Mosfilm: Chronicle of Flaming Years (1961) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Mosfilm

While actress and film director Yuliya Solntseva was undeniably Russian, her husband and creative partner was Ukrainian film directing titan Aleksandr Dovzhenko and initially they began as wartime documentary filmmakers with 1943’s Ukraine in Flames before mounting her first standalone feature as a director with 1958’s Poem of the Sea.  A 35mm production that is regarded as the first of what would or wouldn’t become the director’s ‘Ukrainian Trilogy’, it was intended to be a Dovzhenko film but he passed away in 1956 right before cameras were set to begin rolling leaving the duties up to his widow Solntseva.  Working from Dovzhenko’s preproduction notes and sketches, she rose to the occasion and three years later would make not only Soviet but global cinema history with her Cannes Film Festival award winning favorite Chronicle of Flaming Years.

 
It is 1941 and the Great Patriotic War has begun with Ivan Orlyuk (Nikolay Vingranovskiy) a kolkhoz farmer from the Dnieper region drafted into the army to engage in fierce battles on the Dnieper River front.  Largely told from his first-person point-of-view perspective, he endures a great many hardships including but not limited to slain comrades in the heat of battle, Nazi occupied Ukraine, a burned village and a life-threatening injury he barely survives.  However, after an intense endurance including but not limited to the massacre of a school classroom by the Nazis, Ivan eventually makes his way to Berlin.  When victory is declared, Ivan returns home to meet his fiancĂ©e Ulyana (Svetlana Zhgun), leading them towards involvement in the liberated land’s first sowing.

 
Phantasmagorical, confrontational and often technically astounding, Chronicle of Flaming Years made cinema history by being the very first Sovscope 70mm film made in the Soviet Union and it’s director Yuliya Solntseva became the very first woman to win the Best Director prize at Cannes 1961.  Co-written by Aleksandr Dovzhenko and eventual War and Peace director Sergei Bondarchuk who provides omniscient voiceover narration, the experience of Chronicle of Flaming Years is a sensorily overwhelming one from sight to sound.  Lensed in 2.20:1 65mm by two cinematographers Fyodor Provorov (Viy) and Aleksei Temerin (The Enchanted Desna), the vistas unfolding of battle and eventual liberated landscape are jaw dropping in scope.  Then you have The Enchanted Desna composer Gavriil Popov’s sweeping score which gives Solntseva’s project a David Lean kind of grandeur. 

 
An ensemble piece interspersing many characters and actors including on the battlefield, in the classroom and in SS uniforms, the film eventually boils down to Nikolay Vingranovskiy as our central protagonist navigating the war torn landscapes in Ukraine.  Equally strong in the supporting role is Svetlana Zhgun who becomes the love of Ivan’s life.  Co-starring Boris Andreyev the hero of Ilya Muromets as well as A Big Family actor Sergei Lukyanov and The Cranes Are Flying actor Vasiliy Merkurev, Chronicle of Flaming Years though largely trained on Vingranovskiy nevertheless becomes something of a saga.  Mostly though, the eyes of Solntseva and her two cameramen are the real stars of this opulent 70mm war epic with the camera itself pulling off astonishing technical feats.  Take for instance a scene early on of a soldier getting wounded in battle and going into shell shock.  As he nears towards the camera, it begins spinning while he remains frozen in frame and it does not appear to be an optical effect.  Chronicle of Flaming Years is loaded with eye-defying imagery that ranks among the best 65mm photography ever done in the history of the format.

 
Released in Soviet 70mm cinemas in May 1961 before eventually making it’s way to the United Kingdom as a special Cinerama presentation that ran theatrically for as long as five weeks, Chronicle of Flaming Years was an almost instantaneous critical and commercial success.  A triumph of big-screen filmmaking which gives viewers an insight into what life was like during and after the Second World War on the grounds of Ukraine near the Dnieper River.  Sprawling and grandiose yet intimate and focused on two principal characters navigating the Hell and horrors of war back into ordinary rural life again, the film finally did see a limited United States premiere around 2017 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of a retrospective encompassing Poem of the Sea and The Enchanted Desna yet home video distribution here remains up in the air.  Perhaps Criterion or Deaf Crocodile can turn this around so filmgoers from all over the world can see one of the greatest Eastern European female filmmakers who ever lived arguably at her artistic peak here.

--Andrew Kotwicki