The Cranes Are Flying [USSR 1957]

Летят Журавли
Director: M. Kalatozov
Cinematographer: S. Urusevsky

This film is of interest to me largely because it is the most famous collaboration between Kalatozov and Urusevsky, preceding their I Am Cuba by 5 years. In fact you can find a lot of similarities between the two films--certain shots and techniques that are memorable from the later film appeared here first. Examples are the use of bars/branches hanging in front of a running character being followed by the camera at an angle (Veronica running in Siberia/'Betty' in trance at the club in Havana); the sound of a household object deafening a character and their response (Mariano with pestle & mortar/Veronica with cuckoo clock); etc.

Unlike I Am Cuba, however, the camera does not play the main role in this film. Rather, it follows the plot and the characters closely, always making sure to frame them undistractingly when they are talking and interacting. But Urusevsky is certainly present; one gets a sense at times that the camera is playing its own character role, speaking to us in turns whenever the characters are silent.

There are certain slightly broader themes one notices with the camera work in the two films. Crowd scenes seem to be designed to convey the sense of a larger social situation; we often see the camera panning across faces of 'typical' people and interactions that exemplify aspects of the situation other than that faced by the characters, but the camera never stops long enough to make this the focus. We find our embattled character struggling to make his/her way through a jostling crowd, caught up by the flow of events and unable to have control. Think of Gloria at the demonstration in I Am Cuba. Another similarity is the way in which moving, especially running characters often bounce between the foreground and the background, being followed by the camera in the foreground, which gives a sense of depth while keeping the focus on the character. In both of these ways, our attention is kept on the individual, but we feel swept up in the larger events.

Finally there are some interesting little digs at Soviet life in the 1940s. Boris and Fyodor laugh at the Komsomol girls who have come to tell them that the factories will 'meet and exceed their production quotas'. It is a very understated joke that just suggests that these people (and perhaps viewers) looked cynically at such exhortations. There is also a quick line toward the beginning where Veronica tells Boris that she is not afraid of anything when he is with her, not even the war--well, 'I am afraid of the police' she says laughing. Again we get the feeling that these comments are thrown in as a way of subtly saying 'We are honest about this, we are even joking about it' without particularly dealing with it--I got the same feeling from some of the moments referring to Stalin in Tarkovsky's 'Mirror'. Corruption is mentioned briefly--Mark's boss took a bribe from him to get him a draft exemption, and when Fyodor finds out he is obviously angry at Mark, but does nothing to report him or his boss--he also does not appear very surprised (or surprised when asked to 'borrow' one of the ambulances for unscrupulous purposes).

The end of the film has a nice political message--'We have won, and we shall live not to destroy but to build a new life!' Basically a film about the war, which ends talking about how it has scarred the country, how we must do everything in our power to never go to war again. I suppose this is in line with the contemporary view taken by Khrushchev et al.

I must admit the first time I saw this film I was not entirely impressed; compared to I Am Cuba the cinematography is much more subtle and you do not necessarily realise immediately what a great role it plays in the film. But this is a technically good film, and it is good Urusevsky/Kalatozov at work. The plot and acting are what seems to be typically Russian--they make use of exaggeration and formalism, so you must be prepared for that. Most of all this is a strong film that gives us some insight into the way that Soviet people were thinking about the memory of the war in the 1950s.

For an interesting, though somewhat thinly stretched, analysis of the film and particularly the use of triangular visual metaphor and ways in which it may be related to triangular relationships in the film, see Shrayer (1997).