Aleksandr Sokurov is,beyond any doubt, one of the most important living directors,and perhaps the only Russian one who might claim himself as a "new Tarkovski". ,Sokurov's cinema has a very abstract language,and might find the right echo to rather sparse audiences,as some of Tarkovski's movies are.His cinema is highly demanding,first of all by its excruciating slow pace,austere chromatic, metaphorical language.This movie,at some 5 hours plus it's not an easy nut to take,but those who venture inside this ocean will find a hypnotic pleasure in it.Foreget all the yada yada about war in American movies;you won't find here any commentary about this war,neither any rhetorical or ideological involvement.Is a long movie about being soldier,a kind of ontology of waiting,of the in between.Organised in 5 uneven long episodes,this film,in a mixture of poetry,journalistic curiosity,and personal statement makes us live,feel,be in that awful place that the movie depicts.The first episode,40 minutes long,is a still image of a frozen Siberian village;an off voice speaks about classical music,and art meanings.This might sound amazingly boring,but you have to see how moving and breathtaking beautiful Aleksandr Sokurov makes it. Using video media,this film might seem as a witness.It is,actually,a first person witness,because the movie is meant to be a sort of metaphorical diary;this person might be everyone of us,and in a way this happens and slowly become involved in that reality. Highly recommended,once again,for very special audiences.
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Review this title2 Reviews
Dukhovnye Golosa
TemporaryOne-121 February 2017
This is a five and a half hour documentary and the below doesn't remotely come close to expressing all my thoughts reactions to it, but wow what another hypnotic piece of art by Sokurov.
A painting. Or a real landscape. Desolving into the vespertine hour. Translunary veneer. Snow blanketing the Russian earth. It might be Isaak Levitan's "Eternal Rest" filling up the screen. It might be a real Russian landscape. Tremulous Sokuvoran micro-undulations confuse the eye. Floating landscape. Delicate elegiac piano-sequined chauntacoustics of Mozart, Beethoven, Messiaen, three embattled lives, drift up from the snowy underworld, melancholic sounds, invocations of angels, evocations of demons. Susurrating narration punctuates sublimity of music and fantasy snows cape. Darkness deepens. Candles burn but briefly, stars outshine themselves. A figure transepts across the landscape. Disappears amidst trees. A flame. A glittering spangle of birds. This is a real place after all. A shift from dawn to dusk and the body and face of a soldier mistily emerges.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of unplumbed profundity in a martian-like sun-bleached spallated paleaceous rock-blasted scoured flayed ruddied ochred rufescent gizzard lifeless trackless Afghanistan-Tajikistan border-landscape alongside silent sunbleared Slavic Russian (and Central Asian) soldiers maundering through the torrid chaff-dusted waste-blasted land.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of dizzying vertical navigation giving way to melancholic horizontal quiescence.
The agony of sunlight the ontology of waiting the agony of restlessness the pointlessness of war the fantasia of night.
Nations and Men enslaved by sciamachic war. Invisible enemies. Alien world where soldiers do not belong.
Soldiers motionless and muted and scattered. A book of Russian fairy tales opened to "The Tale Of The One-Eyed Devil".
Atavistic bare-boned daily routine. A collapsed empire uncreating its own sons. Skin and bone and boots and guns. Uncreating and unlearned and inhumane.
From the first segment:
She died without knowing it -- out like a candle
She was completely unaware of her surroundings
I pressed her hand and she started to talk, neither seeing nor hearing me, not conscious of anything
Exactly five hours went by in the same way until, at twenty-one minutes past eleven in the evening, she (Mozart's mother) passed away
Substitute the soldiers for Mozart's mother. Out like a candle, they neither see nor hear, they're not conscious of anything, they undergo a spiritual death, their voices snuffed out, the spirit of a collapsed empire snuffed out.
The Steppe. Nothing but steppe all round. Minefields. Cake. A New Year.
A bird. Looks like a baby bird. So tiny and delicate. Curious. Eager. Watchful. Takes flight. It's wingspan expansive, a much bigger bird than it seemed to be.
