First tier

A youth detachment arrives in one of the steppe regions of Kazakhstan on Komsomol permits, with the goal of developing virgin lands . Severe frosts and streams of spring mud, exhausting work not in their specialty complicate the already difficult life of arrivals. Against the background of such a life, the touching novel of the secretary of the Komsomol organization and tractor driver Anna develops ...

In 1954, the famous Soviet cameraman Yuri Yekelchik was offered - the first of the Soviet operators - to conduct experimental wide-screen shooting. The choice was extremely happy: the wide screen was created as if specially for Yekelchik with his constant desire to “go beyond the frame”, “to embrace the immensity”. But the new format brought new problems. Yekelchik enthusiastically seeks the ways of the most expressive presentation of the actor, checks the possibilities of shooting with movement. The experiments also get a real goal - together with the director Mikhail Kalatozov, Yekelchik begins preparations for the shooting of the first Soviet widescreen film "Tselina" according to the script of Nikolai Pogodin . The film had to be shot on a regular screen. But the work of Yekelchik did not disappear, and experimental filming, and the actor’s shot on a wide screen, were carefully and with great benefit studied by the operators, following Yekelchik mastering a new format.

The "First Echelon" (with the name of the film appeared on the screen) again demonstrated Yekelchik’s ability to change, to find new means to express new content. But the significance of the film in the development of camera art is not limited to this. In fact, it is, perhaps, not yet appreciated. The reason is that certain elements of the synthetic art of cinema, as art critic A. Kamensky correctly noted, have “a certain development autonomy”. It manifested itself in the “First Echelon” - the pictorial interpretation went somewhat ahead of the script and director's decision. And the significance of the film, its place in the history of cinema, is determined, as a rule, by a general assessment.

For Kalatozov (as well as for cinema as a whole), “First Echelon” turned out to be a transitional film: he began to get rid of many canons of the Little Picture period (the last years of the Stalin period) here and only felt for the style that made his next film - “Fly cranes ” (1957) an event not only of Soviet - world cinema. ^[one]

• Vsevolod Sanaev - Alexey Egorovich Dontsov, director of the state farm
• Sergey Romodanov - Taras Grigorievich Shugailo, team leader
• Nikolay Annenkov - Kashtanov, secretary of the regional committee
• Oleg Efremov - Alexey Uzorov
• Izolda Izvitskaya - Anna Zalogina
• Eduard Bredun - Genka Monetkin
• Alexey Kozhevnikov - Valya Solntsev
• Nina Doroshina - Nelly Panina
• Elsa of the Rays - Tamara
• Anatoly Kirillov - Petya from ZIS
• Vyacheslav Voronin - Troyan
• Khoren Abrahamyan - Vartan Vartanyan
• Tatyana Doronina - Zoya

• Stage Directors: Mikhail Kalatozov
• Script writer: Nikolai Pogodin
• Operator: Sergey Urusevsky , Yuri Yekelchik
• Composer: Dmitry Shostakovich
• Sound producer: Valery Popov
• Artist: Gennady Myasnikov .
• Costume Designer: Valentin Pereletov

• The film "First echelon" in the online movie theater "Mosfilm"
• First Tier in the New Encyclopedia of Cinema