The Inspiring Tale Of a Flying Soviet

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The New York Sun

In cinema, as in any art, less is frequently more, technologically speaking. Some of the most interesting benchmarks in film have had as much to do with making-do than with the blessing of improved hardware. Even before the Bolshevik revolution, the nascent Russian film industry struggled to rise from an extended technical infancy to adolescence. When communism came, the ideological powers recognized the importance of a strong, politically motivated film industry with which to disseminate the party line.

But a nation struggling to feed and arm itself can only earmark so many rubles for the manufacturing of movie hardware. Capitalism, like rank, has its privileges. Throughout the 1920s, the free-market American and Weimar German film industries made gigantic technical strides compared with Soviet Russia’s baby steps. Russian film theory — the cheapest part of the filmmaking process — flourished. Russian film technology did not.

Soviet film stocks and the chemicals required to get a completed movie to the exhibition stage, sorely lacked in the consistency and quality that was the pride of such Western manufacturers as Eastman Kodak and AGFA. In a propaganda war, as in any war, it’s up to the foot soldiers to make due with what they’re given. Faced with the reality that any two magazines of black-and-white film could vary dramatically in picture quality when processed and printed, the montage-obsessed Soviet directors of the ’20s cultivated a different approach to making films. Because a single magazine of film could only be trusted to match, when cut together, if it was used to cover a single scripted scene, it made sense to exhaust that magazine in as few takes as possible. In concert with their casts and technicians, Soviet filmmakers began choreographing long and elaborate single-shot takes, where the camera would glide up, down, around, and through the scene. When the shot was done the scene was done.

It was this technically impoverished yet ingenuity-rich film industry that 20-year-old business school dropout Mikhail Kalatozov (born Mikhail Kalatozishvili in 1903) entered in 1923. The subject of an all-too-brief retrospective beginning today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cinématek, Kalatozov, who died in 1973, is Soviet Russia’s patron saint of camera movement. The four films in BAM’s survey — 1957’s “The Cranes are Flying,” 1959’s “The Letter Never Sent”, 1964’s “I am Cuba,” and his last film, 1969’s “The Red Tent,” are the apex of the Soviet long-take camera aesthetic. The earlier films in BAM’s showcase are also products of another current in the history of Soviet film production. Though he made these films during the cultural thaw brought about by Josef Stalin’s death and Nikita Kruschev’s rise to power in the 1950s, Kalatozov had already learned the hard way to toe the party line. After training as an actor, a film editor, and a cameraman, Kalatozov’s first films as a director, including 1930’s amazing operatic proto-mockumentary, “Salt for Svenetia,” were received with increasing anxiety by the politically appointed bosses at the Tifilis Studios in Kalatozov’s native Georgia.

Rather than continue to bite the hand that fed, Kalatozov temporarily abandoned directing in favor of administrative work, a move that prolonged his career and likely prolonged his life. Appointed cultural liaison to the American film industry, he sat out most of World War II in Hollywood. Kalatozov returned to the director’s chair after the war and hit international pay dirt with “The Cranes are Flying,” a movie whose extravagantly unhinged camerawork (photographed by Kalatozov’s frequent collaborator, Sergei Urusevsky) garnered the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1958. “Every director I knew back then was trying to figure out some of the shots in ‘The Cranes are Flying,'” the journeyman American director Joseph Sargent once told me. “None of us could believe it.”

On the surface a typical Soviet World War II melodrama, in which sacrifice trumps love, “Cranes” places the needs of the individual dangerously close to the level of the needs of the state. Its daring and sumptuous celebration of emotion would not have been tolerated in Stalinist Russia’s “social realism” cultural climate. Similarly, “The Letter Never Sent” takes the venerable Soviet film convention of stranding a doomed group of courageous explorers in a remote wilderness, and turns it into a love triangle so romantic, contemplative, and lushly photographed that it approaches surrealism.

Though “I am Cuba” achieved a level of technical daring that retains cult status among modern filmmakers (Paul Thomas Anderson’s introductory long-take swimming pool tracking shot in “Boogie Nights” is an acknowledged quote from the Kalatozov film), its nearly apolitically naïve view of Castro’s Cuba pleased neither the film’s Cuban nor Soviet backers.

The director John Casavettes, addressing mainstream movies’ emphasis on spectacle over emotional truth, once observed, “I’ve never seen a helicopter blow up in real life, why should I show one blowing up in a film?” Mikhail Kalatozov’s final film, “The Red Tent,” infuses the obligatory carnage and hardship of an airship crash on the North Pole with such acute visual poetry that the explosions themselves bear the emotional truth of opera. A joint Italian/Russian production, “The Red Tent” plays like a disaster movie directed by Sergio Leone at his most elegiac. Like the other three films in BAM’s retrospective, Kalatozov’s probing, keening, exalting moving camera invests every frame of his last film with degrees of regret, loss, and yearning that speak directly to the heart.

Through October 14 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).


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