Greetings gentle readers, welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today we have a classic of Russian cinema: The Cranes are Flying.
Reviews:
Letterboxd says:
I hate this movie. It’s going directly into my top 100.
I hate that it makes my heart hurt so much and how the camera work makes me dizzy and nauseous at the horrors of war.
I hate that the sharpness of some of the images stings my eyes, especially those of her eyes and in hearing the word Nyet, over and over to no avail.
I hate the condemnation and perpetual self hatred and to what depths and lengths they’ll carry the burden of them.
I hate that Anna never gets a chance to answer the question, “What is the meaning of life?” Because, I really needed to know. Instead, I’m left fumbling right along with the movie, wondering.
I hate how unsettled I feel and how adrift…
I love that I hate it, for it’s cinema at its finest and most confronting.
Filmsfatale says:
Kalatozov has a strong team behind him, particularly Sergey Urusevsky (who is unquestionably one of the greatest cinematographers of all time) who is exemplary with his wide shots and even better with his extreme close ups. There are camera tricks and ideas here that just puzzle me, not just because I cannot fathom how they were pulled off sixty five years ago but also because I don’t get how there weren’t numerous filmmakers trying to bite this film’s style. Maybe its gradual releases made it under seen (it was only shown at Cannes a year after it was made and then released on a wide level in 1960), or there’s the fact that maybe the finest cinematographers of the time also couldn’t figure out what Urusevsky was doing (please see I Am Cuba for even stronger filmic mastery). These images are perfect for displaying war-torn Moscow (this is a World War II picture) and the broken souls that have faced the worst of humanity.
Criterion.com says:
In Samoilova (daughter of Evgeny Samoilov, who starred in Alexander Dovzhenko’s 1939 Shchors), Kalatozov found an extraordinary screen personality. She is striking not just for her beauty but for her unselfconscious, almost awkward expressiveness, so poignant in the close shots of her in the first minutes of the film—note the calmness of the tiny gesture with which she beckons Boris toward her. Veronica is in motion throughout much of the movie, and Samoilova’s face makes her flight luminous. If the film keeps the audience interested in Veronica, this is not just because Samoilova is so vivid and so good but also because Batalov’s Boris responds to her with an alert appreciation that never lapses into condescension. We understand his need for closeness to her. The time the two share on-screen is limited, but their moments together are so intensely acted and observed that they seem to go on much longer. Kalatozov heightens this effect by placing the lovers’ early-morning idyll in the empty streets of Moscow as a self-contained prologue before the main titles, as if the couple’s relationship existed in a state of timelessness. The director films Boris and Veronica from alternating high and low camera angles, so that the city and the sky, communicating directly, seem to promise unlimited freedom.
My take:
This is one gorgeous film. The cinematography is masterful. The use of light and shadow is a tale unto itself. The acting is simple but in a pure way, an innocent way. Five stars.
Director: Mikhail Kalatozov
Writer: Viktor Rozov
Notable Actors: Aleksey Batalov, Tatiana Samoilova
Plot (Spoilers!):
Veronika (Samoilova) and Boris (Batalov) are two young lovers who have snuck out from their respective homes to spend time together. The sun is rising and a flock of cranes flies overheard, marking the beauty of their time together. But their happiness is about to end.
It’s the advent of World War 2 and Boris has volunteered for the Army. In the chaos, he ships off for the front before he has a chance to say goodbye to Veronika. Their time together is over…but not their love.
Veronika’s parents are soon killed in a German air raid and she goes to live with Boris’s family. While Boris is facing down the Hun, his cousin is making the moves on Veronika. Consumed by lust, he rapes her.
Spiritually broken, Veronika marries the cousin. She despises him. In turn, she is despised by Boris’s family for having betrayed Boris for the cousin. Meanwhile, Boris is killed in action after saving a comrade’s life.
The German advance is advancing and the family moves to the wastelands of Siberia for safety. Mark and Veronika are miserable but she has found meaningful work as a nurse with Boris’s father. On one occasion, a wounded soldier becomes hysterical when he learns that his girlfriend has dumped him and the father lectures the ward about the low nature of women who leave their men during war. Sickened by the realization that she is such a woman, Veronika attempts suicide but stops at the last second to save a young boy from certain death. She takes the boy home and he becomes a member of the family.
