Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema Volume 3 Number 2 2009 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.

.1 386/srsc.3.2.173/1

Veronika fuses out: Rape and medium specificity in The Cranes are Flying
Nancy Condee University of Pittsburgh Abstract
How might Soviet cinema - as medium, rather than as a true image of the real world- constitute sexual desire? This speculative question encounters formidable .oundational barriers;both the mimetic requirements of socialist realism as such and the fraught topic of sexual desire militate against constructing an answer. Taking Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying as the basis of its discussion, the research explores where we might look in Soviet cinema to find sexual desire not as image- governed byj conventional norms of representational accuracy - but instead coded more cautiously as a practice of medium specificity - violating, as it were, one set of'codes while preserving the decorum of another.

Keywords
Mikhail Kalatozov Sergei Urusevskii The Cranes are Flying Thaw Cold War modernism

A Woman in widow's weeds was weeping upon a grave. 'Console yourself. madam.' said a Sympathetic Stranger. 'Heaven's mercies are infinite. There is another man somewhere, beside your husband, with whom you can still be happy.' 'There was,' she sobbed, 'there was, but this is his grave.' (Sergei Eisenstein 1968: 14-15)

Representation of sexual desire

Ilow might Soviet cinema as cinema - as medium, rather than as a true image of the real world - constitute sexual desire? The question is a strange one for Soviet cinema, since several foundational conceptions are arrayed against finding any answer at all: the mimetic requirements of socialist realism as such tended to militate against explorations of medium. Sex desire as such was a fraught topic for Soviet culture - which was worse: sexuality's representation or some kind of distorting visual formalism? The dilemma cannot be ascribed wholly to a flawed ideological system: after all, from one decade to the next Hollywood itself struggled with sexuality's representation in ways that have become the stuff of jokes. Mindful of these obstacles, this essay finds all the more reason to speculate that sexuality, perhaps like other provocative topics, found alternative expression in what would in political terms be loosely called Aesopian language, here played out visually across the screen. The research question asks therefore where we might look in Soviet cinema to find sexuality not as image governed by stringent norms of representational accuracy - but instead coded more cautiously as a practice of medium specificity - violating, as it were, one set of codes while preserving the decorum of another. The term 'medium specificity' invokes Clement Greenberg's 1965 essay, 'Modernist Painting'. The great irony is that, for all the term's
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association with this essay, Greenberg never uses the term. Nevertheless, his essay was instrumental in establishing a forum for its conceptual usefulness - including in the discussion that follows - by putting forth two claims. First, western civilization is marked by its advanced capacity to question its own foundations. As Greenberg (1965: 193) puts it, western civilization is 'not the first civilization to turn around and question its own foundations, but it is the one that has gone furthest in doing so'. Second, modernism may be identified as symptomatic of this turn. Taking Kant as the first true modernist, he argues that modernism's core feature is a heightened awareness of the terms of its own constitution: 'The essence of Modernism lies [...] in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself- not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence' (Greenberg 1965: 193). A core feature of the modernist text, Greenberg continues, is that 'the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium' (ibid.). Modernism, then, is the medium's account of its own terms of existence. Neither a distortion of the real world, nor its refraction, nor its stylization, modernist painting is uniquely capable of constituting the operations of its production. Already we may anticipate why these ambitions would pose a challenge to post-1920s Soviet culture. While Greenberg spoke abstractly of 'each art' ('the unique and proper area of competence of each art...' [ibid.]), he wrote little about what specificity might be in the other arts, including cinema. As Ann Reynolds has suggested, Greenberg made extensive use of cinema metaphors, yet leaves us to extrapolate cinema's unique features: camerawork? editing? Before an elaborative leap is made, we are advised to hesitate long enough to consider whether 'unique' - like the categories of autonomy, individuation and innovation - is an inert, verifiable category, or whether it is historically freighted by modernism's own regime, according to which the modernist critic or artist may identify this or that feature as strategically unique for contingent reasons of individuation from the other arts. In his 1922 essay 'Americanism' ['Amerikanshchina'], for example, director Lev Kuleshov (1922: 14) spoke of 'cinema specificity' in terms strikingly compatible with those of Greenberg's later essay. Searching for ways in which film might 'achieve greater "cinema specificity" and not [be] a reproduction of "theatricality" in films', Kuleshov isolates fast editing and 'rapidly changing scenes' as key elements individuating cinema as an autonomous art. Consistent with Greenberg's logic, editing and camera lens, therefore, would seem 'likely' - that is to say, historically necessary - candidates for medium specificity, compatible with both the director's and the art critic's modernist sensibilities. Like Kuleshov, therefore, Greenberg was eager, in a similar spirit nearly four decades later, for the specific art to secure its individuated space: What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general but also in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself. By doing this, each art would, to be sure. narrow

