The Cranes Are Flying: Hope is a harmless mental illness

There is a moment early in Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957) that announces, with breathtaking clarity, that this is not the cinema you think you know. Two lovers, Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) and Boris (Alexei Batalov), race through the streets of Moscow, giddy with the foolish, magnificent certainty of young love. They toss an alarm clock from one to the other, a private joke about time, about the hours they spend apart, about the future that stretches before them like an endless, sunlit avenue. The camera does not observe them. It dances with them. It spins, it dips, it rises, it falls. It is as if the very apparatus of filmmaking has fallen in love alongside its subjects.

This is the opening promise of The Cranes Are Flying: a film that would use every tool in the cinematic arsenal not to document war, but to feel it. Released during the brief, brilliant flowering of the Khrushchev Thaw, Kalatozov's masterpiece became the first Soviet film to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and for good reason. It broke every rule of Socialist Realism not with a hammer, but with a heartbeat. It told a story of World War II that was not about heroes and tractors, but about a woman who makes an unforgivable mistake and a man who dies dreaming of her. It is a film about hope in the face of annihilation, about the fear that freezes the blood, about the strange, cruel algebra of loss and gain, and about the stubborn, irrational persistence of life.

The Thaw That Made It Possible: Historical Context and Courage

To understand The Cranes Are Flying, one must first understand the ice from which it emerged. For nearly a decade after World War II, Stalin's regime imposed a de facto ban on any non-official representation of the war. Only highly idealized, government-sanctioned images were allowed to circulate. The reality of suffering, the moral compromises of survival, the simple fact that ordinary people might be more concerned with their own affective world than with the fate of the nation these were forbidden territories.

Then came 1956. Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress condemned Stalin's cult of personality and set in motion a short-lived but transformative period of liberalization known as the Thaw. It was in this atmosphere of cautious openness that Viktor Rozov adapted his own play Eternally Alive into a screenplay, and Kalatozov, a director who had cut his teeth on documentaries in the late 1920s, saw an opportunity to make something unprecedented.

The film's achievement was not merely artistic but political. As film scholar Josephine Woll has argued, the film validated "the supremacy of feeling" as an "alternative to officially enshrined values". It suggested that a woman's inner turmoil, her grief, her guilt, her struggle to survive, was as worthy of cinematic attention as any battlefield heroics. The fact that the film was made at all, and that it passed the censors, speaks to the extraordinary moment of its creation. As one critic notes, "Chances are the censors were so besotted by the cinematic splendor (as well as the half-hearted nationalistic ending) that they let it pass".

The Architecture of Hope: Character and Introduction

The film introduces its central couple in a manner that consciously echoes the silent era, a deliberate choice by Kalatozov to prioritize image over word. As Mieczysław Weinberg's buoyant score swells, Veronica and Boris frolic down a riverside street, their joy rendered in purely visual terms. They are captured at low angles, lending them an iconic, almost mythic quality. They are not yet citizens of a nation at war; they are simply two people in love, and the camera grants them the dignity of that simplicity.

Veronica, played by the mesmerizing Tatiana Samoilova, is introduced as a whirlwind of spontaneity and sincerity. She is not a saint, not a paragon of socialist virtue. She is, as Soviet critic Maia Turovskaia observed, a character whose charm derives from "the turn of a head, a momentary pose, the blink of eyelashes, the helplessness and obstinacy, the tenderness and pride" of a particular woman. Samoilova, who would later play Anna Karenina, brings to Veronica a quality of raw, unguarded emotion that feels revolutionary even now.

Boris, played by Alexei Batalov, is her counterpart in decency. He is an engineer, a responsible young man who volunteers for the army immediately after the German invasion is announced, without waiting to be called up. His goodness is almost fatal, and indeed, it is his sense of duty that seals his fate. He is among the first to die, reported to his family as missing in action. The film never pretends that his sacrifice is anything other than a tragedy. The old men who gather to send the young men off speak of the monuments that will be built for the noble fallen, but a heavy, foreboding silence offsets their patriotic chatter. Kalatozov knows that monuments are cold comfort to the dead.

