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 like a thunderclap during the cultural thaw that followed Stalin's death. After years of regimented socialist realism, here was a war film about private grief and the women left behind, with little interest in martial heroism.

Tatiana Samoilova gives a luminous, unguarded performance as Veronika, the young woman left in Moscow when her sweetheart Boris volunteers for the front. The film's real marvel is the camerawork of Sergei Urusevsky. His swirling hand-held and crane-mounted shots, including a staircase climbed in a single delirious movement, gave Soviet cinema a new emotional immediacy and astonished audiences around the world. The camera rarely sits still, and it seems to move with the characters' feelings as much as with their bodies; every frame has that charge.

Its success at Cannes made it an international sensation and helped reopen Soviet film-making to the West, and film-makers from Francis Ford Coppola to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Martin Scorsese have claimed its restless visual language as an influence. It is a devastating portrait of what war does to the people who can only wait and endure, carried by one of the great female performances of its era, and it has lost none of the speed or feeling that stunned the festival.