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its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of this area all the more secure.
(Greenberg 1965: 193)

1. On Greenberg and the Cold War, see especially Guilbaut (1985), Chapter 4. 2. For immediate contemporary western responses, see Doniol-Valcroze in Cahiers du Citiema (July 1958). Leyda in Cinema (July-August 1958), Monod in b1ttres Frantcaises (19 June 1958). Among Soviet critics, even the largely officious Rostislav Iurenev spoke in favour of Urusevskii's camerawork. For an overview of western and Soviet responses. see Woll (2003: 65-80). For more detailed treatment of Soviet responses, see Bogomolov (1989: 10-13. 162-63).

Medium specificity and the Cold War

It is somehow unsurprising to discover that the original version of Greenberg's essay was initially commissioned as a 1960 pamphlet for Voice of America (Forum Lectures), then revised and subsequently published in the Paris journal - Art and Literature. We will grant Greenberg' his later insistence that he was describing (not advocating) features of modernist painting. This bibliographic intersection of Greenberg with Voice of America cannot draft Greenberg tout court as a soldier in Cold War politics, however much the case may be built (most vividly by Guilbaut). At a certain level. however - particularly in light of the historical moment and circumstances of the essay's original commission - I cannot suppress the thought that his logic invites a polemical dialogue with an intelligent Soviet radio listener, for whom modernism, far from being at the historical edge of an advancing civilization ('the one that has gone furthest in doing so' [Greenberg 1965: 19 31), is officially characterized as symptomatic of its decline. That is to say, in contrast to the modernist text, the progressive Soviet text - so goes the argument - responds to the social command, the very material conditions of which prompt its production. Here one might risk arguing that a certain unacknowledged compatibility exists between these antithetical operations: both Greenberg's modernism and socialist realism understand the text as constitutive of their conditions of production. For one. those conditions are the flat surface, the support and the pigment: for the other, the people, the Party and the ideological command (ideinost'). But I mention Greenberg's link to Voice of America (and his implicit Soviet radio listener) for a different reason. The Soviet film to which I am about to turn - Mikhail Kalatozov's war melodrama The Cranes are Fl4ying (Letiat zhuravlii 1957) - appeared at the same historical moment as Greenberg's essay and tackles issues intimately related to those sketched out above. Kalatozov had already run into Soviet official criticism for formalist elements (Shrayer 1997: 425-28), including camerawork by his director of photography Mark Magidson, in his earlier Conspiracy of the Doomed (Zagovor obrechennykh, 1950). And yet The Cranes are Flying - in principle, equally vulnerable to charges of formalism - was released to acclaim in 1957, one crucial year after Khrushchev's Secret Speech, and emerged as a rare instance of Cold War recognition, winning praise both East and West, including the Golden Palm award at the 1958 Cannes International Film Festival.2 In the wake of the 1958 USA-USSR Cultural Exchange Agreement and the turn towards what came to be called, in the lingo of the age, impregnational propaganda (Hazan 1982: 66-69), The Cranes are Flying was selected as one of seven Soviet films for 1960 US screenings distributed by Warner Brothers as the first part of the cultural exchange programme, administered on the US side by the Department of State through the United States Information Agency (Segrave 2004: 101; Caute 2004: 221-22).' To be sure, the film was a masterpiece; it captured attention for its compassionate rendition of a Soviet heroine who 'under no circumstances

3. On the broader cultural context, see Appy (2000); on US cultural politics surrounding State Department promotion of abstract expressionism, see
Mathews (19 76) and

Doss (1989).

