soviet russia

The Cranes are Flying (1957)

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Immediately after our viewing of Soy Cuba, my viewing companion started reading about the director, Mikhail Kalatozov, and discovered that he had also previously directed Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying), and that it had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958. We checked to see if it was on the Criterion streaming service and discovered that it was, and immediately made plans to watch it as soon as possible. Although it lacks some of the spectacular work that was present in Soy Cuba, the seeds for many of that film’s finest moments are on full display here, and this one is likewise worthy of revisiting for a modern audience. 

Boris (Aleksey Batalov) is a young Soviet factory worker with lofty ideals, deeply in love with Veronika (Tatiana Samoilova), whom he has nicknamed “Squirrel,” and he plans to marry her as soon as he can. Boris lives in a multi room apartment with his family: his grandmother, his father Fyodor (Vasili Merkuryev), and his cousins Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin) and Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova). Fyodor is a doctor and Irina is in training to enter the same profession, while Mark is a composer and piano player who is himself obsessed with Veronika. Boris and Veronika’s meetings are often delayed by his duties at the factory, which gives Mark the opportunity to try and ingratiate himself with his cousin’s betrothed, but Veronika soundly rejects him at every advance. When the Soviet Union enters WWII, many of Boris’s colleagues worry that they will be drafted, and there is much discussion about the possibility of receiving exemptions, and Veronika worries incessantly that Boris will be conscripted, unaware that her naive, doe-eyed love has already volunteered, alongside his friend Stepan (Valentin Zubkov). 

On the day before Veronika’s birthday, he is ordered to report for duty, and the two are unable to find each other in the crowd, prevented from saying a final goodbye. In his absence, things go from bad to worse for Veronika when her parents are killed in an air raid; she is taken in by Boris’s family, but this leaves her vulnerable to Mark’s machinations, and he forces himself upon her during another raid while the rest of the family is in hiding, then forces her to marry him. On the front, Boris is shot while saving a fellow soldier and declared missing. Veronika never gives up hope that he will return, however, even as she is trapped in a loveless marriage with Mark, evacuated to Siberia from Moscow as the enemy’s forces encroach, and made to endure the bitter lamentations of returning wounded who have more harsh words for the women who failed to wait for them than they do for the fascists that they fight. 

This movie is stunning. Samoilova is doing unprecedented work here as Veronika, from the first time that she sees the cranes flying over Moscow with Boris at her side, to the film’s bittersweet final moments when she sees them again after learning that Boris will not be returning home to her. This isn’t a spoiler—the film treats his death as an inevitability from the moment that we learn he has volunteered, and although there are a few moments in which it seems that there may be reason to hope, it is a foregone conclusion that he will not be coming home. The film knows it, the characters know it, and we know it, even as Veronika keeps hope alive in her heart for a reunion that will never come. 

This was, apparently, one of the first films within the USSR to treat the war as a tragedy and not a source of tremendous patriotic pride. Prior to this, all films that dealt with WWII did so in an overtly propagandistic way, with the films creating an image of a cheery populace without flaw, all working together in blissful harmony and without want or need. This was a lightning bolt of realism thrust into that industry, a film in which our heroes and our villains espouse the same political philosophies even if they enact very different systems of morality, showing both the mask that the USSR presented the west and the varied faces beneath it. Boris is lovable but he is also not only an obvious fool but dishonest, as evidenced not only by his immediately volunteering for the war effort but also when he lies straight to Veronika’s face about their plans for the immediate future, despite knowing he will not be able to fulfill any of it while he is out on the front lines. Mark is an utter cad, moving in on his cousin’s beloved even before he goes off to war and making every effort to take her for himself (up to and including an implied sexual assault) and resorting to bribery in order to receive a draft exemption—an action that also includes him using his respected uncle’s name without his knowledge and besmirching the man’s honor. Irina is likewise flawed. Her earliest scenes in the film show her belittling Boris for staying out late and sleeping in on his day off, despite the fact that he’s more exhausted from extended days of honest work than he is from catting around the city with Veronika; later, she treats Veronika like garbage for marrying Mark, even though it’s clear that she had little choice in the matter and Irina didn’t respect Boris in the first place. These are people, not propagandists. 

There’s something beautiful about the sense of impending doom here, and the way that it plays out in the visuals and the performances. Of particular note here are Fyodor and his mother, both of whom I completely adore. Grandmother (as she is credited) is weary with wisdom; unlike her naive grandson, she has seen wars before and she knows how the play out, and the knowing look in her eye when she learns that Boris is going to serve and she gazes into his face with the certain knowledge that this intimacy between them is now finite and has an expiration date is heartbreaking. On the day that Boris is to report, two women are sent to the family home bearing gifts from the Communist Party, and as they begin to recite the exhortation of Boris’s bravery and patriotism that they were sent to deliver, Fyodor interrupts them and finishes the last half of the speech for them. He’s heard it before, and too many times, and although he himself will later serve the effort in his capacity as surgeon and head of a medical facility, he knows that war is an ugly, inglorious thing in which young men die, not a call to some greater glory or honor. This, too, was unusual at the time, as the process of De-Stalinization had only really become state policy some half a decade before the film was made, and creating art that professed such a view of war prior to this could very well have been considered insidious or even treasonous. As Boris departs for the assembly grounds, Grandmother first shuts the door behind him as voices retreat down the stairs, only to rush back out onto the landing and call down to him; Fyodor admonishes her for her emotion, perhaps feeling some shame at his own emotional outburst and transferring that embarrassment to his mother, only to join her in their pre-emptive (but correct) grieving when she tells him that she just wanted to see Boris “one last time” (emphasis added). 