Veronika wants to give him a toy, a plush squirrel that Boris had given her, but she learns that Mark has taken the toy to give to his mistress at a party. Veronika crashes the party to get the toy and learns that there is a love note from Boris in it. Reading it, she realizes she is finished with the cousin.
At home, Boris’s father learns that his nephew has bribed his way out of military service. That combined with his cheating leads to him being booted out of the house. The family, realizing that the cousin had hurt Veronika, forgive her for abandoning Boris.
The war is now over and the soldiers are returning to their glory. Veronika searches desperately for Boris at the train station but when she runs into a friend of his she learns that he is in fact dead. She is heartbroken but the friend gives an impassioned speech to the crowd about always remembering their lost ones and she finds the bravery to face the future without Boris. In the final scenes we see a flock of cranes flying over the city: even in the absence of Boris her love endures.
I’ve been on a Russian World War 2 film voyage as of late, Mosfilm has plenty of English subtitled movies on youtube, and The Cranes Are Flying is a gorgeous movie shot just a few years post Stalinism, so it feels unencumbered.
Other gems include:
Ballad of a Soldier
Come and See (the most harrowing WW2 film of all)
Fate of a Man
They Fought For the Motherland
Ivan’s Childhood
Also White Tiger, a Russian WW2 film made in 2012, which ends with Hitler in Hell, being interviewed by the Devil.
I can recommend
The ascent (1977), by Larisa Shepitko
Trial on the road (1986), by Aleksei German
I cannot find Fate of a Man. Do you mean The Destiny of a Man, by Sergey Bondarchuk?
“Sudba” translates as both faith and destiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_of_a_Man
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053317/
P.S. Since everyone is recommending movies, here’s one.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2006_film)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0851577/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz-vegualMg
I look forward to watching this – Kalatozov’s later ‘I Am Cuba’ is one of the most beautiful films ever made (even though many Cubans appear to hate it), some of his famous tracking shots have never been matched, even with the most modern equipment.
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the upward spiraling tracking shot of Boris following Veronika up the stairs. How did he do it, a cork-screwing ladder?
I’ve seen this and Soy Cuba some years back. The latter is a doozy, there are four vignettes, the first with scenes of pre-revolutionary Havana which was a little too much for the Cubans who hated it. But overall it is spectacular. One really gets why there was a revolution.
I will watch this one again, thank you!
I’d recommend The Letter Never Sent, also by Kalatazov and also with Samoilova. Four geologists on a Siberian prospecting mission that runs into difficulty. A beautiful, technically graceful film.
This is a wonderful movie and not just for the photography and the story but also for those of us who think movies are ultimately about actors acting.
Given what’s going on in the world it also helps us to understand the Russian experience in WW2 which still dominates their thinking. Highly recommended.
Exactly. I was shown this as part of a high school Russian language course. Cast and crew did a good job disrupting the Russian stereotypes that were shoved at us back then. I’m thankful my school was willing to promote critical cultural exposure of that sort, though their cumulative effect was probably not what they intended.
WW2 dominates everyone’s thinking, in one way or another.
I’ve heard of this film but never caught up with it. There are lots of good reports about it that i have read over the years. Looks like another film to watch in some downtime. Thanks, semper loquitur.
I’m a fan of WW2 films, and had pretty much run out of English spoken ones, and have found the Russian WW2 films to be a breath of fresh air for the genre.
I’m presently watching this 2013 Russian tv effort
The Youtube Mosfilm site has a recent version of Anna Karinnina that is just so so but splendid “production values.” Doubt Tolstoy would have approved though, and their lead actress is no Garbo.
Meanwhile my library hold list contains yet another Superman. Finance driven H’wood has to have those presold properties and chooses comic books rather than Tolstoy. Old school Hollywood did try to offer some “culture” including that Garbo version of the novel.
Beautiful, touching, my heart is sobbing.