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Figure 1: Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying: Boris. Still courtesy of Iskusstvo kino archive. until now could have been a "positive example", yet is still not offered up by the film-makers for judgment' (Zorkaia 2005: 316). The film's formative impact on younger Soviet directors was foundational. Director Sergei Solov'ev (1986: 8), who saw the film when he was a mere 14 years old. recalls that everything began with the fdrm The Cranes are Flying. And not only for me: for a whole generation of film-makers, among whom I consider myself a recruit. Gleb Panfilov, Vasilii Shukshin, Aleksei German, though years divide us, spoke of the same thing: the encounter with this film turned out to be a pivotal moment in our fate.

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But beyond this pathos, critics East and West were equally captivated by a 4 spirit of formal experimentation finally adequate to the Soviet screen. Attention focused on Kalatozov's cameraman Sergei Urusevskii, whose unusually acrobatic technique - extreme long shots, rapid-editing alternation of pans with close-up shots, canted frames, high-angle crane shots, short-focus optics with blurred backgrounds, conceptually driven dissolves - soon became a reference point for cinematography of the Thaw period, renewing connections with formal photographic composition of the 1920s (Bogomolov 1989: 157-61: Liehm 1977: 199-200). The French audience situated this rediscovery, of course, within the context of their own cinematographic explorations, subsequently dubbed nouvelle vague, marked by its own characteristic jump cuts and long takes: its loose editing and left-wing politics. In the Soviet context, by contrast, conceptual risk accompanied the pairing of social command with formal devices: such was both the vulnerability and the strategic appeal of The Cranes are Fliling. Soviet film critics could not read western praise without hearing the historical murmur of their own 1920s and early 1930s, as well as radically different valences to 'formalist' and 'structure', for which western criticism could not - and did not wish to - account. Cameraman and director Cameraman Sergei Urusevskii was well suited to work with Kalatozov; indeed, as Neia Zorkaia (2005: 317) remarks, Urusevskii's camerawork bore
a family resemblance not only to [Kalatozov's] Salt for Svanetia [(Sol'Svanetii. 19 30)], but also to Kalatozov's early camera work in [Lev Push's] Gypsz Blood [(Tsyganskaia krov', 1928)1.5 where the future director's circle of beloved devices is already marked out: the interplay of sharp, unexpected camera angles, the effects of light and shadow, [... I the motif of foliage, blurred together through the use of quick motion. The origins of [...] The Cranes are Flying go back to the long-ago Salt for Svanetia. One could say that 6 in Sergei UJrusevskii Kalatozov acquired his second self.

4.

Compare, for example, remarks by Eric Rohmer, quoted in Passek (1981: 229-30) with those by Zorkaia (2005: 316).

5.

Gypsy! Blood is also known as The La"w that Knows No La", (Zikon, ne znaiushchii zakona). In addition to the camerawork. Kalatozov wrote the script together with Petr Morskoi and Aleksandr Takaishvili. See K.C.', the film critic for BFI Monthlil il im Bulletin: 'the photography, indeed. is the second star of the fihm'.

6.

Ulrusevskii's work with Kalatozov resurrected a tradition of directorcameraman teams from the 1920s - including Dziga Vertov's cameraman-brother Mikhail Kaufman and Sergei Eisenstein's cameraman Eduard Tisse - that was closely associated with avant-garde experimentation (Cavendish 2007; Prokhorov 2002: 31). A direct influence on Urusevskii, however, had been constructivist artist Aleksandr Rodchenko. Although Urusevskii's principal teacher had been artist and theoretician Vladimir Favorskii, Rodchenko had also taught Urusevskii at VKhuTeln (1V/sshii kliudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskii institut) and included the young cameraman among his photographic subjects (Rodchenko 1932a and 1932b). On this biographical basis alone, Urusevskii was a student and descendent of Soviet modernism; a direct line might be drawn from the early twentieth century to the neo-modernist experimentations of Urusevskii's camerawork of the late 1950s. And in UJrusevskii's work, therefore, we might most easily find that odd hybrid: a Soviet text available both to ideological command and to cinema's potential specificity.

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7.

