From the Power over the Earth to the Power of the Earth

The article studies the evolution of representing the connection between man and the earth in Russian cinema. The author argues that this evolution has gone through three stages: an attempt to conquer the earth (the Collectivization and the Virgin Lands campaign), the awareness of the earth’s power over man in the 1960s and 1970s, and the perception of the complete disruption between man and the earth in the 1970s and 1980s. The logic of the birth and death cycle of ‘pochvennik’ cinema in the USSR is established through the examples of a number of films.