The Cranes Are Flying

Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957) is the only Soviet film ever to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and it arrived as a thunderclap during the cultural thaw that followed Stalin's death. After years of regimented socialist realism, here was a war film concerned not with martial heroism but with private grief and the women left behind.

Tatiana Samoilova gives a luminous, unguarded performance as Veronika, the young woman left in Moscow when her sweetheart Boris volunteers for the front. But the film's true marvel is the camerawork of Sergei Urusevsky, whose swirling, handheld and crane-mounted shots — a soldier's dying vision of spinning birches against the sky, a staircase ascended in a single delirious movement — gave Soviet cinema a new emotional immediacy and astonished audiences around the world. Every frame seems to move with feeling.

Its triumph at Cannes made it an international sensation and helped reopen Soviet film-making to the West; its restless visual language has been claimed as an influence by film-makers from Francis Ford Coppola to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Martin Scorsese. A devastating portrait of what war does to those who merely wait and endure, carried by one of the great female performances of the era, it remains as fresh, as kinetic and as moving as it was the day it stunned the festival.