Petr Bagrov (2007) argues that during the Thaw 'melodrama became virtually the dominant genre, Vasilit Ordynskii's A Man is Born (Chelovek
rodilsia, 19 56). lurii

Ozerov's The Son (Srjn, 1955). Lev Kulidzhanov and fakov Segel's The I louse I Live In (Dorn. v kotorom ia zhim, 1957), Kulidzhanov's When the Trees Were Big (Kofda dere0'ia billi bol'shimi, 1961). as well as Spring on Zarechnaia Street ( Vesna na Zarechnoi ulitse, 1956) and Fortyj First(Sorok pervqli, 19"i6) -are all melodramas'

In Urusevskii's memoirs of Rodchenko. one encounters a description that would perhaps have pleased Greenberg. It provides the genesis of Urusevskii's preoccupations with high-contrast lighting in The Cranes are Flying and elsewhere. Rodchenko's students were eager to be issued their first cameras so as to start shooting portraits and landscapes. To their disappointment, however, Rodchenko had in mind a different lesson plan. Urusevskii writes: Between the source of light and the paper, [Rodchenko] put several objects that threw shadows on the paper. Then. replacing that simple paper with photographic paper, he exposed it to the light and processed it. The result was an unusual composition of shadows and objects. Then he proposed that
each of us do the same [...] And it was in that laboratory work that we lit-

tle by little came to understand the nature of shadow and light, the battle of black and white, we came to understand the nature of the photographic material, the nature of photography.
(Urusevskii 1967: 104-05)

The lessons learned in Rodchenko's laboratory are evident a quarter of a century later in The Cranesare Flying. One cannot argue that Urusevskii's innovative camerawork was unique: as Josie Woll (2003: 71) suggests, his cinematic style was anticipated in some respects by Petr Todorovskii, cameraman for Feliks Mironer and Marlen Khutsiev's Spring on ZarechnaiaStreet (Vesna na Zarechnoi ulitse, 1956), and Igor' Slabneevich, cameraman for Vasilii Ordynskii's A Man is Born (Chelovek rodilsia, 1956). Indeed, it may well be that this resurgence in innovative camerawork - the so-called 'emotional camera', which had as much to do with low-key and high-contrast lighting or with fast editing - was part of broader, resurgent conventions of melodrama, the dominant genre (as Bagrov [2007] has argued) of the Thaw period. 7 Be that as it may, The Cranes are Flying became an emblematic Thaw film. and Urusevskii's signature devices were identified with an emotional richness that is the standard reference point for the Thaw period. The rape scene Bearing in mind these cautions, I turn to the rape, a central scene in this classic example of Thaw cinema. In this episode, set in a Moscow apartment at the outbreak of World War II, the heroine Veronika is alone with her fianc6's cousin Mark, a concert pianist. Although the fianc6 had enlisted to the front, Mark managed illicitly to acquire an exemption from combat and remained in Moscow with Veronika. In the confusion and terror of a sudden bombing raid, Mark interrupts his piano crescendo to force himself on Veronika. She responds violently, providing a prolonged face-slapping, accompanied by enemy shelling, flapping draperies, sirens, wind, but also an oddly (now) non-diegetic piano crescendo. To this mayhem, Urusevskii's camera contributes extreme close-up shots and rapid cuts, accentuated by high-contrast flash lighting. Suddenly, emotional resources spent, Veronika collapses inert, her resistance at an end. Suddenly, too, is an end to the shelling, the sirens, the wind as well as the non-diegetic piano performance, the cuts, close-ups and flashing lights.
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Mark picks up Veronika's lifeless, uninhabited body to carry off-screen. Cinematic convention calls this 'the rape', although the description is far from satisfactory.' The episode's artifice and overwrought qualities have been repeatedly criticized in ways that need no rehearsal here.9 The sequence's enduring mystery (and logical lapse) lies in the abrupt shift from Veronika's violence to her sudden unconscious state. Despite her earlier travails, a convincing account of this physiological shift can be found neither in the plot, nor at the levels of common sense, but rather as a crisis at the centre of Soviet aesthetics, at the limits of the screenable, as if the film's contending compositional elements forced an override to conventional visual exposition and diegetic soundtrack. The first formal indication of this override like a short circuit - is the moment when Mark's earlier piano-playing is usurped, expropriated into a non-diegetic soundtrack, an off-screen crescendo that continues what Mark had begun. Similarly, Sergei Urusevskii's camera, prophylactically seizing the high melodramatic moment just before the sexual act itself, opportunistically overtakes what would otherwise become Mark's frenzy, hustling the spectator instead into a visual transgression of prevailing camera norms in lieu of sexual content, creating a medium-specific ecstasy in which questions of what the spectators are about to watch and whether they should watch are troubling issues of ideological and sexual accountability. And perhaps this line of argument provides the best clue to our socialist heroine's collapse. As Soviet conventions reach their limits, the Thaw figurine passes out, as it were. from too much camerawork. Like a burnt fuse, overcharged by medium specificity, her only choice - as the film's symbolic object at its formal break point - is to lose consciousness. The triangle of characters-camera-viewer enmeshes us in a m6nage of formalist and erotic complicities that help to explain why this otherwise weak scene is among those so often invoked among the provocations of Thaw cinema. It is not my position that this visual appropriation of the rape requires UJrusevskii's camerawork.,1 ) On the one hand, the scene might well have been shot in an expository fashion, with no extreme close-ups or canted shots. On the other hand, Urusevskii's camerawork is utterly adaptable to other narrative moments. After all, the camera and editing - the swirling technique and triple exposures - are used similarly in the fiance Boris's death and Veronika's interrupted suicide. Both of these scenes were unscripted moments of violence improvised by Kalatozov and Urusevskii during the shooting stage itself, felicitous encounters of camera and plot to facilitate a greater range of formal possibilities. Viktor Shklovskii would have smiled: it was not the characters' violent death that dictated the camerawork and editing, but the reverse: the desire for a specific kind of camerawork and editing practice sought justification in improvisational violence, raising interesting questions about the conceptual ties in these three violent episodes of rape, death and the drive to self-annihilation. Yet the key difference in the rape scene from the death and nearsuicide is its dissociation from a specific character, the absence of pointof-view shots. Urusevskii (Merkel' 1980) has intriguingly described this technique as the 'inner life of the camera' (wnutirenniaia zhizn' kamery), an
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8.

