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| Courtesy of Mosfilm |
While many collectives of world cinema
will refer to 1920s Soviet Union filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein as the father of
contemporary Russian cinema for his still-influential epic Battleship Potemkin
followed by his Ivan the Terrible film series as well as Andrei
Tarkovsky as subsequently the most popular Russian filmmaker who ever lived, one
name remains curiously overlooked despite winning a Palme d’Or in 1958 as well
as making one of the boldest feature films on the face of the Earth. That honor goes to People’s Artist of the
USSR winner Mikhail Kalatozov who from a purely technical standpoint was
arguably Russia’s very own Fritz Lang, a cinematic scientist who broke the
cinematic mold in such a way that his films still influence major filmmakers
today.
A wholly original artist whose work
from the mid-30s onward changed considerably with the shift to what was called “the
period of de-Stalinization” set into motion by Nikita Kruschev, Mikhail
Kalatozov was already a seasoned industry veteran, working since 1930 before
his first picture Salt for Svanetia was banned by the Soviets and he
went without work for nine years. Upon Kruschev’s
new pledge towards artistic freedom (though still faced with censorship in some
cases), Kalatozov crossed paths with cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky and the
two joined forces to more or less revamp the face of new Russian cinema from
top to bottom.
Initially a writer and cameraman who
worked his way up to fully fledged film directing, eventually landing him at
Mosfilm where he would embark on the most successful project of his career with
The Cranes Are Flying. A film
which put Kalatozov on the world cinema map and rightfully earned the coveted
Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, quickly generating two more less successful
but no less bold or indelible cinematic endeavors in its wake, the 1959
survival adventure film Letter Never Sent and the revolutionary 1964 Soviet-Cuban
propaganda epic I Am Cuba.
Though neither subsequent picture enjoyed
the accolades and adulation of The Cranes Are Flying with I Am Cuba nearly
ending the director’s career before embarking on his last film The Red Tent with
Sean Connery in a joint Italian-Russian co-production, these three distinctive
pictures though very different in form and intent nevertheless represent
writer-director Mikhail Kalatozov at the peak of his creative powers. As a from-the-ground-up cinematic innovator
whose astonishing visual flair and pyrotechnics remain so astounding and
inspiring, Kalatozov’s three most celebrated films have had such a profound
impact on world cinema (particularly Hollywood filmmakers), it is very likely
you’ve seen traces of this man’s work in your favorite films without even
realizing it.
The Cranes Are Flying (1957)
While most of the rest of the world
points to World War II as, just that, the Second World War, in Russia the
period of battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was fought between
1941 to 1945 in what they called The Great Patriotic War. A period of Soviet history which saw many,
many forthcoming cinematic dramatizations over the next fifty years, the Great
Patriotic War left, for much of the Russian populace, unshakable scars to their
physical and emotional well-being.
Which brings us to Mikhail Kalatozov’s towering
cinematic monument The Cranes Are Flying, the first and only Soviet film
to ever win the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a film which
presented a happy-go-lucky Moscow couple, Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) and
Boris (Alexei Batalov), who are madly in love.
But then WWII begins and Boris is drafted into the frontlines, leaving
Veronica alone fending off the hardships of her once idyllic home life
destroyed completely by bombing raids in addition to thwarting off her lover’s lecherous
cousin who somehow or another managed to evade the draft.
Adapted from his own play by Viktor
Rozov and sort of like a Russian Gone with the Wind concerning the
experience of a young woman whose world is turned inside out by war, The
Cranes Are Flying plays like yin and yang, offering a glimpse of the joyful
romance shared between the young couple followed by the same grounds once
walked now covered in rubble, gasoline and bullet casings. Much of the film’s strength comes from not
only Kalatozov and his cinematographer Urusevsky’s phantasmagorical imagery,
including some absolutely brilliant use of editing and superimpositions by
editor Mariya Timofeyeva, but by the film’s overwhelming original score by
Moisey Vaynberg.
Take for instance a sequence in which a
soldier in the middle of a barren winter landscape is gunned down and the film
abruptly erupts in a series of dutch angles, images layered on top of one
another and an explosion of sound and music, unleashing pure sensory
overload. We literally see a man’s entire
life flash before his eyes in the moment of death or dying, represented through
rapid-fire editing and several different scenes shown in brief flashback. It’s a technical effects laden sequence laced
with complex film editing techniques which would make even the legendary Fritz
Lang jealous. Quite simply, it is bravura
filmmaking of the highest order made by a man who was years ahead of his
Russian contemporaries at the time.
