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FILM COMMENT
September/October 2002
WHISPERING IMAGES
by TONY PIPOLO
above: Russian Ark
Unloved in his native Russia, Alexander Sokurov nevertheless qualifies as his homeland's unofficial cinematic elegist. His formidable body of work over the last 25 years - paralleling the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire and the slow, painful reconstruction of Russian life - is a prolonged act of mourning. In ten features and more than twice as many documentaries and avant-garde works, he has displayed an undiminished humanism and a unique aesthetic embracing both film and video. Though some of Sokurov's features have literary sources - Shaw, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky - they are hardly conventional narrative adaptions. And while many of his nonfiction works are direct responses to the social and political upheavals surrounding the dissolution of the Soviet Union, they frustrate the usual expectations one brings to documentary film.
You can read the complete version of this article in the print edition of the Sept/Oct Film Comment.