Although Shrayer (1997: 434 n. 38) suggests that the first usage of 'rape' to describe the film's air-raid scene is found in Lifton (1960: 43). Rostislav turenev (1957: 13) first raises the term with great scepticism in his contribution to the cluster of articles in Iskusstvo kino. 12 (1957) devoted to the film: 'What actually took place? Rape:' See. for example. Iurenev ( 1957: 13): Kremlev (1964: 178); Turovskaia (19 5 7: 16). For analyses in English, see Cooke ( 199 5): Shrayer (1997): Woll (2003: 53-55).

9.

10. The shooting and editing treatment of rape varies enormously. An extraordinarily common topic (I invite the reader to enter the keyword into imdb.com). with extensive scholarly range - from silentfilm scholarship (e.g. Shrock (1997)) to contemporary television analysis (e.g. Projansky (2001) - its adequate treatment lies beyond the scope of this essay. We are focused here more narrowly on its encounter with unconventional camerawork. Compare, for example, cameraman Vladimir Il'in's chaotic work for the oral rape scene in Aleksei German's 1998 Khrustahev, the Car! with the cool. expository rendition by Aleksandr Simonov in Aleksei Balabanov's Carqo 200 (Gruz 200. 2007). As Marcia Landy has remarked in personal

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conversations, for which t am indebted, the best-known examples in western cinema would include John Alcott's camerawork in Stanley
Kubrick's 1971 Clockwork Ornnge and Gibor PogAny's work in Vittorio De Sica's Two Women (La Ciociara, 1960). 11. tlrusevskii's disassociation from a specific character's viewpoint appears again later in Kalatozov's lain

Cuba (la Kuba, 1964), where its unambiguously disassociative

moments include the

first of the filn's four episodes (when the camera 'dances' with Betty) and the second iwhen the camera, in a frenzy, 'labours' alongside Pedro).

