Tireless Cranes

 Another text from Recrudescence.

Tireless Cranes 

If When the Cranes are Flying* were a question, the answer would be: from the third shot of the pre-credits sequence. In the sky, we see their impeccable V formation that will not return until the very end of the film. Those cranes have, truth be told, flown more than once over the screens of the world, and Mikhail Kalatozov's film is perhaps the only Russian film to have become part of the life of the French. To the point that, dubbed by the Paris Soundtrack Company (SPS), it loses nothing. The grandmother with white hair who exclaims "I can't believe I forgot that I still have some saucisson; I'll go get it" is an essence of a grandmother, at home in every kitchen and credible in every language.

Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1958, the film was loved for various reasons. Reasons of thaw, first of all (two years after the Khrushchev report). Reasons of lyricism, too (because of the theory of the "emotional camera" owed to its chief cinematographer, the famous Sergei Urusevsky). It was enough then for a film not to speak of the war in heroic and pompous terms for it to seem like a true sign of thawing. That the love story between Boris and Veronika suddenly benefits from an abuse of camera movements normally reserved for war epics was enough to make The Cranes are Flying a film with a difference. That Tatiana Samoilova was allowed to wait until the very last shot to melt her private grief into the collective emotion was a real breach in the official logic of martyrdom of Stalinist cinema.

The informed cinephile opinion however was less keen. It said that the poetry of the film felt fabricated, that the shreds of aged avant-garde surprised but remained unconvincing. It said that this falsely youthful film would likely age badly and also that it wasn't enough to cancel out so many Stalinist horrors. Nevertheless, the kid who was fourteen in 1958 would rediscover, thirty years later, the intact sensation of what had seemed to him for a short moment the very essence of cinema: the amplified noise of the tic toc of the clock, the dying character reliving his life between birch trees, and the streaks of crude light on the faces of the lovers. 

Why is it not in vain that those old cranes are being broadcast again, with dubbed French calls (yes, the crane "calls") on Channel 1? Because Gorbachev has succeeded Khrushchev and that, with yet another thawing, it is with the same tireless innocence that we are once again looking eastward. Except that from the USSR, it is no longer only the films that come to us, but also news reports that we are still watching — owing to the fact that these are the first and that we are not yet accustomed to them — like films.

It was strange to watch again The Cranes are Flying after all the evening news broadcasts on all six channels, each with its report on Armenia. All the more strange since the war evoked by Kalatozov and the Armenian earthquake are both catastrophes. Was it finally possible to "critique" the Cranes, as if their flight had found its landing place? To at least compare the way an apartment building bombed in the forties is filmed in 1958 and the way, thirty years later, Soviet authorities behave on the site of the Armenian earthquake. Of course, this belated reverse-shot sends Kalatozov's film into the most mannerist aestheticism. Does it prove right those who had seen more tricks than sincerity? But to those who used to say "so what?", it also proves them right.

When you see the film again, you end up understanding why it still works. It's that Kalatozov and Urusevsky seem to have made two films in one. One for pleasure and another one. When they launch into a scene in a frenzy, with vanishing lines, successions of spaces, sprints of actors, flights of cranes and unhinged music, it creates a certain sensation: the sensation of being moved. Yet (it's the other film), this sensation is never picked up again — neither worked through nor developed — in the scene that immediately follows. It remains (in memory) because it was born without a sequel (in the film).

The Cranes are Flying does not rest on an idea of progression or dawning awareness but on the childlike fear Veronika has of suddenly seeing something bigger than herself (a body or a crowd). block all of her space and prevent her from running. That's all.

* Translator's note: the French title of the film is Quand passent les cigognes (When the cranes are flying...)

First published in Libération on December 19th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.