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| Tatiana Samojlova, Aleksei Batalov, Vasili
Merkuryev |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Army
official: Our hearts must go out to those waiting for soldiers who
will not return, and stand together to ensure this never happens again.
A
young woman in war-torn Russia during WWII maintains hope that her lover
will return from the front.
 The
1957 winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival is a fairly
little-known Russian war story with memorable cinematography that has
given it a small but devoted following. The film's often flamboyantly
expressionistic visual style, full of dizzying twirls, dramatic lighting
and deep-focus compositions, actually dominates the slim, formulaic
narrative to an almost absurd extent. In that respect, The Cranes
are Flying is more like opera than like conventional narrative film,
with a number of aria sustained more by the production design and the
cinematography than by the actors' performances. But in spite of the
virtuoso technical work on the film, the melodramatics of the social-realist
romantic storyline are never convincing or even particularly gripping,
which makes the experience of watching the film a fairly bumpy ride.
For without the necessary narrative momentum, one simply moves from
one visual setpiece to the next. That makes The Cranes Are Flying
essential viewing for those with a great interest in the more technical
aspects of filmmaking, but somewhat less so for more causal film viewers
looking for a gripping story with properly developed characters. |
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A
fairly bare-bones Region 1 release is available from the Criterion Collection.
The film is also available on DVD as part of the Russian Cinema Council's
'RusCiCo' collection; this DVD has no region encoding and carries numerous
extras, as well as subtitles in twelve languages. The Criterion Collection
edition served as a basis for this review.
The
fullscreen image is framed at its original Academy aspect ratio of approx.
1.33:1. The Criterion Collection's recent track record concerning DVD
transfers of ancient classics is superb, and the film presented here
is another winner. The impressive cinematography is presented in an
impeccably rendered wide range of whites, greys and deep, solid blacks,
drawn from a restored source print that's in truly pristine shape. Belying
its age in every shot, this DVD offers nothing short of reference-level
image quality for a black-and-white film.
The mono sound mix is presented in Dolby Digital 1.0 emanating from
the center channel. The soundtrack unfortunately is not as impressive
as the video transfer, as it suffers from a tinny, resticted sound and
horrendously dubbed dialogues.
There
are no extras at all on the disc. The only added value to be had is
an informative essay printed in the nicely designed booklet.A
handsomely designed main menu screen in fittingly retro Soviet style displays
a slide show of stills, accompanied by a music cue from the score.
Noah
Eamon
Reviewed: July
24, 2002
Click
here for IMDB info on The
Cranes are Flying.
Click here
to return to the front page.
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