I am at work, i played on a bit of faster speed, which may have made it more devestating. I dunno.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Related, though Sci-Fi is “Solaris” and incredible Russian film.
Some other very good, Russian (some Soviet) films are:
Fortress of War (2010)
White Tiger (2012)
Stalingrad (2013)
The Battle for Sevastopol (2015)
Road to Berlin (2015) Doroga na Berlin
Panfilov’s 28 Men (2016)
Indestructible AKA Tankers (2018)
This movie is painfully beautiful. There are some poignant moments when it’s hard to keep one’s water works under control. The ending is not exactly happy, but uplifting all the same. Life does go on.
An amusing side note: my Russian mother-in-law (born 1939) was, in her younger days, a dead ringer for Tatiana Samoilova (born 1934). Our daughters noticed the resemblance after watching this movie a few years ago and immediately pulled out the old family photo albums to be sure, and looking at their grandmother’s photos from the early 1960s it’s indeed like they were separated at birth. When they asked her about it, Babushka casually replied that people often stared at her when she was out in public in Moscow in her 20s, and occasionally approached to ask who she was.
Thanks for the comments and the suggestions. There will be plenty more Mosfilm in the future, including some Tarkovsky soon I think.
My personal favorite film maker of all time. I’m reading his book. Sculpting in Time.
https://archive.org/details/Andrei_Tarkovsky_Sculpting_In_Time
Andrei Rublev is one of my top five films. Which gives me an idea.
Thanks for the tip, I loved Soy Cuba and agree that the camera work is stunning in that one.
“Burnt by the Sun” is an excellent film ofStalin’s purge of generals when he became paranoid.
While the movie naturally stands well on it’s own, it may behoove to mention that was also a part of the societal development of the Soviet Union. Stalin had died a few years earlier, a general amnesty had returned over a million people from the Gulag back to the society, end of arrests made people more keen to express their opinions, construction boom was finally creating enough apartments and rising food production got rid of rationing and hunger.
People in Soviet Union felt that they were owned something for enduring – and eventually winning – the war and even if the short “thaw” in mid-1950’s was limited by a clampdown after the Hungarian revolt indeed a new Soviet “individual” emerged in the literature and cinema. Instead of heroic engineers sacrificing everything to build a better world there now were faulty people with their own (realistic) lives and moral dilemmas – and often their productivity as members of society or group was actually hindered by bureaucrats.
One can even think this as a reflection of the Soviet population in general trying to redefine themselves or find out how life in Soviet Union should be after Stalin and WW2.
Then a word or two about the cranes… It’s my understanding that in the agrarian Russian folklore the wedge of cranes was understood as a harbinger of change – being migratory birds the flocks are only seen in spring and autumn, so this makes sense. As it would also in the context of the movie.
Of course, 10 years after the release of the movie, a poem “Cranes” by Rasul Gamzatov was turned into one of the most famous and powerful “wartime” songs of Soviet Union. Yes, it’s from late 1960’s, but it’s so ingrained into Great Patriotic War experience it will bring audiences to tears even today. It’s about the soldiers who died far from home turning into cranes, and flying eternally among the clouds, keeping a space in their formation for the storyteller one day to join them.
So, for the audiences of “The Cranes Are Flying” since the song “Cranes” was published, in the final scene Boris kind of returns from the war. At least I can’t help but see it this way.
If you enjoy The Cranes are Flying and Soy Cuba (which I do; I think they fit that overused category of “masterpieces”), check out Salt for Svenetia on YouTube. It’s from 1930, and although listed as a documentary, it’s more of a silent docu-drama, with Kalatozov’s cinematographic ideas creating an almost surrealistic effect from the Georgian province’s landscape and people. It was the director’s first film, and the first I saw of his. Film director and historian Jay Leyda waxed lyrical about it in his book, Kino, so I had to check it out. I really hope someday that Kalatozov’s entire oeuvre is made available in clean copies with English subtitles. The man had *soul.*
Excellent choice, Cranes Are Flying. Thank you for reminding me of it.
AFAIK some scenes in this (and Soy Cuba) were shot on Infra Red B&W film stock hence the otherworldly contrast in some of the shots.