Taiga, Taiga, Burning Bright

SOMEBODY on Twitter was saying that Mikhail Kalatazov’s LETTER NEVER SENT had the most beautiful b&w cinematography they’d ever seen, which reminded me that I’d never seen it. Sorry, can’t remember who it was who said that. But they’re not altogether wrong.

Kalatazov is best known for I AM CUBA, where his camera sways across a rooftop, glides down the side of a six-storey building, ambles through a bar and descends into a swimming pool, all in one shot. THE LETTER NEVER SENT is almost equally stunning in its sustained shots, following the characters through blazing Siberian forests, all done for real without visual effects, unless setting fire to an actual forest qualifies as a visual effect.

Four government prospectors are looking for diamonds. There’s a romantic triangle. They find the diamonds. And then everything goes wrong and it’s a desperate struggle for survival, the goal of which, this being a Soviet film, is not individual survival but the safe delivery of the diamond map to the proper authorities. It begins to look as if the happy ending might be the recovery of the map from our heroes’ frozen corpses…

All along the way, stunning images.

Kalatazov and his regular cinematographer Sergey Urusevskiy favour wide angle lenses and a hand-held camera much of the time, so there’s not only scenic beauty and packed, thrusting compositions, but tremendous visual tension and dynamism. The contrast between stable, beautiful long shots (POV Siberian taiga) and unstable, panicked close-ups (the individual experience), is electrifying.

And despite the slightly inhuman (OK, a lot inhuman) state that’s being celebrated, where human life does not have the highest value, Kalatazov seems to like his characters and admire their sacrifice. The beauty isn’t just visual. There’s also, as in DERSU UZALA, the real terror of the vast unpopulated wilderness, where the sheer size of the landscape becomes frightening.

(Musician Laurie Anderson went camping in the wilds, and when she was chopping firewood the axehead flew off — up, up, up in the air — and she thought, “If that thing hits me on the head, who’s going to help me?” The planet is TOO BIG. And yet too small, as we’re managing to mess it up.)

There are scenes on the ice flow which put D.W. Griffith to shame. The whole film is like a suicidal endurance test for cast and crew. A film unit can get to be kind of like a cult, I suspect. Doing this kind of stuff is NOT NORMAL. Can any movie be worth this? But nobody died for real, so far as I know, and the result is astounding.

I have seen SALT FOR SVANETIA, I AM CUBA and THE RED TENT, all excellent, though his astonishing gusto was diminishing a little by that last one. But I have to get my act together and see NAIL IN THE BOOT and THE CRANES ARE FLYING (where, I know, actors and camera plunge through swathes of actual flames in a burning building). And there’s a bunch of lesser-known ones. What am I waiting for?