The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov by Jeremi Szaniawski

Author:Jeremi Szaniawski
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004010, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Direction & Production
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Russian Ark: Imperial Elegy

‘Everyone knows the future. It is the past everyone has forgotten.’

– Alexander Sokurov

As a child, Alexander Sokurov made early acquaintance with uncertainty and suffering in a surgical procedure that took part of his leg. The intensive surgery, along with a lengthy convalescence, introduced the young Sokurov not only to excruciating pain, but also to the profound, imaginative joy of high art: it was the classical music he could hear on the radio that helped the director through his illness and recovery process.1 And it is thanks to his great loves – literature, painting, music – and the faith they gave him in Art, that Sokurov managed to endure the many years of humiliation under the Soviet regime. Art had given him strength.

Overcoming his hardships endowed Sokurov with a keen and compassionate interest for other people and their predicaments, be it social, political, psychological. Throughout his career, and in parallel to his pursuit as a fiction filmmaker, Sokurov devised his cycle of elegies, several of which were already broached in the preceding chapters. Derived from the Greek word elegeia (έλεγεία), the elegy is the literary and lyrical genre meant to mourn the dead. It is therefore often sad, plaintive and melancholic. Yet in its function – reminiscing about the past when the object of mourning was still alive – the elegy also redeems and captures, from under its mournful tone, those moments of beauty and life, fondly remembered. Half poetic diaries, filled with the director’s ruminations and observations in his customary voice-over, and half documentaries, Sokurov’s elegies are dedicated to a variety of subjects (famous and anonymous people). They devise a highly personal and introspective vision of history, perfectly fitting the description above, in tone and in the moments they choose to illustrate – and in how they focus specifically on an interrogation of man’s spiritual condition.

In 2001, Sokurov released yet another instalment in the cycle. Entitled Elegy of a Voyage, it documented and commented upon a trip from Russia to the Boijmans-Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, whose collection the director was to showcase with the film.2 The intimate and remarkable film highlighted Sokurov’s love of paintings – and the characters therein, ‘eternal people’. This was an appetiser for a far more ambitious project: later that year, after countless hours spent in museums all over the Soviet Union, the Western world and the East – and driven by his endless love of high art – Sokurov walked across the many halls of one of the world’s greatest museums, despite his limp, and produced the first ever single-take feature film in motion picture history.3 The utopian dream of a child who might easily have died or never walk again led to one of the great utopias in the history of the cinematic medium.

I

At the core of every museum and cinematic project lies a similar utopian drive. It consists of conflating a diverse set of temporalities within a block of space and time, and infusing them with a new life.

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