Visually, this is a masterpiece, even if it doesn’t reach the same heights that the director would later achieve in Soy Cuba. There’s nothing as breathtakingly awe-inspiring as that bus transition scene or the funeral march in the third segment of that narrative, but this is nonetheless a gorgeously shot film, and the abundance of epic tracking shots is already on full display, from the way that the camera follows Veronika through the throngs of people as she struggles to find Boris before he ships out, to the similar scene at the end when she searches for him amongst the returning soldiers at the train station in Moscow, to the way that the camera moves with perfect precision as it follows Boris on the front lines as he races for the safety of the tree line with his injured compatriot on his back. The most stunning may be the repeated images of characters climbing a mind-boggling amount of stairs—first, Boris climbs them because he cannot bear to leave Veronika’s building after they have spent the night walking the city together; later, he bounds up them in a surreally shot sequence wherein he returns home triumphantly and marries Veronika as he promised, a dream as he lays dying; still later, those stairs are all that remain of Veronika’s apartment building when she returns home from the subway shelter after an air raid as she ascends them rapidly, already knowing that her parents have been killed but needing to see for herself. And that’s not even getting into the other ways that this film uses visual language with such style and aplomb; the choice to have Mark pursue Veronika through the streets of the city in the same places and from the same angles as we earlier saw her walk with Boris is particularly inspired, as if he is taking even that from her and making it revolting.

There’s a real sense of modernity that Soy Cuba had that is missing here, it’s true. That film felt like it could have been made yesterday, while this one definitely feels more like a product of its decade, with many of the hallmarks thereof. Still, as someone who usually can’t stand war movies, this one is a beautiful film, and although I don’t really know what the other contenders were, I have no doubt that it deserved its Golden Palm win. If you were interested in watching both, I might suggest starting here and watching the later film afterward, but both are beautiful, noteworthy, and deserving of attention, either as a pair or in isolation. The Cranes are Flying is currently streaming on Criterion. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Viy (1967)

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There’s a tricky balance between patience & expectation in recommending the historical curio Viy (aka Spirit of Evil) to the uninitiated. This is a one-of-a-kind cinematic artifact that concludes with what has to be one of the most gorgeous scares in the history of its artform. I’m already getting ahead of myself in overhyping it, though, as that glorious delayed payoff is a mere five-minute stretch of the film’s (mercifully brief) 77min runtime. There’s an early sequence that promises witchcraft & devilry for audiences patient enough to await its arrival, but much of the film is a slow, lightly comedic build to that final spectacle. I can only report that the witchy, demonic climax is well worth the wait, and that the movie would still be worth your attention even if it weren’t – due to its cultural significance as an early Soviet horror.

Cited as the first horror film produced in the Soviet Union, Viy feels like it’s gleefully getting away with something even when it’s pretending to be well-behaved. In the same era when Serious Artists like Andrei Tarkovsky struggled to express their religious beliefs onscreen under Soviet censorship, Viy sidesteps those restrictions by passing itself off as “a folk tale.” Adapted from the eponymous Nikolai Gogol text (which also inspired Mario Bava’s cult classic Black Sunday), it follows the story of young priests in training who very much believe in God, witches, and The Devil – with forbidden Christian iconography often decorating the sets they occupy. The mood is kept exceedingly light, though, as the bumbling would-be priests are basically frat boy buffoons on Spring Break who meet their end at the hands of a powerful witch. Despite the severity of its political & religious transgressions, this is essentially a horror comedy – with a comedic score keeping the mood light throughout (except at it blissfully chaotic climax).

While drunkenly enjoying a rowdy break from his studies in town, a young priest-in-training catches the lustful eye of a horny old witch. Unamused by her sexual advances, he beats her to death with a stone – a grotesquely outsized reaction to her enchantment. As retribution, the witch poses as the beautiful corpse of a local townie, insisting before her “death” that the very priest who bludgeoned her be summoned to pray for her soul over three consecutive nights. In classic fairy tale fashion, her menacing revenge on the idiot priest gradually escalates over those three nights—eventually reaching an intense supernatural crescendo during the final prayer session. The priest continually tries to weasel his way out of his responsibility to pray over the corpse (and, more to the point, to pay for his crime of drunkenly assaulting a witch), but his doomed fate is sealed as soon as the request is made. He gets his just desserts on that third night in a spectacularly satisfying act of supernatural revenge.

