A Film Canon

The most striking cinematic elaboration of the crowd since The Crowd, The Cranes Are Flying reinvents the tracking-shot in a manner that will prove more suited to the panoramic, documentary Marxism of I Am Cuba, than Viktor Rozov's residually Stalinist war melodrama. As a result, the extended, hand-held sequences, in which the camera becomes sufficiently mobile and nimble to dodge tongues of flame, feel like relatively self-contained blueprints for that film, as the vast number of people required to pass the camera from hand to hand become a kind of collaborative surrogate for the crowd they depict, and even a compensation for its threatening, chaotic, apolitical potential. That said, Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky's spectacular tug-of-war between extreme high and low angle shots, culminating with the transformation of protagonist Veronika's (Tatyana Samojlova) face into a work of sublime, modernist architecture, draws a common denominator between these passages (which tend to culminate with an astonishing vertical trajectory) and her own awakening, while the crowd's frenzy informs an almost operatic intensification of key moments in the romantic narrative, usually centring on her second lover's musical pretensions. It's also worth mentioning the extent to which the cinematography plays on the ambiguity enabled by the Krushchev Thaw, drawing a sinister common denominator between parade and production-line, factory and front, as well as blurring fences, gates and bars into an ominous translucency that only becomes visible once the camera tracks in tandem with an engine, along Veronika's hyperactive sight-lines.