On 1uim Cuba, see Anemone (2008). 12. 1am grateful to Olga Klimova for
her remarks on

Vinogradov.
13. On the status of

rape in the Hays Code - formally known as The Motion

Picture Production Code (193 0-68) -

see entry tI. 3.a. (Seduction or Rape):

'they should never

be more than suggested and only when

essential for the plot. and even then never shown by explicit method'. An annotated version of the Hlays Code is available online with emendations, rationales, and examples at http:// productioncode. dhwritings.com/ container.php. For background infornation, see Inglis (1985:
381). 14. It is an odd coinci-

utterly different register than the point-of-view shot." The camera may run alongside the characters; it may recoil in response to a nearby physical blow, but it is not identified with the gaze of a particular character. Hence Mark's impending rape of Veronika triggers the occasion for the camera's own giddy indulgence, as if in voyeuristic anticipation, and poses a quandary for the spectator who - like the camera - thereby 'participates' in the rape. Looking ahead through successive decades, one recognizes that Urusevskii's inner life of the camera - with its blocked sight lines, extreme close-ups and unconventional composition - has served as an inspiration for a number of successive instances, from the rape in Valentin Vinogradov's war drama Eastern Corridor (Vostochnyi corridor, 1968) to Aleksei German's Khrustalev, the Car! (Khrustalev, mashinul, 1998).2 In a film otherwise unimpaired in its capacity to provide verisimilitude, the compositional frenzy in The Cranes are Fhking suggests that - where physical and psychological representation reach their limit - neo-modemist camerawork might steal an illicit, libidinal moment in the medium whose veryj alibi lay in the fact that it was most intimately controlled by the state. Formal experimentation thereby becomes the lesser of two evils - a kind of visual Aesopianism for that which cannot be represented by the conventions of socialist realism. But Urusevskii's experiment in this respect is more interesting than a mere instance of 'the act that cannot be depicted' (or, alternatively, an account of the heroine's psychological disorientation). Instead, it is the strategic appropriation by the cameraman of that visual regime normally held in the sway of Soviet film-making's bureaucratic conventions, a brief seizure of visual power from the eye of the state. Here is one instance where one might look for the ways in which Greenberg's writing - rigorously concerned with paint, support and pigment, but with profound implications for cultural politics - encounters an eastern rendition of medium specificity, one that can never altogether be ideologically disentangled from its relation to centralized state film production. As Alexander Prokhorov (2002: 30) has polemically argued, 'what the West named the Cold War, the Russians titled the Thaw'. It is a curious fact that 1956 marked not only a thaw in Soviet culture, but also a thaw in US cinema as the Hays Code3 gave way to a more strategic dynamism, allowing for a more liberal treatment of such themes as prostitution, drugs and abortion. 1 4 The relaxation of Soviet protocols of representation contributed to the conditions within which 'Cold War' and 'Thaw' are not opposed but interdependent ways of describing the give-and-take of visual regimes, renegotiated in simultaneous dimensions of time (the pivot of 1956) and space (East and West). The 1958 encounter two years later at Cannes. the same year as the signing of the Cultural Exchange Agreement, further revealed the two sides of this Cold War/Thaw. Symptomatic at that time of their uneasy encounter is Mitchell Lifton's 1960 response to The Cranes are Flying in Film Quarterly: Two styles - one, a very straight, naturalistic, pictorial rendering, the other a fast, nervous, symbolized evocation - seem to be in constant
180 Nancy Condee

dence - and perhaps

conflict throughout the film. [...] A unity accrues which is not one of continuity but of rhythm, of the repetition and elaboration of certain symbolic elements.
(Lifton 1960: 43)

Lifton's remarks may be narrowly read as describing Urusevskii's cinematography. It may more profitably be read as broadly contemplative of an instance of how two distinct but interdependent ideological drives are inscribed on the common screen of the late 1950s. Lifton's 'certain symbolic elements', I would argue, reveal themselves in three key registers of association: first, a historical re-linking of Soviet spectators to their own cultural legacy from Rodchenko to Urusevskii: second, a geopolitical linking of Russia's medium-specific traditions from the 1920s to its counterparts in contemporary western art of the late 1950s; third, a visual linking of the medium's transgressive experimentations with unscreenable practices of sexuality. T[he cultural politics of the Cold War were in this sense the real-time negotiation of these linkages of history, geopolitics and visuality, recasting how time and space got screened: how legacy was appropriated and shared across the globe in cinema. Cinema specificity, which Kuleshov's 1922 'Americanism' struggled to distinguish from theatricality, eventually found an implicit enthusiast in Greenberg, an interlocutor largely uninterested in cinema and yet providing the most explicit evaluation of medium's autonomous terrain, Greenberg - once lovingly described (Schjeldahl 199 3: 166; emphasis in the original) as 'art for art's sake on tank tracks', who 'almost incidentallyj organized the unruly data of modern art more persuasively than anyone else' - was just as incidental a participant in the very cultural exchange that transformed 'Cold War' into a near-synonym with 'Thaw', providing the organizing logic and cultural context of how Soviet cinema as cinemna- as a medium, rather than as a true image of the real world - might constitute sexual desire. Acknowledgements
This essay is written in response to work by losie Woll (1950-2008), whose monograph The Cranes are Flying deepened my appreciation of director Mikhail Kalatozov and cameraman Sergei Urusevskii. An earlier, abbreviated version