Viy’s value as a Soviet Era artifact is not going to interest every horror nerd. It’s a niche territory that’s only made more challenging by its shoddy English vocal dub, which plays like a book-on-tape translation where a single performer voices every character. If its historical context interests you, though (and if you generally have the patience for delayed payoffs to moody, atmospheric builds) the film is well worth the effort to reach its delirious haunted-house climax. The five-minute stretch that makes good on its long-teased witchcraft & devilry—boosted by an importation of Silent Era special effects into a 1960s filmmaking aesthetic—will leave an intense impression on your psyche that overpowers any minor qualms with its build-up. This is a quick, oddly lighthearted folk-horror curio with a fascinating historical context and an eagerness to wow the audience in its tension-relieving climax. That’s more than enough to melt my own horror-hungry heart, but your own mileage may vary.

-Brandon Ledet

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the term “pure cinema,” now that it’s become both a critical cliché and an apt descriptor of the kinds of films that have been winning me over in recent years. Films like Neon Demon, The Duke of Burgundy, and Beyond the Black Rainbow have all hit the pure cinema sweet spot for me, centering their artistic merits around the marriage of sound & the moving image, carving out a mood & a tone instead of structuring their goals through traditional stage play & television style narratives. As often as I find myself seeking a pure cinema aesthetic in my film selections, however, I do have to admit that the term’s sudden ubiquity, along with other descriptors like “tone poem” & “mood piece,” has watered down its meaning somewhat. There’s even been a recently launched Pure Cinema podcast jokingly titled after the term in a tongue in cheek way. As current as the “pure cinema” concern & descriptor feel in a hive mind sense, though, the type of art it describes has existed nearly as long as the medium as film itself. Last year, I fell in love with the early “pure cinema” silent era horror A Page of Madness, which explores its tone & mood-based concerns in a flood of intense, seemingly narrative-free imagery. Later that decade, director Dziga Vertov was even more direct & intentional in his pure cinema ambitions. Frustrated with early film’s adherence to narrative forms of art that came before it, like stage plays & literature, Vertov attempted to make a film purely concerned with the art of the moving image. The result was 1929’s avant-garde “documentary” Man with a Movie Camera.

Filmed over three years in a range of Soviet Russian cities, Man with a Movie Camera is structured as a day in the life in the modern industrialized age. The film has a from dusk until dawn narrative shape to it, but otherwise tells no coherent story. It is a silent film without intertitles, a movie with “no scenario, no sets, no actors.” Vertov attempts to establish a “universal language of cinema,” in which narrative adherence to an A-B plot would only get in the way of its pure cinema aspirations of a director as an artist attempting to test & define the boundaries of his medium. As a documentary, the film is an interesting look at what Soviet cities look like in the 1920s. The advertising, transportation systems, and assembly line machinery of places like Kiev & Moscow are documented with a kind of historical eye, even if they’re filtered through avant-garde cinematography & editing techniques. Modern leisure is captured just as much as factory work too, with the movie often breaking to document barroom alcohol consumption and families bumming around on the beach. There’s very little humanism to its documentary style, however, as the film deliberately avoids focusing on or developing anything resembling a character. Besides stray moments when a woman hooks a bra or a man walks across a construction beam, Man with a Camera films people from dehumanizing heights, like watching the scurrying citizens of an ant farm. The cities themselves are also abstracted in this way, as the camera searches for geometric lines in its buildings, nurseries, park benches, and typewriters. This emotionally distancing abstraction makes the film difficult to focus on in its entirety, even with its measly hour-long runtime, but any five minute stretch of the work is fascinating to the eye in a formal sense and this is ultimately a film about form.

A more accurate title for this work might have been Man with Two Cameras. Vertov’s favorite subject to film seems to be himself, filming.  The movie is overloaded with shots of camera equipment, projectors, film strips, and even movie theaters. Everything from principal shooting to the editing process to the screening of footage is represented onscreen, suggesting that Man with a Camera is less about documenting modern city life than it is about navel-gazing on the subject of what is art & what is cinema. Sometimes it finally ​finds a specific subject for audiences to latch onto in these reflections, like when stop motion footage of a camera turns it into a personified character. Overall, though, the movie more effectively breaks down the camera and the man who operates to their function as just two more machines in the larger, industrialized picture.

It can be striking how modern that goal & aesthetic are in a 2010s context. I imagine this is the exact kind of cinematic artifact that Guy Maddin daydreams about & drools over while planning out his own work. Personally, though, my fascination with Man with a Camera‘s early experiments in tracking shots, overlayed imagery, and mimicry of the human eye’s perspective as it darts around erratically can only take me so far. The avant-garde horrors of this film’s predecessor, A Page of Madness, were much easier for me to connect with because there was a humanity in its central narrative, however vaguely defined. The recent documentary Cameraperson also sounds more immediately interesting to me for similar humanist reasons, despite being just as loosely assembled over the course of disparately documented years, locations, and personalities. Man with a Movie Camera‘s dedication to a pure cinema ethos is both visually & philosophically interesting to me in an intellectual sense, but I do think a little influence from literary or dramatic narrative tradition would’ve been helpful in making it more interesting as a film instead of an academic exercise. Dziga Vertov was definitely onto something, though, and it’s fascinating to watch him reach for the outermost boundaries of his medium, something I wish more modern directors would do now that television & video games are encroaching on & democratizing their territory.

-Brandon Ledet