Pull the cranes
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Pull the cranes / When the cranes pull |
| Original title | Летят журавли |
| Country of production | USSR |
| original language | Russian |
| Publishing year | 1957 |
| length | 95 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Mikhail Kalatosov |
| script | Viktor Rosow |
| production | Igor Wakar |
| music | Moissei Wainberg |
| camera | Sergei Urusevsky |
| cut | Maria Timofeeva |
| occupation | |
| |
Dragging the Cranes ( Russian Летят журавли / Letjat shurawli ; alternative German distribution title: When the Cranes Drag ) is a Soviet feature film by the Mosfilm studio from 1957. The melodrama , set during the German-Soviet War , was directed by the Georgian director Mikhail Kalatosow . The drama Die Eifel Lebenden ( Вечно живые ) by Viktor Rosow , who also wrote the screenplay for the film, served as a literary model . The Cranes are Flying won at the Film Festival in Cannes 1958 the Palme d'Or .
2,836,058 visitors saw the film in the GDR, 347,986 of them in East Berlin .
action
The film begins in Moscow in 1941 , shortly before Germany's attack on the Soviet Union. Boris and Weronika are lovers, she lets him call her a "squirrel" and the two watch the cranes move over the city. After the outbreak of war, Boris volunteered at the front and was drafted the day before Weronika's birthday. She fails to say goodbye to him and Boris can only leave her his birthday present, a toy squirrel.
Weronika's parents are killed in a bombing raid, and there is only one hole left in the place of their apartment. Weronika is taken in by Boris' family. Boris 'father Fyodor Ivanovich is a doctor, and Boris' sister Irina, his cousin, the pianist Mark, and the grandmother also live in the apartment. Mark has always been in love with Weronika and uses Boris's absence to rape Weronika during a bombing raid. She agrees to marry him. Meanwhile, Boris falls at the front after rescuing his wounded comrade Volodya. Weronika does not find out anything about his death and continues to think that he is missing.
The family is evacuated to Siberia ; Fyodor Ivanovich runs a hospital there, in which Irina and Weronika also work. Weronika talks to the history teacher Anna Mikhailovna about her lost courage to face life. When she witnessed the pain of a wounded man in the hospital because of his fiancée, who married someone else in his absence, Weronika wants to kill herself, but instead saves a little boy from a traffic accident. His name is Boris ("Borja") and she takes him in.
When Chernov, the director of the Philharmonic, wants to ask Fyodor Ivanovich for a favor, it turns out that Mark had only been released from the frontline because of a bribe to Chernov. His uncle throws him out of the house, but asks Weronika to stay. Volodja, who was saved by Boris, appears, but Weronika is not convinced that Boris is really dead.
Only when Weronika met Boris 'friend and comrade Stepan again at the station when the soldiers returned to the victory parade in Moscow after the war, she was able to accept Boris' death and broke into hopeless sobs. Stepan then gave a short but powerful speech in memory of all who did not return. Weronika distributed the flowers he brought for Boris to returned soldiers.
background
Dragging the Cranes was the second Soviet film to win the Palme d'Or in Cannes after Friedrich Ermler's Die große Wende (1946) . It represents a phase of Soviet cinema that took place during the thaw after Stalin's death (1953) and the XX. CPSU party congress (1956) and classics such as Grigori Tschuchrai's Die Ballade vom Soldier (1959), Michail Romm's Nine Days of a Year (1962) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan Childhood (1962) are counted as well.
In addition to the main prize of the competition, the film also received the technology prize in Cannes ; In addition, the jury gave an “honorable mention” to the main actress Tatiana Samoilova . In 1959 Samoilowa also received the Étoile de Cristal for best foreign actress.
