Plane songs: Lauren Sedofsky talks with Alexander Sokurov - Interview

ArtForum, Nov, 2001 by Lauren Sedofsky

STRADDLING THE PERIOD OF SOVIET DISINTEGRATION and perestroika/post-perestroika liberalization, the twelve features and twenty-seven documentaries directed by the fifty-year-old Saint Petersburg--based filmmaker Alexander Sokurov all testify, however obliquely, to this inextricable le historical upheaval. Their preponderant landscapes are populated not so much by individuated personae as by specimens of the human species lost in some highly generic situation: nineteenth-century urban desperation in Whispering Pages (1993); naval regimentation in Confession (1998); a father's interment in Second Circle (1990); ethno-medical research in Days of Eclipse (1988). In this "anthropology," which is neither social, nor cultural, nor too flagrantly theological, the object under scrutiny might be termed "external signs of inner life"--minimal signs, something both more and less than subjectivity, and otherwise affecting. No available distinction between fiction and documentary can quite account for the porousness that S okurov makes manifest between these two modes, often by exploiting archival material in the features and extracting muted drama and enigmatically poignant participation in the documentaries. And this interpenetration has only become more pronounced: Dolce (1999) circumscribes a central monologue that hoists the interview format to the altitude of Racinian tragedy; Moloch and Taurus (the private lives of Hitler and Lenin respectively; 1999 and 2001) rise from the archive, unleashing a controversial fictional genre of "historical imagination," one that rides on each viewer's own fascinated projections.

To situate Sokurov's films, it seems almost unavoidable to take the ring road through Eisenstein's retrospective illumination of the sequence from his own Potemkin (1925) known as the "Odessa Mist." In the slow lifting of a dense haze in the port at dawn, the master of montage would remark, at twenty years' remove, a "suite" of indistinct, imponderable landscapes relinquished to the fluidity of their internal form and, in their "matches," to a dissolving, one into the other, all at the very surface of the screen; hence, his recognition of the film medium's common lineage with Chinese landscape painting. Although the drift of Eisenstein's reading departs from his avowed intention, it temptingly suggests the possibility of an approach to film thoroughly antithetical to his theory of montage and far more radical (or regressive) than anything proposed over and against it by Neorealism, the Nouvelle Vague, or even Warhol. For the "imagicity" or integral image to which Sokurov's films aspire englobes the entirety o f the work and reposes on just those features of limited visibility, seamlessness, and the unprecedented eradication of linear perspective. His paradigm is indeed painting--the Byzantine icon, Northern decentered geometry, and the visionary legacy of sfumato--that is, all the plane-bound deviations from the Albertian model that might conceivably ensnare and confound the viewer's visual cortex and make of the film medium, loosed from its origins in the camera obscura, something other than the tardy avatar of a long-outmoded visual scheme.

With New York's Museum of Modern Art and Cinematheque Ontario gearing up for a major traveling retrospective of his films (debuting at MOMA in February 2002), Sokurov agreed to engage in the following exchange with me between the screenings of Taurus at Cannes in May and Elegy of a Voyage at the Venice Film Festival in September--all the while preparing his ninety-minute single take of an elaborate mise-en-scene at the Hermitage, intriguingly titled Waterloo.

LAUREN SEDOFSXY: How did you come to treat the screen as a two-dimensional Surface?

ALEXANDER SOKUROV: If film as art exists, then the real problem resides in optics. The camera lens is an immense reproach to the film director. It points to the dubious nature of the artistic result and, really, the very process of filmmaking. The picture created by an optical device possesses a high degree of objectivity; at the same time, it's monstrously subjective. This conflict is a real tragedy for film. Aesthetics comes down to seeing a good-looking picture on the screen. This beauty, however, has been created essentially by neither the director nor the cameraman but rather by the frozen liquid of optical glass. I've spent a long time familiarizing myself with this process, getting inside it, in order to find my own way of freeing myself from it. It was necessary to define the artistic hierarchy in the visual work and to decide, ultimately, that my model would be painting. The point of convergence with film was clear: the picture plane. Strictly speaking, the surface of the screen and that of the canva s are one and the same.

LS: How does this involve altering photographic perspective?

AS: The question is whether we need a three-dimensional space at all. The development of pictorial art reposes on the artist's understanding of the flat surface as a canon, an objective reality that should not be fought. Filmmakers treat it as a void that has to be filled--an absolutely ridiculous practice. If you accept this canon, however, it leads to a system of restrictions that allow you to concentrate on the main matter, the moral dimension. Since camera lenses are generally designed specifically to create the impression of volume, we have had two developed in Russia specially for our films. They reverse traditional illusionistic volume and emphasize the illusion of a plane. These are the first steps, but we still have a long way to go before we have significant artistic resources for the flat film image.