ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the film Odessa directed by Jean Lods. Odessa opens with impressive shots of the Black Sea—a rock in the waves and partly hidden by fog is reminiscent of Alexander Dovzhenko's lyrical imagery of nature. A montage of archaeological finds illustrates Odessa's long history while aerial views of the sea, showing ships drawing curved lines in the water surface, situate the city and its harbor geographically. A striking high angle shot, with a rooftop statue on the foreground, shows a street and a traffic intersection with trams and cars, evoking the metropolitan imagery of the city symphonies by Walter Ruttmann, Dziga Vertov, and others. After a series of exhilarating traveling shots of a car drive through the city, the film takes us back to the sea where it started.