Kalatosov's film is shaped by the expressive work of the cameraman Sergei Urusevsky , some of which was realized with a hand-held camera , with whom Kalatosow had already worked on The First Train ( Первый эшелон ) in 1955. Kalatosov's next two works, in turn with Tatiana Samoilova, A Letter That Never Arrived (1959) and Ich, Kuba (also as Ich bin Kuba ; 1964), filmed in Spanish , were strongly influenced by Urusevski's style and that of criticism referred to as the "emotional camera". Especially the I, which was only rediscovered internationally in the 1990s thanks to Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola , Cuba is now regarded as a classic in cinema.
Reviews
“[Kalatosow] draws on cinematic stylistic devices that were popular in the time of Pudowkins and Dowschenko's heroic revolutionary films. [...] Thanks to [his] director and the excellent [...] Samoilowa [...] the film conveys an extremely strong feeling of sympathy. "
"A timeless, harrowing melodrama that leaves even the most serene viewer with wet eyes."
"The sensitively designed film [owes its] effect [...] above all to its self-critical-patriotic view with little political teaching and the wonderful camera work."
“A moving testimony to warm humanity, a cinematic and acting masterpiece. Highly recommended from 16 onwards. "
synchronization
The German dubbed version of DEFA premiered on June 6, 1958 under the title The Cranes Pull in East Berlin . Wito Eichel wrote the dubbed script , and Helmut Brandis was responsible for the dialogue .
| role | German speaker |
|---|---|
| Weronika | Eva-Maria Hagen |
| Boris | Horst Schön |
| Fyodor Ivanovich | Hans Wehrl |
| mark | Reinhardt Brandt |
| Irina | Erika Müller-Fürstenau |
| Stepan | Helmut Müller-Lankow |
| grandmother | Maria Hofen |
| Volodya | Manfred Borges |
| Chernov | Karl Eugen Lehnkering |
| Anna Mikhailovna | Marga Legal |
An alternative dubbed version was produced in the FRG and released in cinemas on July 22, 1958 under the title When the Cranes Pull .
Publications
The DVD released by Icestorm Entertainment in September 2005 contains the DEFA dubbed version without a Russian soundtrack. A DVD with the original Russian sound has been available since April 2002 in the American Criterion Collection . For a long time, the DVD version released by Крупный План on the Russian market in 2005 provided the best picture quality, which is also available with German subtitles from trigon-film . In 2018, the Mosfilm film studio presented a restored HD version of the film, which was then uploaded to the Group's YouTube channel. This HD version is not yet available with German subtitles or in one of the German dubbed versions.
Web links
- The Cranes are Flying in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The cranes move at kino-teatr.ru (Russian)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Pull the release certificate for Die Kraniche . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , July 2005 (PDF; test number: 17 150 DVD).
- ↑ Thomas Lindenberger. Mass media in the Cold War: actors, images, resonances . Böhlau Verlag, 2006. ISBN 978-3-412-23105-7 . P. 92.
- ↑ Heiner Timmermann . That was the GDR . Lit, 2004. ISBN 978-3-8258-8167-2 . P. 662.
- ↑ http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/200
- ↑ http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=1&res=9C01E6D91E38E333A25751C2A9659C946191D6CF (original: Mikhail Kalatozov, the director, has harked back to a cinematic style that was popular in the making days when Pudovko were and Dovz revolutionary films. […] Thanks to Mr. Kalatozov's direction and the excellent performance Tatyana Samoilova gives as the girl, one absorbs a tremendous feeling of sympathy from this film. )
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated November 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Originally: [...] it's the kind of timeless, devastating melodrama that can leave the most jaded of audience members moist-eyed. )
- ↑ Pull the cranes. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed July 3, 2017 .
- ↑ Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 510/1958
- ↑ http://www.eva-maria-hagen.de/Ostzeit/Die_Kraniche_züge.shtml
- ↑ http://vobzor.com/page.php?id=758
- ↑ http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/dvdcompare/cranes.htm
- ↑ https://www.trigon-film.org/fr/movies/Kraniche_züge
- ↑ Летят журавли. Retrieved October 17, 2019 (German).