Of course, The Cranes Are Flying wouldn’t
be half as powerful were it not for the radiant Tatiana Samoilova who brings to
the role of Veronika a kind of Audrey Hepburn vibe to her character. Much of the film, Kalatozov’s camera is
trained on Samoilova’s face from her clean and bubbly smile glimpsed in the
first half to a dirty and strained distant gaze drowning in wartime in the
second half. Veronika starts off as an
ebullient carefree spirit but over the course of the movie has all traces of
her joyful former self beaten and burned out of her. As a viewer, we can’t help but empathize with
Veronika’s ordeal and unfairly dealt hand as circumstances, time and tide work
to erode away whatever feelings Veronika and Boris might’ve still had for one
another.
The first real recognizable female face
of Soviet cinema, decades before Natalya Negoda’s iconic turn as a Soviet sex
symbol in film with Little Vera, Tatiana Samoilova helped cement The
Cranes Are Flying as one of the first Russian films European and western
filmgoers could easily identify with.
Nobody wants a war and everyone knows what it feels like to fall in and
out of love for reasons beyond our own control and despite the differences in
language and locale, this is a story just about everyone can relate to. An emotional powerhouse with dynamic
groundbreaking filmmaking with a powerful heroine at the epicenter, The
Cranes Are Flying is one of the best films ever made about the power of war
to make or break even the most intensely committed of human relationships.
Letter Never Sent (1964)
Just a couple of years after making seismic
waves around the global cinematic arena, director Mikhail Kalatozov and actress
Tatiana Samoilova reunited for the director’s next project which is spoken of
the same breath as The Cranes Are Flying but as a picture couldn’t be
more different in terms of visual design, structure and ultimately how the
thing plays out onscreen. Shifting gears
from the Second World War to the endurance of wading through the freezing cold central
Siberian terrain, playwright Viktor Rozov also reteamed with Kalatozov and
screenwriters Valeri Osipov (based on his own play) and Grigori Koltunov to
create a film that invariably paved the way for such tense outdoors and woodsy survival
thrillers as Sorcerer, The Edge and most recently The Revenant.
Dubbed Letter Never Sent, the
film zeroes in on a guide named Konstantin (Innokenty Smoktunovsky) who is
tasked with chaperoning three geologists, Tanya (Tatiana Samoilova), Andrei
(Vasily Livanov) and Sergei (Yevgeni Urbansky), to the Siberian mountains in search
of elusive diamonds. On the flight,
Konstantin pens a letter to his wife about the expedition, meanwhile Andrei and
Sergei start butting heads over their mutual affections for Tanya.
Soon the four finally do find their hidden
buried treasure, but it comes at a cost when the crew awakens in the forest one
morning to find it engulfed in flames and from here it becomes an endurance
test ala The Cranes Are Flying or more recently Larisa Shepitko’s The
Ascent as the forces of the natural world begin chipping away at our cast of
characters piece by piece. With a raging
forest fire blazing on and encroaching winter weather, the film becomes a
survival story as our geologists press on against unforgiving elements.
Far bleaker and more visceral than The
Cranes Are Flying with a simple-minded goal of survival, Letter Never
Sent more or less drops its cast of characters in rugged terrain and
watches them flounder when the world around them unleashes a kind of Old
Testament level of natural fury. Adorned
with extraordinary wide-angled cinematography which seems to make the forests
come alive and feel that much more entangling and an evocative, doom-filled
score by Nikolai Kryukov which even hints at electronica at times, Letter
Never Sent is like being in Heaven turning to Hell in slow motion as the
battle against the elements only intensifies.
Unlike The Cranes Are Flying, however,
Tatiana Samoilova is not the film’s main protagonist, however. Soon over time it becomes clear Letter
Never Sent is being shouldered by our tour guide played by Innokenty
Smoktunovsky who finds himself in over his head with the geologists who have
their own sets of skeletons in the closet, boiling over as their circumstances
grow more dire. Watching the film and
the endurances ahead faced by the characters, you can’t help but fear for the
actors some. Take for instance a showstopping
sequence where the group awakens to find the forest around them is ablaze. Combined with the production pyrotechnic effects
and Kalatozov’s arresting camerawork, you really feel like you’re being burned
up with the characters even if we know it’s just an illusion.
Though a follow up to The Cranes Are
Flying and arguably the superior film, Letter Never Sent was slated
to go into the 1960 Cannes Film Festival before being pulled at the last minute
as Kalatozov later remarked the film wasn’t ready to be shown yet. Moreover, Soviet critics blasted Kalatozov
for focusing more on the film’s cinematography than giving us a main character
to identify with and rally behind. That
said, the film has since gone on to be the one that catapulted Kalatozov into
the pantheon of the all-time greatest directors in the world. Despite being unseen for decades, in 1995 the
film was rescued by Francis Ford Coppola before being shown to western
audiences. Further still, director Rian
Johnson pointed to Letter Never Sent as a singular influence on his Star
Wars film The Last Jedi.
