Retrospektiv: Aleksandr Sokurov Retrospective: Aleksandr Sokurov
ELEGIES 3 short films by Aleksandr Sokurov
ELEGY (ELEGIYA) RUNNING TIME: 30 m USSR 1986
The first in Sokurov’s series of «Elegy» documentaries is this enigmatic, 30-minute black-and-white tribute to Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938), the Russian bass ranked by critics alongside the likes of Callas and Caruso among the 20th century’s greatest operatic talents. Self-funded by Sokurov at a time when Chaliapin was out of favors with Soviet authorities, elegy traces the singer’s posthumous 1984 «journey» from a Paris cemetery to his ashes’ new restingplace in Moscow, an event of high diplomatic importance for Soviet-French relations. Archive materials blend with wry testimony from Chaliapin’s surviving descendants to create a resonant, penetrating vision of Russian history.
SOVIET ELEGY (SOVETSKAYA ELEGIYA) RUNNING TIME: 37 m USSR 1989
A study of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, during the brief transitional period when he found himself in the calm eye of an epoch-changing storm. In 1987, Yeltsin had been sacked from his position as «Mayor» of Moscow – in 1991, he would be elected president of Russia, a position he’d hold until the last day of 1999. Sokurov’s film, made in 1988–9, thus catches this seminal figure in world political history when he was simply a mid-ranking, somewhat «fallen» official, dealing with his own family issues and those of ordinary folks. In the director’s words, «Our hero exists within the tragic pattern of Soviet socialist life. He is a character of a drama, of which he is one of the authors.»
A SIMPLE ELEGY (PROSTAYA ELEGIYA) RUNNING TIME: 20 m USSR 1990
Vilnius, 1990 – you are there. In response to the Lithuania’s audacious declaration of independence, Moscow imposes an economic blockade on the Baltic nation – its defiance personified by a professorial musicologist, the newly-elected headof-state Vytautas Landsbergis. The world watches as the future of the entire USSR hangs in the balance. Compiled from footage shot during the blockade, the brisk time-capsule a simple elegy is, according to Sokurov, about both «the Lithuanian people and Mr Vytautas Landsbergis – an attractive figure, a historian of culture and music. Perhaps every state should seek to have such an educated person at its head. Yet we who made this film did not have any political intentions, only, quite naturally, artistic ones »
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