The Cranes Are Flying · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the birches. Boris, shot on a muddy verge somewhere at the front, takes his fatal step, and the camera does not stay with the dying man — it tips up and begins to turn, faster, into the crowns of the birch trees, their bare tops wheeling against a white sky until the spinning dissolves into a wedding that will never happen: Veronika in white, a staircase, faces. It is the most quoted image in Soviet cinema, and it tells you exactly what kind of film you are watching. The action — a soldier's death — is over in a second. Everything that matters happens after the action can do anything, in the turning of the world.

Deleuze has a name for that turning. He calls it the movement of the world: the moment a character falls still — here, falls dead — and the world takes over the motion the body has surrendered. Boris stops; the birches revolve; the camera, freed from him, keeps the dance going alone. Sergei Urusevsky's genius was to make the camera the thing that moves when the human being no longer can. And spliced into that revolving canopy is the phantom wedding — not a memory (it never happened) and not the present (he is dying), but a pure dream-image, what Deleuze calls an onirosign: a circuit of fantasy attached to no clock, no place, occupying the same instant as the loss it answers. Grief and what-might-have-been share one frame. Mariya Timofeyeva's cut doesn't explain the relation between them; it collides them, and out of the collision a third thing appears — the specific ache of a future cancelled. That is Eisenstein's pathetic montage, the shock-cut that Kalatozov's teachers used to make crowds rise against the Tsar, turned inward to make one woman's private catastrophe.

That inheritance is the whole argument of the film. The cut-as-emotion comes straight from Battleship Potemkin; the ecstatic bodies and faces come from Dovzhenko's Earth; the unchained, athletic camera — in-camera superimposition, the rig that climbs — descends from Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and, further back, from Karl Freund's strapped-on 'entfesselte Kamera' in The Last Laugh. What Cranes does with that toolkit is quietly revolutionary: it points all of it at a single suffering person instead of at the mass. Mother had pointed the way in 1926. But here the whole apparatus of Soviet montage, built to think politically about History, is repurposed to feel its way through one consciousness.

Whose consciousness? Watch how the camera behaves around Veronika. When she runs to the front through the churning departure crowd, the lens is carried bodily into the press of shoulders and coats — not observing her panic but having it. Deleuze would call this a perception-image sliding into a dicisign: we don't just see what a character sees, we feel the camera itself perceiving her perceiving, its presence grieving alongside her. And that mobility has a texture — flowing, unanchored, poured through crowds and along the river embankment where the cranes first pass overhead. Deleuze's word is reume: perception as current, as drift, vision that has come loose from any fixed standpoint. Urusevsky's short-focus wide-angle lens, pressed close and distorting at the edges, keeps the world liquid.

Against all this motion, Tatyana Samoylova's face. The dossier is right to call it a landscape. Deleuze's affection-image is exactly this: the close-up that holds a feeling before it can discharge into any act — a qualisign, a single quality shining off an immobile face. Radiant joy on the embankment; stricken numbness in the ruined apartment; and, crucially, nothing you could sort into 'faithful' or 'guilty' after Mark. The face refuses the verdict the war film was built to deliver.

Which is where the film touches something new. Veronika, after Boris is gone, can no longer act adequately to what befalls her. She is coerced, bombed out, dispossessed; the sensory-motor logic of the Stalinist war film — perceive the enemy, act, resolve — simply stops working for her. This is the crisis of the action-image, the hinge Deleuze locates in postwar cinema, and Cranes arrives at it in 1957, early. By the famous ending Veronika has become a seer rather than an agent: at the homecoming she does not act, she watches, moving through the victory crowd handing flowers to strangers, her grief given no cathartic discharge, only absorbed into a collective survival that has no room for it. The cranes overhead convert her unspendable private loss into an elegy for a generation. Boris does not come back. The film denies you the last-minute rescue that American montage was invented to provide, and asks for something harder: understanding.

What it did to cinema is measurable. The rotating canopy and the spiral staircase entered the language; you can trace them forward through every operator who wanted the camera to feel rather than record, up through the Steadicam era the film anticipates without the hardware. But the deeper bequest is moral. Kalatozov and Urusevsky proved that the most disciplined machinery of political montage could be turned to serve one imperfect, unheroic woman — and that in doing so it told a larger truth about the war than any monument. Rewatch it for the birches. Stay for the face that won't be judged.