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Death masques
The cinema of Alexander Sokurov at the Harvard Film Archive
BY PETER KEOUGH

"Requiem: The Visionary Filmsof Alexander Sokurov"
At the Harvard Film Archive, March 8-30.

"Ah, the Grim Reaper," says an unlikely character in Moloch (1999; March 9 at 8:45 p.m.), a highlight in the Alexander Sokurov retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive. "The plague will soon exist no more. We’ll beat death."

The speaker is Adolf Hitler (Leonid Mozgovoy), the 20th century’s own Grim Reaper, and the words might be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy of his own demise. But Sokurov might have a deeper, more disturbing meaning in mind, the idea that even the murderer of millions might have committed his atrocities as a twisted way of affirming life. As such, he seems to suggest, Hitler is an artist, because art is humanity’s way of vindicating life and preparing for death in the face of ultimate extinction.

The preferable artistic method, of course, would be something akin to Sokurov’s own. Obsessive, hypnotic, ponderous, and funereal (seven of his efforts include "Elegy" in the title), his films move with the slow rhythms of prayer, with few of the sudden, often glorious epiphanies achieved by his mentor, Andrei Tarkovsky, but with a gathering darkness and sense of inevitability befitting his subject. His tone is more detached grief than clammy terror, as he probes not so much the dread of personal extinction as the devastation caused by the loss of others, the fear of being left behind. These are fitting works in this period of grief where in Collateral Damage even Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a widower; and though they may not beat death (some might think they beat the theme to death), they provide genuine consolation.

Moloch actually proves one of the more lighthearted of Sokurov’s works, a comparative romp opening with a nude Eva Braun (Elena Rufanova, with German dialogue dubbed by Fassbinder protégée Eva Mattes) doing cartwheels on the damp ramparts of the Führer’s Eagle’s Nest castle high in the Bavarian Alps. Although it takes its name from the Old Testament idol with a hunger for sacrificed children, Moloch is a love story from the point of view of Braun, who’s here depicted as the sometimes bemused power behind the throne, chiding "Adi" about his hypochondria and his boorish remarks about "corpse soup" to the non-vegetarians at the dinner table, where, naughty girl that she can be, she offers a hand job to Martin Bormann.

Stifled in their fortress, which looks like a cross between Edgar G. Ulmer’s Metropolis sets and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s staging of Parsifal, Hitler, Goebbels, and the gang dance to decadent music on a bleak hilltop, and Hitler poses in a Caspar David Friedrich tableau. It’s the logical end, perhaps, of the Romanticism that is Sokurov’s own admitted inspiration, and just an extreme example of the yearning of two souls doomed to end in tragedy. As long as Eva’s beauty lives, Adi tells her, he will live also.

That’s not much solace to the millions who died at Hitler’s hands despite, or because of, Braun’s inspiring beauty. Their case is more concisely related in "Sonata for Hitler" (1979-’89; screens with Moloch), an 11-minute montage of archival footage — Hitler looking thoughtful, Hitler fulminating, masses saluting, Panzers blitzing, corpses mounting — set to a sprightly Bach flute sonata. The jarring irony did not go unnoticed by Soviet censors, who held up the film’s release for 10 years, a common fate for Sokurov’s efforts in the 1980s.

Yet irony, except perhaps for the kind favored by Sophocles and Euripides, is not so much Sokurov’s style as is pathos. In the opening scene of The Second Circle (1990; March 15 at 9 p.m.), a tiny, dark figure (Pyotr Aleksandrov) bends before and is finally absorbed by a howling, snow-filled landscape. Things get only colder for the young hero (all Sokurov films seem to breathe a palpable chill), who arrives at his father’s house just in time to hear a gruff medico mutter, "He stopped breathing — that’s a fine kettle of fish."

Indeed it is for the bereaved son, who now must dispose of the deceased. The water pipes are broken, so he has to drag the old man’s corpse outside and wash it with snow. Strangers mug him on the bus when he returns from the doctor’s office with the death certificate. The dominatrix-like undertaker smokes the dead man’s cigarettes, complains about the dirty floor, and later subjects the grieving son to almost sado-masochistic humiliations (he ends up putting his own socks on the dead man’s feet) as they box the stiff and give it the bum’s rush out the door.

An allegory about the demise of the Soviet patriarchy and the rise of heartless, mercenary chaos? A luminous, Bressonian tale of universal fate? "Happy are the nearest and dearest of ours," reads the epilogue, "who died before us."