only that - that the Hays Code liberalizations are coincident with identical key dates in Soviet history: in 1956, a liberalization (often referred to as a thaw): in 1968, the Code's replacement by a more calibrated movie ratings system: in 1984, the more flexible category of PG-13: and in 1990, the phasing out of X-ratings.

of this essay, as a tribute to Woll's work, appeared in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 3: 1 (2009), pp. 74-76. In expanding and re-editing the essay, I am grateful to several colleagues who discussed these issues and directed my
attention to valuable texts. They include Marcia Landy, Vladimir Padunov,

Richard Pefna, Andrey Shcherbenok, Terry Smith, Rebecca Stanton and Denise
Youngblood.

Works cited
Anemone, Anthony (2008), '1am Cuba', Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2: 3, pp. 345-46. Appy, Christian G. (2000), Cold War Constructions: The PoliticalCulture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Bagrov, Petr (2007), 'Soviet Melodrama: A Historical Overview', Kinokultura, 17,

http://www.kinokultura.com/2007/17-bagrov.shtml. Accessed 31 December 2008.

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Segrave, Kerry (2004), F'oreign lFilis m America: A Historyl, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Shaw, Tony (20t07), lHollyiwood's Cold War, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Shraver, Maxim (1997). 'Why are the Cranes Still Flying,', Rissian Review, 56, pp. 42i-39. Shrock, Joel (1997), 'Desperate Deeds. D)esperate Men: Gender, Race. and Rape in Silent Feature Films, 1915-1927', The Journal of Xlen',s Studies, 6, pp, 69-89. Solov'ev, Sergei ( 198 6), MUir fl'mov Serileia ,Solov'eva, Moscow: Vsesoiuznoe biuro propagandy kinoiskusstML Turovskaia, Maia (1957). "l)a" i "net"', lskusstmo kino, 12, pp. 1 5-1 7. ILrusevskii, Sergei (1967), 'Neskol'ko slov o Rodchenko', Iskisstvo kino 12, pp. 10)l 11)1 . 1)))2), S5 kinokameroi i za mol'bertom. Moscow: Algoritin. Woll, Josephine (21)1 3), The Cranes are F'lying, Kinoriles Film Companion. 7, London: 1.1. Tauris. Zorkaia. N. M. (20)0)5), Istoriia sovetskoqo kino, St Petersburg: Aleteiia. Suggested citation C(ondee, N. (2009). 'Rape and medium specificity in The Cranties are Iilling', Stidies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 3: 2, pp. 17 3-18 3, doi: l0. 1 386/srsc. 3.2.17 3/1 Contributor details Nancy Condee is associate professor of Slavic and Film Studies at the Universitv of Pittsburgh. She is the aUthor of The Imperial Trace: Recent Riissian Cinema (Oxford iniversitv Press. 2009) and co-editor (with Terry Smith and Okwui Enwezorl of Alltilonlie,s oi Art and C'iltm: Modernityn. Postmodernityu. Contitetporalneitn (Duke University Press, 2009). Hler work has appeared in such Russian journals as
Isktisstvo kio. Novooe literaturnol'obozrenie, and Seans. Contact: Slavic, CL, 141 7. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh. PA 1 52t)6. IF-iaill: coiRIdCC(a pitt.edU

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TITLE: Veronika fuses out: Rape and medium specificity in The Cranes are Flying SOURCE: Stud Russ Sov Cinema 3 no2 2009 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals.php?issn=17503132