Monthly Archive: July 2003

Sokurov is a specialist in analyzing totalitarian ideologies-he proposed visual interpretations of Hitler (Molokh, 1999) and Lenin (Taurus, 2000). These films are the first half of a tetralogy on dictators of the 20th century. (Rumour has it that his next project will deal with Mao Tse Dong).

Russian Ark does not fit at all into this series. This breathtaking movie seems not to analyze but to produce ideology. It is a dream phantasy with a narrator who owns Sokurov’s voice and the eye of the camera.

This eye (which is in Nabokov’s homophony also an I) is led … Read more

Anyone who knows Sokurov’s films-his obsession withmists, dissolves and fadeouts, their hypnotic thrills, his delving into a mystery-can easily understand Sokurov’s desire to make a film “in one breath”.

In one of his latest interviews Sokurov confessed that his idea of making a film without a single cut was already almost fourteen years old.

Then Sokurov wanted to make a film about the Tower of Babylon, where – as he mentioned – all nations and languages form one spiritual movement.

Sokurov is interested indeed in this kind of inner gesture, in the movement of big masses encircled by an … Read more

Sokurov’s much debated film Russian Ark is a film of many paradoxes. Its premiers travel from West to East in America, Europe, and Russia, and contrary to the histories of Russia it (re)presents, has led to many confusions and irritations.

Picture theory as “sculpted” through the history of pictures, bodily perceptions and intercultural questions seem to be an entry-point for understanding and analyzing the film. A tangible simultaneousness of historical epochs, visual techniques and thoughts about preserving a national film-culture (in the context of the “global” or European threat) comprise some of the complexity of the film. Still, these issues … Read more