Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko is the great visual poet of Soviet cinema. Urged by Stalin to make propaganda for agricultural collectivisation, he instead delivered a passionate hymn to nature. His film poem Earth (1930) brings to life the collective life experience of Ukrainian proletarians, examining the cycles of nature through its epic montage and exploring life, death, violence, sex and other themes related to the collective farms. The primacy is always beauty, or in Dovzhenko's own words, "If I have to choose between truth and beauty, I choose beauty. In it there is a greater, deeper existence than the naked truth. Existence is only that which is beautiful."