Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Ballad of a Soldier
1959 · Grigoriy Chukhray · Ballad of a Soldier on Sightlines
A boy is running across a field, a German tank is behind him, and then the world turns over. Chukhrai's camera turns upside down. The sky slides to the bottom of the frame and the earth hangs overhead like a ceiling about to fall. It is one of the most famous shots in Soviet cinema, and it is worth holding onto, because the rest of Ballad of a Soldier is about a world being set back on its feet, one small kindness at a time.
The boy is Alyosha Skvortsov, nineteen years old, a signalman. What he does in that field earns him a few days' leave. A Stalin-era war film would have made that deed its summit. Here it happens in the first minutes, seen upside down, and the film plays it as fright at least as much as courage. Chukhrai had been a paratrooper and was wounded in the war, and you can feel a veteran's distrust of the heroic pose. Then the film simply moves on and puts Alyosha on a train.
Gilles Deleuze gives us a useful way to see what Chukhrai is doing. Classic cinema, in his account, runs on what he calls the action-image: a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the story is the chain of those acts. The war film is its natural home. A hero sees the enemy, does the decisive thing, and the world is changed. Alyosha has his goal ready-made, and it is almost a fairy tale. He wants to reach his mother and mend her roof. That is the engine. What makes the film is how often the engine stalls.
It stalls because people need help. A soldier who has lost a leg is afraid to go home to his wife. A woman has betrayed her husband at the front. There are old people and grieving people on the platforms. Each time, Alyosha sees a need and stops for it, and each time his days of leave shrink. Deleuze, writing about the films that came after the war, noticed the decisive act giving way to the trip: characters moving through a string of encounters that never add up to a plot. He called this the balade, the stroll or ramble, a French word one letter away from the ballad of this film's title. Its signs are a scattered situation of many weakly linked people and an episodic chain in which one scene doesn't cause the next, so that the cuts carry feeling instead of cause and effect.
That describes Ballad closely, with one real difference, and the difference is the film's genius. Deleuze's postwar wanderers mostly drift. Alyosha never drifts. Within each episode he is still a man of action: he sees, he helps. But the large action, the war and the heroic deed and even the trip home, keeps breaking into pieces. The film sits on what Deleuze calls the crisis of the action-image, the hinge where cinema began to lose faith that acts resolve situations. Chukhrai keeps faith in acts, as long as they are small. The heroism that counts is a detour.
The spaces help explain why. Chukhrai keeps the war almost entirely off the front line. We are in trains, stations, a bombed depot, the back of a truck. Deleuze called spaces like these "any-space-whatever": places that have stopped being a setting for decisive action and become something you pass through, wait in, endure. Postwar cinema was full of them, and the rubble had a lot to do with that. Here they are transit spaces, and the country's immensity, which the camera keeps showing as open sky and damaged land, presses against a boy trying to reach one small village.
The best of these spaces is a hay-filled freight car. Alyosha and a young woman, Shura, are shut in together while the train moves. She begins wary and slowly comes to trust him. Very little gets said, and nothing is acted on. This is Deleuze's affection-image: a feeling registered in faces and bodies and never discharged into action. Zhanna Prokhorenko and Vladimir Ivashov were young and barely known, cast so that no star persona would get between us and them, and the freshness holds. You watch feeling gather in a confined, rocking box.
All of this comes to us as remembrance. The film opens on a mother waiting at a roadside, and a narrator tells us we are hearing a memorial. Deleuze is wary of flashback. He calls it a recollection-image, a closed loop from the present into a dated past, and he notes that it tends to carry a feeling of fate. Chukhrai uses that weight on purpose. Because the story is framed as something remembered, there is no suspense about heroics, and our attention goes where he wants it, to the worth of each ordinary hour.
The film's ancestors show how much it gathers. From Dovzhenko's Earth (1930) comes the lyrical habit of holding faces, sky and land for their own emotional weight. Chapaev (1934) had already made the soldier fallible and warm. Turksib (1929) made the railway a rhythmic spine for Soviet film, and here the railway becomes the whole architecture. From Italy, Bicycle Thieves (1948) supplied the quest through a landscape, where meaning builds up from ordinary encounters. André Bazin championed neorealism as cinema that respects reality rather than chopping it into drama, and Deleuze later found in it the birth of characters who see more than they can act on. Ballad takes neorealism's road and keeps a hero who still acts. Chukhrai's own The Forty-First (1956) had set two lovers against a landscape, and Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957), with Urusevsky's spinning, untethered camera, opened the way for that inverted sky.
The film also reverses something. In the great Soviet montage tradition, the individual dissolves into the masses and the crowd becomes one body. In Ballad the crowds on the platforms come apart into separate griefs, each as private as Alyosha's errand. That reversal was the Thaw's argument: the meaning of the war lies in ordinary people, not in generals or doctrine. The world received it that way. The film was honored at home with the Lenin Prize and abroad became a defining image of Soviet cinema's human face.
So here is a question to watch with. If a journey keeps missing its goal because the traveler keeps choosing other people, has it failed? Watch how each detour is a choice Alyosha could have refused. Watch the trains, which are the film's real landscape. And remember that upturned sky at the start, then watch how patiently the film works to turn the world right side up again.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The heroic deed is shown upside down in the first minutes and played as fright as much as valor. After that, the large action (war, heroism, the trip home) keeps breaking up, while Alyosha still acts within each small encounter
- the voyage/balade form — A picaresque road-movie structure in which the goal of reaching his mother and mending the roof keeps slipping away as his days of leave are spent on strangers
- dispersive situation — A string of strangers met along the way: the maimed soldier afraid to go home, the woman who betrayed her soldier-husband, the old and the bereaved on the platforms
- weak links — Discrete, self-contained episodes cut together to build emotional rather than plot momentum, at an unhurried, associative pace
- any-space-whatever — The war is staged almost entirely off the front line, in transit spaces: trains, stations, a bombed depot, the back of a truck, and a damaged countryside marked by absence
- affection-image — In the hay-filled freight car, Shura moves from wariness to trust. Their unconsummated, barely spoken attachment is feeling registered and never discharged into action
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — The film is framed by the mother waiting at the roadside and by a narration that sets out its memorial premise, so the whole journey arrives as remembrance
- perception-image — In the opening tank pursuit the camera is inverted and sky and earth swap places, so the frame takes on the boy's terror and disorientation