Quite probably the video rediscovery of 2012, Mikhail Kalatozov's Letter Never Sent (1959) is a world masterpiece you've probably never heard of, and which even civilian aficionados of Soviet cinema have had a very difficult time seeing in the decades since it first appeared. This isn't quite the oddity it seems - the New Wave era, beginning in the late '50s with the Poles and the Soviets, is still bursting with great European films we barely if ever get chances to see. Kalatozov himself could be a poster boy for this kind of global-exhibition martyrdom. After winning an Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1957 with The Cranes Are Flying, he skipped world film culture's radar for years. It wasn't until 1992, when the electrifying but completely forgotten I Am Cuba (1964) reappeared at the Telluride Film Festival and stunned every onlooker, that Kalatozov became an international cause celebre, almost two decades after he'd died. One of the most visually titanic works in the century of movies, I Am Cuba mated together superhuman camerawork, unearthly infra-red-stock exposures, unfettered revolutionary outrage and long-take traveling shots so extraordinary that the resulting assault feels less concerned with Cuba per se than with the fusillade of movement, shadow, light, vertigo and landscape on the viewer's tender optic nerves.

Letter Never Sent was ripe for rediscovery, then, coming immediately before Cranes, employing as Kalatozov's other lauded films had the cinematographic sorcery of Sergei Urusevsky, and being a Siberian-set adventure saga unlike any other made anywhere. No five-second clip from the film could be mistaken for the work of any other two craftsmen. With their unique arsenal of mobile camera, infrared stock, infinite range, and deep compositions, Kalatozov and Urusevsky adapted Valery Osipov's book about a four-person geological team (three men and demure Soviet New Wave maiden Tatiana Samojlova, a recipe for trouble) hunting for diamond lodes in Siberia. The terrifyingly specific elements - endless ice, endless mud, endless forest - turn against the starry-eyed team, and in the manner of so much state-beloved Soviet political melodrama the narrative ends as a devastating salute not to heroism but to wholesale bad-luck martyrdom.

That's it for story. The real star is the film's torrential visual texture; it may have only the team's other films as rivals to being the most dazzling black-&-white films ever shot. Shot almost 100% on-location, Flaherty-Herzog-style, the film nevertheless careens, starting with its first breath-holding helicopter shot, from the rugged to the ur-Gothic to the Dantean. The entire middle third of the film entails an endless forest fire from which the team attempts to escape, and instead of taking the safe and short route, with establishing shots abetted by detailed close-ups, Kalatozov shoots his characters in a series of astonishing tracking shots through the inferno, up close but always moving, in and out of the burning trees and cyclonic smoke clouds. How this sequence was managed out in the Siberian wilderness is anyone's guess; merely surviving the shoot appears to have been challenge enough for everyone involved.

In this film Kalatozov represents something like the original source waters for one the cinema's greatest tangential histories - that of the plan sequence art film, beginning here and progressing to Tarkovsky, Jancso, Angelopoulos, Sokurov and Tarr. It's a style of cinematic experience that galvanizes your attention, as the world we see through the camera changes with movement and time, and we are free to wander around within the shots as if they're three-dimensional events. It's a shared realism in a myriad of ways a "normal" film, with all of its cutting and eye-direction, cannot touch, but the extreme sequences in this style also rope in historic, cultural, even existential thematic ideas, just by virtue of their length, complexity and scope. You can have a film tell you about man's relationship to the wilderness, or to God, or to totalitarian history. But then you can have a film hold you by the hand and take you on the tour instead. And then the experience is yours.

Letter Never Sent represents also a large puzzle piece from Kalatozov's attenuated career, which began with documentaries in the late '20s but which took so long to come to a head, during the Khrushchev thaw. All the while, apparently, the filmmaker was rarely allowed to fashion anything that wasn't straight-up agitprop; only one silent of his is available on DVD, the 1930 quasi-doc Salt for Svanteia, and tellingly it's a forced agitprop ballade about the titular region saved by the roads built by Soviet industriousness. But Kalatozov, even without Urusevsky, constructed his state assignment as though he were making a film about Middle Earth, bristling with visual oddness and unorthodox perspectives. The films he made with Urusevsky (the fourth is 1957's Pervyy eshelon, still waiting to be unearthed) are remarkable for how they ignite even the systemized sentimentality of Soviet propaganda with unique and unalloyed formal pyrotechnics. Letter Never Sent might be pure film - if you went to Siberia, it wouldn't look like this. No other film would, either. It's a self-contained, utterly miraculous vision.

New to Blu-Ray by way of The Criterion Collection, the Letter Never Sent disc is, it must be noted, oddly devoid of the usual cataract of extras. A rather dry booklet essay by scholar Dina Iordanova is all we get, when, given the realities of the film's production ordeal, a paradigmatic Criterion retrospective documentary would've been fascinating. But perhaps not - maybe the "how" of Kalatozov and Urusevsky's achievement is best left unexplained.

For more information about Letter Never Sent, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Letter Never Sent, go to TCM Shopping.

by Michael Atkinson