SHORT CUTS:
COMMENTS ON SOME OF SOKUROV'S RECENT WORK

By Daniel Smith

Most reviews of Mother and Son have described it as the expression of ideal love, and the deep bond between the mother and the son. I think that the film does recognize a deep bond between the two characters, but Sokurov seems to have a more complex, darker agenda. One of the most noticeable visual aspects of Mother and Son is Sokurov's use of distortion effects, to stretch the character's bodies across the frame. This most of all allows the viewers to sense the effect of something very heavy weighing down on these characters. (The mother even mentions life being "heavy.") If these characters were the example of the ideal love-the true, liberating love-then what would there be to weigh them down? With something weighing them down, they can never experience true freedom, and can never have this perfect, ideal love for each other.

Mother and Son is so commonly considered to be about the "ideal" love that many reviewers see certain things-such as his touching his mother at times in ways that could be considered incestuous-as "tender" moments between the two. It seems that these reviewers who say this are just like the characters in the film-they have a false concept of real love. Like so many people today, the mother and son have basically imprisoned themselves with a concept of love that fails to go beyond simple family bonds. We as audience members get to see and experience their (self-imposed) isolation, and in the end when we see the son all alone with nothing at all in the world but the hope of reconciliation, it's utterly heartbreaking.

By Gabe Klinger

In the history of classic Russian literature - whose key works and authors I need not mention - there has always existed a current of characteristically cerebral, historical, and urgently political thought. In many ways, it's the most dead-earnest history of intellectual activity the world has seen. Sokurov would appear to be following this tradition: his stillness, use of classical music and (in most cases) minimalist set decoration and lighting seem to stem from a rigorous literary application. In this sense, The Second Circle (1990) may be the defining line between ironic art-posturing and serious work. If alarm bells didn't go off in your head during the admittedly ridiculous second half of the film - the second circle of the title, one would think - then you have not been following the descriptions of the profoundly somber Sokurov too closely. Second Circle is actually clearly farcical in parts, while it's subject matter is sad, cruel, and creepy. A sick joke? No, but a certain kind of formalism that makes the film provocative and memorable.

A young man returns from a trip to find his father dead and frozen stiff from the winter. He is obviously devastated, and moves the corpse around in fits of anxiety, living with it, tending to it. When the experts take over in filing his father away to the heavens, the young man not only finds the whole process tiresome; he refuses to come to terms with the emotional baggage that is not mutually exclusive when dealing with the burial of a family member. The person that is most confrontational to the son about his moping, a funeral home employee who arrives at his doorstep with a checklist of burial arrangements and prices, also treats his father's passing with the least amount of dignity. "I would prefer it if you measured him," she tells the son, "I'm afraid to go near the body." He doesn't seem to mind, but the ensuing scenarios - one where a coffin is laid-out between two chairs and nearly tips over with the weight of the corpse - can only have, we presume, an effect of denial over the son, who refuses or half-refuses to see the surreal nature of what's in front of him. His conviction to get things done "properly" alongside the ill-manners of the funeral specialist result in a comic release.

Whether or not this is intentional, it never outweighs the overlying sadness that Sokurov unambiguously aimed for. For the first 20 minutes of Second Circle, barely a word of dialogue is spoken yet we still understand the son's condition. In an extended scene that takes place in the back of a moving truck, the son sits quietly with the wind blowing in his face as he starts crying copious tears. Even if later in the film the simple and poignant is replaced with the increasingly absurd, the crying never stops.

By Zach Campbell

The opening scene of Moloch is perhaps the film's most tragic in hindsight, because it establishes the primacy of Eva Braun, not Hitler, as the central character in the film. The carefree, nude figure of Elena Rufanova cartwheeling and stretching along the walkways of Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat in the foggy morning stands in stark contrast to the tense, insane human relations involved in every scene after this one, where Hitler (Leonid Mozgovy) dominates the environment and yet portrays a man shrinking in fear and self-pity.

Moloch (and also Taurus) are in some ways a kind of reckoning with events of last century that are larger than life. Hitler and Lenin are used as shorthand for their actions and their legacies, and the tangential exploration of history in these films is why I see a philosophical connection between these Sokurov films and the Resnais of Night and Fog and Hiroshima, Mon Amour. But shorthand is a secondary function for the characters of Hitler in Moloch and Lenin in Taurus. The most fascinating thing about Sokurov's treatment on these dictators is that he examines them as people, merely people, without ignoring or downplaying who they are as icons, as symbols. There are no summative scenes in Moloch that spell out Hitler's monstrosity. But neither does Sokurov avoid the reality of Hitler's presence.

What makes Moloch so fascinating and so challenging is precisely because it looks at Hitler as a man and a symbol, but through the (guileless?) eyes of strong, opaque Eva Braun: who is unafraid to mock her lover, to contest his authority, even as she is ultimately in love with him and subordinate to his persona. Sokurov is, like few other filmmakers I know of, examining the control that dictators can exert on "regular" people. Whether he means to paint Nazi Hitler and Bolshevik Lenin in the same stroke, or simply identify them as magnetic personalities who eventually lose their grip on the world, I'm not sure.

The inevitable Tarkovsky comparison seems apt here: combining politics and poetics, a sense of motivation but not much of a narrative, Moloch is definitely a way of grappling with tangible, worldly issues through the expression of ethereal, weightless tones and images. One can imagine Eva Braun, Hitler, and his entourage traveling through the Zone.

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