Seen now, the magnificence and grandeur
of Letter Never Sent is such that one viewing simply won’t let you
absorb all of its beautiful (and terrible) wonderment in. One of the most visually astonishing films
ever created, Kalatozov’s galvanizing adventure film, though separated by years
and a language barrier, remains as pulverizing and jaw droppingly beautiful as
ever. Not everyone emerged unscathed
from such an ambitious undertaking though, as actor Vasily Livanov suffered
lifelong vocal chord damage shooting a windy scene at forty degrees below zero. Nevertheless, for the viewing public Letter
Never Sent has lost none of its staggering visual power and ability to convey
the feeling of physical endurance in a heated battle for survival in the frozen
tundra.
I Am Cuba (1964)
The film that capstoned (and nearly
ended) director Mikhail Kalatozov’s career and one that was nearly forgotten
completely at the time of its release before being rediscovered by American
filmmakers decades later, the Soviet-Cuban co-super-production I Am Cuba is
an epic anthological tapestry of life in Cuba as seen, heard and felt through
the eyes, ears and soul of the country of Cuba itself. Revolutionary in form yet propagandistic in
intent, the film I Am Cuba is a picture like no other before or
since. Unlike the previously released The
Cranes Are Flying or Letter Never Sent, I Am Cuba has no main
character, no conventional narrative, no main plotline. Rather it is a series of vignettes
experienced by Cuba who whispers to the viewer throughout in a rather feminine
voice.
Broken into four short stories intended
to portray “the suffering of the Cuban people”, the first story details the
disparity between impoverished Cubans and wealthy American-run casinos before
moving onto a farmer’s tale of woe when his landlord sells his farmland to
American investors. Later still we see a
group of American sailors who try to hunt down and rape a young Cuban woman
before being rescued by a bystander at the last minute. Further still, we’re given imagery of the
Havana revolution in a very overtly pro-Castro montage of Cuban revolutionaries
carrying guns as the camera gazes up upon them.
After the 1959 Cuban Revolution and
dissolution of diplomatic ties with Cuba in 1961, Cuba turned to the Soviet
Union for film related partnerships and soon got in touch with Kalatozov who
was given immense financial support from both Russia and Cuba as well as a
wealth of creative freedom. One of the
first movies to invent a watertight camera lens with a special periscope
cleaner, the film is best remembered for a now iconic sequence where the camera
seems to climb down the side of a building to a swimming pool area before
following one of the vacationing swimmers underwater into the pool. Paul Thomas Anderson rather sneakily reused
this shot in his film Boogie Nights but not without giving due credit to
Kalatozov’s film as the primary influence of that shot.
Filmed during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
including (at one point) utilizing over 1,000 Cuban soldiers for some shots,
the film was also one of the very earliest progenitors of the soon-to-be
Steadicam, including an apparatus that strapped the camera to a vest worn by the
camera operator. There are also times
when the camera seems to float in midair, an effect accomplished over half a century
before drone photography would become commonplace. Further still, there’s one sequence where the
camera seems to leap from rooftop to rooftop and not a track of technical
equipment ever shows up in the shot, making it all the more seamless and
eye-defying.
Despite everything intended by Fidel Castro
(who watched all the rushes during the shoot) and the USSR, neither Russian nor
Cuban viewers or critics took to I Am Cuba when it came out. Cuban viewers thought the film undermined
Cubans while Russian filmgoers didn’t find it revolutionary enough, more or
less making the film for its intended audience a failure. Though made in 1964, nobody outside of Russia
or Cuba had ever heard of I Am Cuba until 1992 when the film was
rediscovered by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola who joined forces with
Milestone Films and (for a short time) released the film commercially in
America.
While overtly a piece of propaganda and
narratively speaking a vastly inferior work to The Cranes Are Flying or Letter
Never Sent, I Am Cuba nevertheless has become a major source of
inspiration for American filmmakers able to filter out the messages and just
enjoy the revolutionary structure and design of the film. More of a dazzlingly beautiful artifact of
experimental avant-garde filmmaking as mainstream narrative cinema than an
involving story you can identify with, I Am Cuba though meant to be
anti-American turned out to be the best thing to happen to American movies when
it was unearthed in the early 1990s.
Seen now, the film is an encapsulation
of every innovative cinematic technique Mikhail Kalatozov employed during his
career including some new nifty surprises along the way. Regardless of intent, you can filter out the
point of view and just look at the whole thing as a truly original filmic
construct, a movie that in essence has to rethink the way to make a film and
tell a story.
Creatively speaking there has never
been a film remotely like it before or since, though some may point to Darren Aronofsky’s
mother! as a more recent example of a filmmaker trying to humanize a
land or country. Though personally not
my favorite Kalatozov (Letter Never Sent earns that top honor), I Am
Cuba whatever your political leanings are remains on its terms an
extraordinary motion picture made by one of Russia’s most distinguished filmmaking
pioneers who didn’t make a home run with this one but nevertheless clearly swung
as hard as he could.
--Andrew Kotwicki