The only evidence of compassion in The Second Circle comes from a little boy at the doctor’s office who says, "Everything will be all right." It’s the same consolation given to the old man in Oriental Elegy (1990; March 16 at 9 p.m. with Dolce) by a drowned sailor he saw as a boy. The old man himself is apparently dead too, a shade summoned by Sokurov’s voiceover narrator as he relates a seeming dream voyage to a necropolis on a fog-shrouded Japanese island that looks like a cross between Giorgio de Chirico and the sets for Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. There the dead speak, but unlike the little boy or the sailor’s corpse, they offer neither wisdom nor comfort.

What does offer comfort, it seems, are the simple things, quotidian details and duties, that get reduced to their essence in A Humble Life (1997; March 22 at 7 p.m. with "Simple Elegy"), a painstaking look at the labored existence of an old Japanese widow in a rough-hewn house high in the remote mountains of Japan. She sews kimonos, she eats lunch, and in a wild moment of extravagance she gives alms to a small band of itinerant monks; it’s all accompanied throughout by Sokurov’s awed, off-screen commentary. In the end, she recites her own haiku on the themes of transience, loss, and grief.

A more noted Japanese widow is featured in Dolce (1999; March 16 at 9 p.m. with Oriental Elegy). In a brief prologue, the narrator recounts the career of the writer Toshio Shimao, his books, his war service, his marriage, the adultery that drove his wife temporarily insane, his daughter’s muteness and stunted growth, his death in 1986. Now the widow and daughter live together on a Japanese island, where the former recalls her own mother’s death, her father’s grief, and her guilt at her daughter’s condition but almost nothing about her husband. The extremity of the emotions seems to distort the landscape itself: favored Sokurov motifs like misty seas and moonlit skies verge on the haunted otherworldliness of Oriental Elegy.

And that’s characteristic of how the border between the concrete and the imaginary tends to blur in Sokurov’s world. Ghosts wander through an imaginary architecture reminiscent of the oneiric ruins painted by the French landscapist profiled in the short "Hubert Robert: A Fortunate Life" (1996; March 27 at 7 p.m. with Maria (Peasant Elegy)). The ghosts can be historical, or literary, as in Whispering Pages (1993; March 9 at 7 p.m.), perhaps the greatest adaptation of Russian literature on screen, a version of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment with apologies to Kafka’s The Trial and a little bit of Alice in Wonderland. A suffocating, nightmare city and a saintly whore every bit as sublime and fragile as the barely blossoming tree that is a Sokurov hallmark make for a bleak but sensuous descent into guilt and redemption.

In one of many enigmatic scenes in Whispering Pages, the unnamed Raskolnikov figure apparently dreams of people leaping off balconies into what looks like the reflecting surface of a well. Where do they go? Perhaps into the world of Stone (1992; March 16 at 7 p.m.), which adapts Chekhov — not his work, but the writer himself.

A young man, played by Pyotr Aleksandrov of The Second Circle, enters a house to confront its dead occupant. In this case, however, the house is not the hovel of a pauper, as in the earlier film, but the home of Anton Chekhov, now a museum, and the dead man is the dour author himself, played by the versatile Leonid Mozgovoy, who also portrays Hitler in Moloch and Lenin in Taurus (2001; March 23 at 7 p.m. but unavailable for preview). More than 90 years after his death, Anton is still puckish and pince-nez’d, but now he’s bewildered by this gray new world where the chilly grounds are crossed by fog and a stray crane. His filial guide is as clueless as himself, and there’s no one around, living or dead, to assure him that everything will be all right.

Perhaps the mirror-like surface of Whispering Pages opens to the world of Elegy of a Voyage (2001; March 22 at 9 p.m. with "A Soldier’s Dream" and "Evening Sacrifice"), in which the narrator, Sokurov himself, is whisked from a snowy solitude to an ocean voyage (he recalls Chekhov’s smiling at the remark of a little boy: "The sea is so big!") to a deserted museum where he arrives at last at a painting of a town square rendered by the 17th-century Dutch artist Peter Saenredem. The narrator seems to recall being there at the time it was painted, and he notices that certain details have been changed or omitted, but now the scene has been frozen immutably on the canvas, and the instant of time has become immortal and inescapable.

Whether the grave or the eternal moment of art is our voyage’s ultimate destination, its origin lies in the paradigm of Mother and Son (1997; March 8 at 7 p.m. and March 12 at 9 p.m.). Somewhere in a rustic universe of ominous beauty where everything is slanted and elongated like a Mannerist canvas and burnished like an icon, a young man emerges from a dream to tend his invalid mother, whom he nestles and strokes and consoles and carries from place to place. She dies anyway, of course, and his Gethsemane takes place in a wood that seems to absorb him the way the snow does the youth in The Second Circle. "We will meet where we agreed," he tells the still form. "Wait for me . . . " Maybe that’s the place where everything is all right.

Issue Date: March 7 - 14, 2002
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