“Even today, when I close my eyes, I do not know darkness. Now, still, my brain lights up with a vivid and continual glow the visible and the invisible procession of images—innumerable, sometimes without pattern. The images float over the Danube and over the Desna. The clouds in the sky float free and capriciously; they swim in the vast blue emptiness and meet in so many combats and duels that if I could only snatch a tiny part to put it into books or into films, I would not have lived on this earth in vain. . . .”

—Alexander Dovzhenko, from Beginnings: Sources, 1942; Cinema In Revolution, edited by Luda and Jean Schnitzer and Marcel Martin, translated by David Robinson, 1973.