AN INTRODUCTION TO THE FILMS OF
ALEXANDER SOKUROV
By Gabe Klinger
Alexander Sokurov is in a slump. It remains to be seen whether the recent decision to bring his films to the high-profile glamour of Cannes was a mistake; Moloch (1999), his first film to surface at the festival, opened the 50 year-old Russian director for serious consideration, but the praise came from David Cronenberg's artier-than-thou jury, which commentators still consider one of the events' biggest blemishes. Sitting in between one writer from Vogue and another from Paris-Match at this year's Rotterdam Film Festival, I mentioned the day's films I had seen, and one of them happened to be Taurus (2001), Sokurov's second film to compete in Cannes. "I haven't seen it, but I can't stand his films!" exclaimed the reporter from Paris-Match. It was only at this point, late in the festival year, that I realized the mainstream press had already begun to ignore his films. At least now we have two groups, and few directors can so easily discern their viewers: those who can't even drag themselves to his films out of professional duty; and then those who keep seeing them because they truly admire what he's doing.
Susan Sontag. Paul Schrader. There aren't as many fervent Sokurov supporters as there are for Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, arguably the two other greatest discoveries of the last two decades. Critics as well as audiences have responded wearily to his work. When Mother and Son (1997) was released commercially in the U.S., Roger Ebert refused to review it, instead duly passing along to a second-stringer, who wrote a glib, 100-word summary along the lines of, "still-life doesn't work in a movie."
Though far from being Sokurov's most accomplished work, Mother and Son served as an introduction to his painterly aesthetic, his use of colors using a paint-brush technique and bent glass to stretch-out the image. Mother and Son, like all of Sokurov's films, is slow-paced and depressive in tone. Sokurov is protective of his timing; this is especially apparent in some of his videos, which have been meticulously subtitled in a way that has the letters fading in and out rather than popping onto the screen whenever someone begins to speak. His films can be long but they're never self-indulgent; in fact, most of the chapters in his famous "Elegy" series are timed at just under an hour, and each feel as richly detailed as a novel. On the other hand, his ambitious and rarely-screened 6-hour masterpiece Spiritual Voices is a demanding film when shown all together.
Even when he's working in a political mode, one suspects that for Sokurov, the visual comes first and the meaning comes second. Like Andrei Tarkovsky, he was punished for ambiguity in the Soviet days. Unlike Tarkovsky, his films are ambiguous in intent; for instance, one doesn't know if the first two films in his autocrat series, Moloch and Taurus, are expressions in banality (Moloch was unfairly subtitled "the banality of evil") or studies in latent humanism--or something else entirely. In most of his video work (which are mostly documentaries) Sokurov's objective seems to be to capture naturalism, filming people who fascinate him in their natural surroundings. Those surroundings, however, are manipulated, directly and indirectly by light, mirrors, paint filters, and other on-the-set production techniques (Sokurov does not change his images in post-production). It would be wrong to say Sokurov is two parts impressionist and one part storyteller, just as it would be wrong to label the intent of any of his films.
That's not to say Tarkovsky's films should be labeled. For the sake of comparison, Sokurov seems much less conflicted about the existence of god than his predecessor. As a result, Tarkovsky's style has the feeling today of being self-conscious, his symbolism unmistakable (even if the effect is always profound). In Sokurov, the murky (visual and otherwise) amounts to a calculated transcendence. One can also see that Sokurov's protagonists are not in a spiritual purgatory; from the boy in The Second Circle (1992) to the old woman in A Humble Life (1996), their roots are buried deep in the ground below them. Tarkovsky's characters - from Ivan to Rublev to the stalker - have formal cinematic traits; their road to certainty is open-ended.
It was Tarkovsky's letter of recommendation to Lenfilm Studios that jumpstarted Sokurov's feature film career. From his very first, The Lonely Voice of Man (1978), to the very latest, all of his films have the involvement of Lenfilm (at one point Troitsky Most Studio). From the amount of work he does, Sokurov stands alongside many of the prolific filmmakers working in Japan (where he's encountered funding for several videos); he's even a celebrated television personality in Russia, much like Takeshi Kitano and Nagisa Oshima in Japan. His films couldn't be further from this reality of course.
Anyway I couldn't even begin to scrape the surface of what Sokurov's films are really about, nor do they invite connections from other periods in movie history (except historically). It doesn't help that this director is largely non-cinephilic; maybe I can see some isolated moments from other documentary films: the images of defeated countrymen in the Evening Sacrifice (1984), the feeling of tourist alienation (to put it crudely) in Oriental Elegy (1996), the rapid montage of family photos in Dolce (2000), the empty road and unseen narrator in Elegy of a Voyage (2001). The last thing I'd like to note is that Sokurov stubbornly prevails as a filmmaker artist, not because he is uncompromising and doesn't care about the commercial aspects. It's because he likes to paint and if he's good at that (and he is), then it will give all his films some consistency. In a recent debate with a friend, I tried to separate the descriptors "masterwork" and "work of of a master." We agreed the "masterwork" is the film that seems to function on all levels of cinema, and that the "work of a master" will always be merely esoteric. Lucky for us, Sokurov is a champion of the last genre.