Kalatozov: Neotpravlennoye Pismo (Letter Never Sent) (1959)

The second of Kalatozov’s great collaborations with cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky, Letter Never Sent revolves around a group of geologists exploring the remote Siberian Plateau. Their mission is to find diamonds for the Soviet government, but they end up fending for their lives after being caught in the midst of a massive forest fire. It’s presented as a cautionary tale, but it’s not warning against personal greed or natural exploitation so much as the dangers of neglecting the camera’s power in colonising new worlds. Building upon the extended sequences of The Cranes are Flying, Kalatozov and Urusevsky present the camera as a geophysical tool, or perhaps a geometaphysical tool – a fusion of fire and water that purifies the air before it and transforms the earth beneath it. Swifter than water and nimbler than flame, this camera doesn’t move through air so much as remove air, sending forth a vacuum to prepare its passage. In doing so it emits a different kind of space from the spaces it depicts – it is as if it carried a small pocket of outer space around in front of it (and the point of the diamonds is to provide funding for the Soviet space program). Among other things, that means that there’s no real middle distance in the film, as the foreground perpetually falls back into utter remoteness, often by way of precipices and shorelines, which drop suddenly to unimaginable voids. Suspended between fire and water – the film actually ends with fire suspended on water – the lens collapses cinematography into space exploration, making for one of the most cosmic, dynamic visions of Communism ever committed to film, a manifesto and blueprint for exploring the most distant reaches of the ideological universe.