Synopsis |Appreciation |Afterthoughts
1957 Black and White 90 mins
Produced by Moscow Film Studio, USSR
Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov Written by Viktor Rozov Cinematography by Sergei Urusevsky Main Cast: Tatyana Samoilova (Veronica) Alexei Batalov (Boris)
This film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1957. Batalov (as Boris)
The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1957 Cannes International Film Festival
Synopsis
Veronika is not at all prepared for the outbreak of war.
She is in the happiest period of her life. She has a cozy home. At home she is the favorite of her father and mother. In the fall she's going into architecture school. More than anything, she has Boris. They were y in love. Veronica was sure she would always be happy. She had already imagined herself many times walking beside her husband in a white gown on her wedding day. Veronica was so sure of her future happiness that when she learned that the war had begun, she thought it would not affect her future life.
It is only when Boris suddenly tells her that he has enlisted in the army and is about to leave that she realizes that her life has truly changed.
Boris is gone. Veronica doesn't even get to say goodbye to him - as she hurries to the station, she can only see Boris in the distance, with his heavy steps, as the procession fades away. Veronica threw the packet of cookies she had brought toward Boris. The paper packet fell at the feet of the soldiers going to the front and was crushed by a pair of leather boots ......
The real blow was yet to come. In one bombing raid, Veronica's lovely home was almost leveled. When Veronica rushed from the bomb shelter to the house she had lived in for so many years, all she could hear was the only surviving small wall clock still ticking the hour. And for Veronica, time had stopped. Her parents and her lovely home were lost. What did she have left in life?
Now, Veronica's only hope rests on Boris. She is convinced that no one can take her Boris away from her. She stays at Boris's home so that she feels like she is with him every day. However, Boris is not heard from for a long time.
Veronica does not yet know that, just as she hoped day and night for a letter from the front, Boris is long gone. Soon after he arrived at the front, he was hit by a stray bullet during a march. When he slowly fell to the ground holding a tree trunk, in front of his eyes still floating and Veronica wedding scene: Veronica wearing a long white veil flying fluttering, surrounded by flowers and loved ones smiling faces, melodious music so that the couple immersed in the incomparable happiness ...... However, all this has become a dream that can never be realized.
Boris has a cousin Malk, also living in Boris's home. He often showed great attentiveness to Veronica. Veronica was affectionate to him. Wasn't Boris's cousin also his own relative? But one terrible night, when the whole city is caught up in the horrors of an air raid, something happens that seems unbelievable even to Veronica herself - she loses her virginity to Malk.
Marke announces to his uncle's family that he is going to marry Veronica. From this moment on, Veronica is truly in a never-ending agony. Not only did she lose her family, but she lost all her friends, all the people who had loved her. Because she had betrayed Boris. This was especially unforgivable during that period of heavy suffering. Though, in reality, it might not be called betrayal, since Boris had already been sacrificed. But psychologically, it was betrayal again, because Veronika still thought that Boris was thinking of her up ahead. And in fact she misses Boris.
What's more, Veronica is not happy after marrying Marke. Malk was in fact a man of mercenary habits. While everyone was contributing to the victory of the war, he hung out with opportunists and gave Veronica's beloved toy squirrel (which was a gift from Boris) to a woman with whom he had a warm relationship. Veronica thoroughly understands the qualities of Marke, and realizing that she has fallen for it, she resolves to break up with him.
Veronica is in the hospital to look after the wounded evacuated from the front. In front of them, Veronica feels guilty because they have all bled and fought at the front as Boris did. Once, a wounded man received a letter from home and suddenly became unusually emotional. It turned out that his fiancée wanted to break off relations with him. Boris's father was the director of this hospital, and as he comforted this wounded man, he denounced the women who betrayed their loved ones fighting at the front. His every word was like a sword in Veronica's heart. She ran out of the hospital and onto a bridge from which she wanted to jump and die. Just then, she suddenly saw a little boy of about two or three years old toddling along in the middle of the bridge, while a big truck was speeding by. Without a second thought, Veronica ran forward and picked up the child, holding him tightly in her arms. An accident was averted. A motherly feeling arose in Veronica's heart. She picked up the little boy and walked off the bridge. She realized that she should live on.
Veronica worked diligently. She labored day and night and spoke little. Her only hope was a letter from the front, and she looked forward to it for a long, long time, but she did not expect anything. But she remained convinced that she would hear from Boris. At last one day. She received a man from the front. But he brought unfortunate news. He told Veronica that Boris had died a long time ago.
Veronica could not believe it. She has been waiting for so many days and nights, is this the result? No, her Boris would not die. She knew that he was thinking of her from afar, as she was thinking of him.
Veronica is still waiting.
The war is over. Teams of warriors are returning from the front. Veronica came to the station square with a bouquet of white flowers in her hand - the place where she had last seen Boris. She saw Sergei, her comrade who had gone up to the front with Boris. He was an officer now. He was standing on a tank and addressing the crowd that had come to welcome him. He also saw Veronika. He said in a loud voice to the crowd that filled the square, "We y realize how much grief is in the hearts of those who did not greet their loved ones today ...... We will do everything in our power in the future so that fiancées will never again lose their fiancées, and mothers will no longer be afraid for their children ...... We overcame and we will live on, but not to destroy, but to build a new life!"
Veronica looked at Boris's comrades, at the laughing crowd around her, and a smile spread across her face. She began to distribute the flowers in her hands, one by one, to the returning warriors.