A gun battle with the invisible enemy. About an hour long. Nothing violent appears on screen but you can feel the fear of eminent battle and you can almost taste the metallic heat of the shrapnel mingled with dust and sweat.
Day turns to night, soldiers' limp bodies and sleeping faces seamlessly merging and disappearing into the crumbled landscape. Passing from the body into the earth, in the morning, passing from the earth into the body.
Leaden storm-clouds. A new musical palette. A ship horn. Ship horns and dissonant strings conjuring up icy churning waters. Icy churning waters juxtaposed against crumbled martian landscape. Clouds move to the menacing music of Takemitsu and Wagner. Roseate and ochre tints fade out. Landscape devoid of colour. Men devoid of colour. Men falling into a state of desuetude.
Humanity falling into a state of desuetude thanks to the Military-Industrial Complex.
A painting. Or a real landscape. Desolving into the vespertine hour. Translunary veneer. Snow blanketing the Russian earth. It might be Isaak Levitan's "Eternal Rest" filling up the screen. It might be a real Russian landscape. Tremulous Sokuvoran micro-undulations confuse the eye. Floating landscape. Delicate elegiac piano-sequined chauntacoustics of Mozart, Beethoven, Messiaen, three embattled lives, drift up from the snowy underworld, melancholic sounds, invocations of angels, evocations of demons. Susurrating narration punctuates sublimity of music and fantasy snows cape. Darkness deepens. Candles burn but briefly, stars outshine themselves. A figure transepts across the landscape. Disappears amidst trees. A flame. A glittering spangle of birds. This is a real place after all. A shift from dawn to dusk and the body and face of a soldier mistily emerges.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of unplumbed profundity in a martian-like sun-bleached spallated paleaceous rock-blasted scoured flayed ruddied ochred rufescent gizzard lifeless trackless Afghanistan-Tajikistan border-landscape alongside silent sunbleared Slavic Russian (and Central Asian) soldiers maundering through the torrid chaff-dusted waste-blasted land.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of dizzying vertical navigation giving way to melancholic horizontal quiescence.
The agony of sunlight the ontology of waiting the agony of restlessness the pointlessness of war the fantasia of night.
Nations and Men enslaved by sciamachic war. Invisible enemies. Alien world where soldiers do not belong.
Soldiers motionless and muted and scattered. A book of Russian fairy tales opened to "The Tale Of The One-Eyed Devil".
Atavistic bare-boned daily routine. A collapsed empire uncreating its own sons. Skin and bone and boots and guns. Uncreating and unlearned and inhumane.
From the first segment:
She died without knowing it -- out like a candle
She was completely unaware of her surroundings
I pressed her hand and she started to talk, neither seeing nor hearing me, not conscious of anything
Exactly five hours went by in the same way until, at twenty-one minutes past eleven in the evening, she (Mozart's mother) passed away
Substitute the soldiers for Mozart's mother. Out like a candle, they neither see nor hear, they're not conscious of anything, they undergo a spiritual death, their voices snuffed out, the spirit of a collapsed empire snuffed out.
The Steppe. Nothing but steppe all round. Minefields. Cake. A New Year.
A bird. Looks like a baby bird. So tiny and delicate. Curious. Eager. Watchful. Takes flight. It's wingspan expansive, a much bigger bird than it seemed to be.
A gun battle with the invisible enemy. About an hour long. Nothing violent appears on screen but you can feel the fear of eminent battle and you can almost taste the metallic heat of the shrapnel mingled with dust and sweat.
Day turns to night, soldiers' limp bodies and sleeping faces seamlessly merging and disappearing into the crumbled landscape. Passing from the body into the earth, in the morning, passing from the earth into the body.
Leaden storm-clouds. A new musical palette. A ship horn. Ship horns and dissonant strings conjuring up icy churning waters. Icy churning waters juxtaposed against crumbled martian landscape. Clouds move to the menacing music of Takemitsu and Wagner. Roseate and ochre tints fade out. Landscape devoid of colour. Men devoid of colour. Men falling into a state of desuetude.
Humanity falling into a state of desuetude thanks to the Military-Industrial Complex.
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