Aleksandr Sokurov

  • Aleksandr Sokurov – Robert. Schastlivaya zhizn aka Hubert Robert. A Fortunate Life (1997)

    1991-2000Aleksandr SokurovArthouseDocumentaryRussia

    Quote:
    Aleksander Sokurov brings the treasures of the Hermitage back into the light by making films about artists and their paintings. He has chosen the painter Hubert Robert, who spent a long time in Italy, and whose preference was for creating ancient ruined landscapes and naturalistic portrayals of times past. He was successful with the wealthy, who bought his works from him. The camera pans across the paintings while Sokurov speaks of a happy era, when the artist was at one with the spirit of the times, and agreed with the taste of his clients. Just how far removed from us this is, is shown by pictures of a “Nô” performance which are inter-cut on the screen. No words are necessary to describe what everybody knows todayRead More »

  • Aleksandr Sokurov – Elegiya aka Elegy (1985)

    1981-1990Aleksandr SokurovDocumentaryShort FilmUSSR

    Quote:
    The first “Elegy” by Alexander Sokurov appeared in 1984. The legendary fame of the great Russian singer Fiodor Shaliapin, the fame that was still alive in his homeland, resisted to the official tendency of reproaching him for emigrating from Russia. When Sokurov, whose first films seemed to be buried forever in the closed film archives and whose every new work was stopped in the very beginning, made his “Elegy” — without financing, supported only by the enthusiasm of his team, — the Leningrad Documentary Films Productions tried to legalize the film, but with no success. The answer of the highest cinema officials was: “Shaliapin is not forgiven.” It was the time when Shaliapin had not yet got the “imperial” pardon.Read More »

  • Aleksandr Sokurov – Molokh AKA Moloch (1999)

    1991-2000Aleksandr SokurovArthouseDramaRussia

    Synopsis
    In 1942, in Bavaria, Eva Braun (Yelena Rufanova) is alone, when Adolf Hitler (Leonid
    Mozgovoy) arrives with Dr. Josef Goebbels (Leonid Sokol) and his wife Magda Goebbels
    (Yelena Spiridonova) and Martin Bormann (Vladimir Bogdanov) to spend a couple of
    days without talking politics.Read More »

  • Aleksandr Sokurov – Elegiya dorogi AKA Elegy of a Voyage [+Extras] (2002)

    2001-2010Aleksandr SokurovArthouseDocumentaryRussia

    From Kinoglaz.fr
    In this film, the artistic transformation of the objects of reality reaches the pinnacle of the author’s alteration of this reality. The author’s thoughts and words anticipate the appearance of visual images crystallised from flickering impressions of reality, composed in a manner that is eloquent yet austere, fantastic yet truthful.
    In this voyage the names of people and places are alienated: this unfettered dream, a dream about the infinitude of space and time, needs no frontiers or passports.Read More »

  • Aleksandr Sokurov – Kamen aka Stone (1992)

    1991-2000Aleksandr SokurovArthouseUSSR

    Quote:
    “If ever a film replicated the state of dreaming, Stone does. Which is not to say it is, in the classical sense, surreal; but it has the flow and fugitive feeling of a half-remembered reverie, full of mysteries, portents, inexplicable happenings, and chimerical objects. Set in (and filmed in the actual) Chekhov museum, Stone centers on the relationship between a young museum guard and an older visitor who seems at different times to be a lover, a doctor, or a surrogate father. Shot in evanescent black and white with a sound track of silences, breathing, natural sounds, and fragments of classical music, Stone is haunting and enigmatic” (James Quandt)Read More »

  • Aleksandr Sokurov – Smirennaya zhizn AKA A Humble Life (1997)

    1991-2000Aleksandr SokurovDocumentaryRussia

    An ancient, solitary house lost in the remote mountains of the village of Aska, in Japan. Inside the house lives an old solitary woman, whose humble life is made of little and silent tasks and traditions whose origins are lost in time: stitching kimonos, cooking, eating, keeping the fire alight, combing her hair, reciting unadorned a haicai, a prayer on solitude. With music from Japanese folklore and melodies from Tchaikovsky, Sokurov creates a poem in images which recalls a culture thousands of years old and his own feelings of nostalgia for his native Russia.Read More »

  • Aleksandr Sokurov & Alexei Jankowski – Il nous faut du bonheur AKA We need happiness (2010)

    2001-2010Aleksandr SokurovAlexei JankowskiDocumentaryFrance

    Synopsis:
    Two elderly women, who have led remarkable lives, live deep in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. One, born in Russia, fell in love with a Kurdish student and set off to his native village here, where she spent the rest of her life filled with pain, turbulence and violence sparked by war. The other, a matron in the true sense of the word has witnessed numerous deaths and unexplained disappearances of the members of her large family. Their movements are calm, full of determination and wisdom that only old age can bring.
    Simple lives that at the same time possess poetic dreamlike qualities, transparent, yet full of profound mystery are an ode to the joy of the ordinary life.Read More »

  • Aleksandr Sokurov – Samye Zemnye Zaboty aka Le Piú Terrene Occupazione (1974)

    1971-1980Aleksandr SokurovDocumentaryShort FilmUSSR

    A documentary film about the agricultural development in the region of Gorky: the everyday life in a sovkhoz, the building of a reservoir and of a greenhouse.Read More »

  • Aleksandr Sokurov – Zhertva vechernyaya AKA The Evening Sacrifice (1987)

    1981-1990Aleksandr SokurovArthouseDocumentaryUSSR

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    Sokurov shows the official manifestation and fireworks on the 1st of May, one of the ritual celebrations of Soviet times, as a gathering of tired participants of a mass scene falling into pieces without the director’s orders and without any aims. Outbursts of joy without reason, mixed here and there with equally unmotivated signs of anxiety are given in brief sketches of a restless and pitiful crowd. A part instead of the whole, individual instead of common, a symbol growing up from details are the postulates of Eisenstein’s representation of the “people’s masses,” both the chorus and the protagonist of the Soviet official culture. Sokurov revises these postulates in the context of our time when the chorus has gone out of action, both in the aesthetic and in the social sense, and the protagonist is absent. However, both chorus and soloist are introduced into the picture of the festivity by the hand of the author: Sokurov puts a church canticle into the soundtrack of the film. It is an evening Orthodox prayer of repentance: “let my prayer be like incense before Thou, like my hands uplifted, an evening sacrifice.”Read More »

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