The Interference of Lives: Mark, Family, and the Geometry of Pain

The film's narrative structure is, in essence, the story of Veronica's fall and redemption, and the architecture of that fall is built around her relationship with Boris's cousin, Mark (Alexander Shvorin). Mark is a draft-dodger, a coward who connives his way to a deferment while Boris goes to the front. He is also a man of barely suppressed desire, and in one of the film's most devastating sequences, he sexually assaults Veronica during a bombing raid.

The scene is a masterclass in expressive cinema. Kalatozov cuts around any explicit image of the assault, but he renders its violence through pure cinematic language. A thunderstorm rages outside, rendered in expressionistic flashes of strobe-like white that blind the screen. The lightning seems to erupt out of Mark's desire, and the effect is horrifying without being graphic. As the critic for Slant Magazine notes, "the manner in which the storm seems to erupt out of Mark's barely suppressed desire for Veronika makes the implications of his actions all too clear".

Out of guilt, exhaustion, or sheer inertia, Veronica agrees to marry Mark. She moves into Boris's family home, where his parents and his young cousin Irina watch her with a mixture of pity and disgust. The film refuses to judge her, and this is its most radical gesture. As one analysis notes, "the film refused either to explain her behaviour or to judge it". In the context of Soviet cinema, where women on the home front were expected to be saint-like models of wartime heroism, this was nothing short of revolutionary.

The family home becomes a pressure cooker of unspoken accusations. Veronica is ostracized by those who once loved her. She works as a nurse in a ward overflowing with wounded soldiers, always scanning their faces for sight of Boris, always hoping and always being disappointed. The wide-angle lenses used by cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky transform the hospital rooms and domestic clutter into expressionistically distorted prisons. The walls seem to close in. The faces of the wounded become widened, surreal shapes that look as if they might jump right out of the screen.

The Sculpting of Time: Cinematography as Emotion

The true protagonist of The Cranes Are Flying is not any single character but the camera itself. Sergey Urusevsky, who would go on to shoot Kalatozov's Soy Cuba, created a visual language that was unlike anything that had come before. One critic describes the film as taking "20s Soviet montage theory and fusing it with a Wellesian approach to blocking, camera movement, lens selection, and lighting and then dialing it all up 1000%". The result is a film that feels as if it is not merely recording events but experiencing them.

Consider the departure scene, a single unbroken shot of staggering complexity. The sequence begins with a close-up on Veronica inside a bus that is slowing down. She pokes her head in and out of the window, then decides to step off and continue on foot. Instead of cutting, the camera executes a 180-degree turn to follow her out of the bus and into a dense crowd of soldiers and civilians. It continues, presumably on a dolly, to follow her from some distance as she weaves her way through the throng. Finally, it moves up into a crane shot that reveals Veronica recklessly rushing across a procession of tanks in order to reach the other side of the street. Not a single cut interrupts the action.

Famed American cinematographer Haskell Wexler, when asked in 2011 to name an image that had affected his work, chose precisely this scene. Its power lies in its documentary quality, its sense of chaotic, unrepeatable reality. Yet it is anything but chaotic; it is a masterpiece of choreography, a ballet of grief and desperation.

The film's most audacious sequence comes later, on the battlefield. Boris, wounded and dying, looks up at the sky. He sees a spiral of cranes, the symbol of his love for Veronica, and in that moment, Kalatozov and Urusevsky unleash perhaps the most audacious superimpositions ever committed to film. The critic for Letterboxd describes the effect with rare eloquence: "There are very, very few moments in cinema that have made me sit up and go 'Jesus christ!', but this is one of them. It's so extravagantly amazing and novel that I scarcely have the vocabulary to even describe how wonderful this sequence is: an honest-to-god pinnacle of cinema as a form of expression".

In Boris's dying vision, his hopes and dreams merge with the image of Veronica. The camera zooms rapidly in and out of a shot of the moon, preventing the image from focusing as the life leaves his eyes. Time is being sculpted. Memory is being woven into the moment of death. And we, the audience, are left breathless.

