The Cranes Are Flying: A Free Camera

Among the film’s innovations, not the least have to do with the characterization of Veronica. 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.

The rest of the narrative is largely built on the lovers’ separation by the war, which leaves each of them longing to be reunited with the other. The tone of the film darkens, and Veronica becomes a figure trapped by fate. The scene of her rape by Boris’s cousin, Mark (Alexander Shvorin), is formalized and elliptical: in a cavernous apartment lit by the flashes of an ongoing aerial bombardment, diaphanous curtains billowing around them, the two suddenly resemble figures in a graphic novel, exchanging intense stares and face slaps until Veronica appears to faint, allowing Mark to carry her across a floor strewn with shards of glass from the shattered window. The scene is immediately followed by that of Boris’s death at the front from a sniper’s bullet. The hyperbolic lyricism with which the film laments this tragedy answers the scene of Veronica’s ordeal: as Boris slowly collapses, the camera gazes up with him at a swirling skyscape of wintry birch trees, which dissolves into an elaborate hallucination of his and Veronica’s wedding. In the windswept gauze of Veronica’s veil, the ensuing montage echoes the billowing curtains of the rape scene, and the bare birch branches that loom over the dying Boris are turned into clouds of translucent leaves.

In the absence of clear explanation, Veronica’s decision to marry Mark appears to be a self-punishment. The film gives a twist to the familiar theme of the hardships endured by women at home during wartime by portraying Veronica’s domestic suffering as a willed self-victimization (perhaps in identification with the men who are fighting). In its last section, The Cranes Are Flying becomes a narrative of therapy, as Veronica leaves her state of victimhood by discarding the ignoble Mark. The film ultimately grants Veronica two worthier symbolic replacements for the lost Boris: the adopted child Borka (a diminutive of Boris) and the soldier Volodya (Konstantin Nikitin), who bonds with Veronica over a shared sense of guilt about Boris’s fate. Amid the grandeur of Moscow’s celebration for its returning heroes, the final sequence restores Veronica to her original place as an embodiment of hope, as she distributes among the crowd the flowers she had intended for Boris. Juxtaposing loss and recovery, The Cranes Are Flying ends by reintegrating its heroine into the mass of humanity.

The visual exuberance of The Cranes Are Flying reconfirms the earliest impulses of Kalatozov (born, in Georgia, as Mikheil Kalatozishvili). His previous career included two striking silent films, the quasi documentary Salt for Svanetia (1930) and the fictional allegory Nail in the Boot (1932), which were strongly marked by avant-garde aesthetics (and duly castigated by Soviet censors). He spent a year and a half in Los Angeles during World War II on a diplomatic assignment, an experience that enabled him to see Hollywood films that were unavailable in the Soviet Union. Although the book he wrote on the experience, Litso gollivuda (The face of Hollywood, 1949), is predictably highly anti-American, it is likely that Kalatozov was marked by some of these cinematic discoveries. (He apparently thought highly enough of William Dieterle’s work to steal three prints of his films, according to an allegation made privately by Dieterle’s wife.) The Cranes Are Flying is, partly, a melodrama, and the complexity, fluidity, and audacity with which Kalatozov approaches that form recall the peak moments of certain films by Frank Borzage, King Vidor, or Vincente Minnelli.

In finding visual correlatives to his characters’ spiritual states, Kalatozov had a priceless collaborator in cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, with whom he had first worked on The First Echelon (1956), the account of a group of young workers opening up virgin lands to agriculture. Though not much more than a quaint curiosity, The First Echelon announces the stylistic trademarks of The Cranes Are Flying: relentless camera movement, jarring diagonals, a tendency to place the camera low or high. The earlier film also contains occasional bursts of handheld cinematography, at which Urusevsky had become adept during his two years of service as a military cameraman (he was one of the cinematographers on Dovzhenko’s 1943 war documentary Ukraine in Flames). He coined the phrase “off-duty camera” to describe the freedom made possible by taking the camera off its tripod. A whole philosophy of cinema is contained in these words by the cinematographer: “The camera can express what the actor is unable to portray: his inner sensations. The cameraman must act with the actors.”

Kalatozov and Urusevsky followed up The Cranes Are Flying with Letter Never Sent (1959), the chronicle of an ill-fated geological mission to the Siberian taiga, and the astonishing extravaganza I Am Cuba (1964). The two men’s joint body of work can be considered one of the great multifilm director-cinematographer collaborations. In Ugol zreniya (Dialog s Urusevskim) (Angle of vision: Dialogue with Urusevsky, 1980), a beautiful book by Maia Merkel’, the cameraman discusses his work with Kalatozov: “With us there existed a tacit right of veto. We didn’t agree on it, it wasn’t written down anywhere, but he knew: if I don’t like something, he won’t insist; if he doesn’t like something, me neither. Of course, we tried to persuade each other, we argued.” In working with a director, he said, a cinematographer “mustn’t push him, and at the same time mustn’t fulfill only what he wants.” He agreed with Merkel’ that he was never more himself than in the films he made with Kalatozov: “No one held anyone back, prompted, dictated. The graphic side of the picture depended on me, and Kalatozov attached great importance to that.”

With The Cranes Are Flying, the off-duty camera comes to the fore. Its unmooring is announced in the first postcredits scene, when Boris, having said goodbye to Veronica in the ground-floor hallway of her building, runs up several flights of stairs after her, the camera whipping ahead of him around the open well of the staircase. Mieczysław Weinberg’s score underlines this bravura camera movement with a tremulous passage in which the violins seem to be dashing upstairs as well. (Throughout the film, the music, too, seems to act along with the camera.) The mimetism of image and sound marks the stairway scene as a privileged moment, the better to imprint it on our memory so that we will recall it when it is repeated—but with Boris now wearing his army uniform, as if he had just run all the way from the front—in the climactic wedding-day hallucination.