Overhead, a flock of geese was flying through the air. Veronica looked up at them. How familiar, how dear to her were the geese. Hadn't a line of geese often flown overhead when she and Boris had laughed their hearts out by the Moscow River a few years ago?
Veronica moved forward. She knew that life went on.
Testimonials
Flight of the Geese is one of the major Soviet cinematic works of the 1950s. It marked the beginning of a new period in the history of Soviet cinema. after the mid-1950s, ordinary people began to become the main characters on the screen. The audience saw in the movies people they knew well, people they often met in their daily lives. Their joys and sorrows were often felt by them, and were therefore easily understood. Especially in a group of films showing the war, the sufferings and struggles of the protagonists were able to arouse the ****songs of the audience. Such works make the audience feel friendly. The infectious force of the work comes from the authenticity of the characters and life depictions, and therefore particularly easy for the audience to accept.
The heroine of "Flight of the Geese", Veronica, is not an outstanding hero. She is actually a very ordinary person. She not only has obvious character weaknesses: childish and easy to be deceived, love of fantasy and impractical, and her vision is not broad enough, the spiritual realm is not high enough. But her encounters are a true representation of that era, and thus get ****ing in the hearts of the audience.
Veronica's image is real. She grew up from a young girl who was only concerned about her own personal happiness to a mature, gained life experience and gained a strong belief in life, and in the meantime, how many trials and lessons she went through. Though she had not fought on the front, she had endured the exercises of war, and her growth had been achieved step by step, and through countless agonies in return. She was not mentally prepared for such trials, but the times spurred her on to join the millions who endured trial after trial. As a result, the audience experiences their own feelings in her feelings, and their own growth in her growth. The audience loves this image because they find themselves in this image.
"Flight of the Geese" was also popular with the audience because of the brilliant and colorful presentation. The movie is one of the representative works of the Soviet poetic cinema genre of the 50s and 60s. The director of the film, Karatozov, was a proponent of poetic cinema in the 1950s. He believed that "a real movie must be a poetry movie! This is true in terms of drama, treatment of images, and means of expression". He said: "The ideas and intentions that give rise to a film should be expressed in broad poetic colors", because "a poetic leap gives the artist a philosophical point of view from on high, a spirit of vision and exuberance". However, Karatozov does not exclude factors other than poetry. He says, "Poetry cinema and rational cinema are not two parts separated by an impenetrable abyss ...... The work that brings these two elements together acquires a new, powerful force."
All of these assertions by Karatozov are sharply reflected in Flight of the Geese. The poetry of this film is no longer characterized solely by metaphors, symbols, and similes. It permeates the entire conception of the movie. There are a lot of "prose" depictions in the movie, but even these passages are full of poetic atmosphere. The beginning of the film is full of poetry in its depiction of the love of the hero and heroine (the walk on the banks of the Moskva River, the tender words in Veronika's house), but also in its treatment of Veronika's tragic situation (Veronika's deep longing for Boris, Veronika's running up to a bridge to commit suicide), not to mention the scene of the send-off in the station and the vision of the wedding in front of her eyes at the time of Boris's death. Not to mention the poetic *** images of Veronica's farewell scene at the station and the vision of the wedding at the time of Boris's death. The Flight of the Geese may be regarded as a long lyrical poem. It consists of many passages, each of which is a poem.
The poetic cinematic character of "Flight of the Geese" is particularly evident in the cinematography. It embodies the theory of "emotional photography" that emerged in Soviet cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. This theory asserts that cinematography should not be an objectivist record, but should be strongly emotional. Photography should "intervene" in the life shown in the movie in order to move the audience more y. The cinematography of Flight of the Geese reflects this idea. Take the scene of Veronica's farewell at the station as an example. Veronica walks through the crowded crowd, looking for Boris. The camera follows Veronica closely, also moving through the crowd. From the moment Veronica begins her search in the square to the end when she sees Boris in the line from a distance and tosses the cookies, these eleven shots are mostly close-ups, with only three medium shots and one panorama. This creates an immersive feeling for the audience. The shaky camera shot that travels through the crowd is both like a subjective shot representing Veronica's line of sight and shows Veronica's nervous excitement, with the result that the audience gets nervous with it. The strong feeling of the camera image *** affects the audience. Another example is the scene of Boris' sacrifice, which has become a famous passage in the history of cinema. After Boris is shot in the grove, he first jerks his head up into the air. At this point the camera is pointed at the sky, and the sun in the clouds suddenly shrinks as if it were far away. Then Boris leans against a birch tree and slides slowly down it, followed by another upward shot of the birch tree. The birch tree spins along as Boris slides down around the trunk. Then a long subjective shot. A vision of Boris appears on the background of the spinning birch tree: he and Veronica slowly coming down the stairs after their wedding, the white veil on Veronica's head brushing against Boris's face. Surrounded by flowers and crowds, the vision then fades as the birch tree spins faster and faster, as if it were about to crush down. The camera seems to slide violently from the treetops to the ground. Then in a medium shot, Boris falls straight down into a puddle with both hands spread. This scene used a total of 10 shots, basically close-ups and medium shots, they hold the audience, Boris dying moment (the film extends this moment for a long, long time, which is a poetic device) of emotional fluctuations expressed in an exciting way, so that the viewer's heart is gripped, forgetting everything around them. This is the power of "emotional photography".
In short, although Flight of the Geese expresses the major issues of the times, it is not a philosophical movie. Its power does not lie in logical reasoning. It mainly appeals to the audience's emotions, relying on the rich artistic image to make the audience's mind shaken. From this point of view, "Flight of the Geese" is a very successful poetry movie work.