The Emotional Ride: From Despair to a Flawed Redemption

The film's emotional architecture is one of sustained tension and catharsis. After Boris's death, after the assault, after the forced marriage and the ostracism, Veronica reaches her lowest point. She runs to a railway bridge, intending to throw herself onto the tracks. The sequence is shot in a sped-up style, so that she seems to be sprinting faster than a locomotive itself. The camera stays close to her body, its movements and the editing imitating her feverish pace. We are physically with her, trapped in her desperation.

But then, in a moment of unexpected grace, she sees a young boy wandering into the path of an oncoming truck. She lunges, pulls him to safety, and in that act of saving another life, she saves her own. She adopts the boy, whose parents have been killed in the war. She returns to the family home, not as a penitent, but as a woman who has chosen to live.

The ending of The Cranes Are Flying has been a subject of critical debate. After all the film's hellish portrayal of war and trauma, it concludes with a moment of official patriotism. Boris's father, finally learning of his son's death, delivers a speech about the victory and the future. Veronica, standing among the crowd of returning soldiers, looks up at the sky and sees the cranes flying overhead. She smiles through her tears.

Some critics find this ending disappointingly conventional, a "tossed-off handwave of a message" that feels inadequate as a salve for what the audience has just endured. Others see it as a necessary concession to the censors, a thin veneer of patriotism over a deeply subversive film. But perhaps there is another reading. Perhaps the ending is not patriotic but human. The war is over. The survivors must find a way to go on. The cranes, which have symbolized love and loss throughout the film, now symbolize the persistence of hope. Veronica has lost everything—her parents, her lover, her innocence, her reputation—and she has gained a child, a future, a reason to live. The film does not pretend that this is a fair trade. It simply acknowledges that this is how life works. We lose. We gain. We keep going.

The Poetics of Light and Shadow: Visual Contrast as Moral Language

Throughout the film, Urusevsky's cinematography uses contrast as a moral and emotional language. The opening scenes are bathed in bright, diffused light, the sparkle of sunlight on water, the open sky above the lovers' heads. As the war intrudes, the interiors become enveloped in darkness, the windows blacked out as protection against the Luftwaffe's dive-bombing. The chiaroscuro lighting, the deep focus, the canted angles—all of it derives from German Expressionism, but Kalatozov and Urusevsky deploy it in service of a distinctly Soviet story.

One particularly striking example occurs on the stairs leading down from the bridge where we first saw Veronica and Boris. In the opening, the stairs are shot brightly, with the camera capturing much of the open sky. Later, when Mark accosts Veronica on the same steps, the shot mostly frames the stone wall, with only a sliver of sky visible above. The composition itself foreshadows Veronica's loss of hope, the narrowing of her world.

The bombing raid sequence, which intercuts the destruction of the city with Mark's assault on Veronica, uses strobe lighting so extreme and violent that it shatters the barrier between the continuous shot and the edit. The frames flash white, then black, then white again. We cannot see clearly. Neither can Veronica. The technique is not mere virtuosity; it is the expression of a consciousness under siege.

Hope in the Time of War: The Film's Enduring Power

The Cranes Are Flying endures because it understands something essential about hope. Hope is not the absence of fear. It is not the naive belief that everything will turn out all right. Hope is the stubborn, irrational refusal to stop living even when living means suffering. Veronica's hope is not that Boris will return she knows, deep down, that he is gone. Her hope is that she can survive his absence. Her hope is that she can be forgiven, or at least that she can forgive herself. Her hope is that the cranes will keep flying, that spring will come again, that the world will continue to turn even after it has broken her heart.

The film's final image is not of victory or defeat, but of a woman looking up at the sky. She is not looking for Boris. She is looking for the birds. And they are there. They have always been there.

In 1991, decades after the film's release, it was shown at a library in Providence, Rhode Island, as part of a festival of Russian culture. Among the audience was an eighty-year-old woman, a Russian émigré who had seen the film in 1957. The print was scratched, the sound was poor, but she still wept. "All of us did," she said.

That is the power of The Cranes Are Flying. It is not a film about history. It is a film about the human heart, and the human heart does not change. It hopes. It fears. It loses. It gains. And sometimes, if it is very lucky, it looks up and sees the cranes flying overhead.

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