Tag Archives: Letter Never Sent

Diamond Hunting in Siberia

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A Russian film poster for the 1960 adventure epic LETTER NEVER SENT.

If international film aficionados are familiar with Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov at all, it is probably due to his 1957 Oscar-winning Best Foreign Film Letyat Zhuravli [English title: The Cranes Are Flying]. But he has also secured a place for himself in cinema history for his 1930 documentary Jim Shvante (Marili Svanets) [English title: Salt for Svanetia] and the visually dazzling, anti-American propaganda epic, presented in four vignettes, as I Am Cuba (1964). Often overlooked or ignored is Neotpravlennoye Pismo [English title: Letter Never Sent, 1960], which was criticized by some Russian critics as unnecessarily arty and underdeveloped in terms of its characters. Yet, seen today, the film works as a stirring, lyrical portrait of man vs. nature where the innovative black and white cinematography of Sergei Urusevsky overwhelms any agitprop messaging. Instead, the viewer is transported to a wild landscape where four explorers fight for their survival against the four unpredictable elements of nature – wind, water, fire and earth.

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The Sniper’s Conundrum

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Maryutkh (Izolda Izvitskaya), a Red Army sharpshooter, prepares to greet some approaching White Army members in the Russian Revolution war drama THE FORTY-FIRST (1956).

After the death of Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in 1953, Russia began to experience a less repressive period in the arts, especially the cinema, which had previously been used for mostly propaganda purposes. During this brief period, which flourished between 1953 and 1967, Russian filmmakers were allowed to explore the artistic possibilities of the medium, resulting in a number of cinematic masterpieces which enjoyed international distribution, even in the U.S. Among the more famous of examples from the “Cinema of the Thaw” (as it came to be called) are Sorok Pervyy (The Forty-First, 1956), Letyat Zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying, 1956), the historical epic, Tikhiy Don (And Quiet Flows the Don (1957), Don Kikhot (Don Quixote, 1957), The Idiot (1958), based on the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ballada o Soldate (Ballad of a Soldier, 1959). The latter film, in particular, which won a special award for director Grigori Chukhrai at the Cannes Film Festival, is still considered a high water mark for Soviet cinema in the 50s but it is Chukhrai’s debut film, The Forty-First, which launched the director’s career and is in danger of being forgotten.

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Georgia on My Mind

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Images from the 1930 film SALT FOR SVANETIA, filmed in the Republic of Georgia.

Svaneti is not a planet in the solar system or some alternate universe out of a science fiction fantasy but it might as well be. In truth, it is a remote region located in the northwestern part of the Republic of Georgia on the southern slopes of the Caucasus Mountain range. For centuries the area was cut off from civilization due to its inaccessible location in the mountains plus the extreme weather, that usually included eight straight months of snowfall, also made it unwelcoming. After Georgia was invaded and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1922, the region was subjected to Stalin’s five-year plan (1928-1932), which was created to spawn agriculture collectives across the nation and introduce large-scale industrialization. But Svaneti was so isolated from the rest of the world that it took a while for Soviet workers to reach the area and Jim Shvante (Marili svanets) [English title: Salt for Svanetia (1930)] is a portrait of the lives and traditions of the Ushkul tribe in that inhospitable domain before the Soviets arrived to develop it. The result is not a typical documentary but more of a folk culture microcosm as captured by some wildly creative ethnographic filmmaker. 

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