Letter Never Sent

I saw that Criterion also had an edition of Mikhail Kalatozov's Letter Never Sent (1960) and since I had enjoyed his previous films I Am Cuba, The Cranes Are Flying, and The Red Tent I decided to get it. The most important aspect of this film is the continued collaboration of Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, who worked previously on 1957’s The Cranes Are Flying and 1964’s I Am Cuba. This like those two previous films are notable for its visual style more than anything else. he opening five minutes of Letter Never Sent, a sequence of five long takes (none shorter than thirty seconds in duration), can be seen as an example of Urusevsky’s cinematographic mastery.This film is a film of exploration at the onset a party of four geologists—three men and a woman—embarks on an expedition to locate diamonds in the wilderness of the Central Siberian Plateau. The second part of the film is a desperate struggle for survival against nature first in the form of a forest fire then later by the early winter that strikes. The Criterion treatment is uncharacteristically light:new high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition, a new English subtitle translation, and a booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Dina Iordanova.