it's use of imagery combined with a humanitarianism, whereas Pudovkin only has imagery. The final image of the film is surely one of the great ending images of all cinema.