Plane songs: Lauren Sedofsky talks with Alexander Sokurov - Interview

ArtForum, Nov, 2001 by Lauren Sedofsky

LS: You situate your characters within these landscapes as anonymous or relatively impersonalized human bodies that ultimately become objects of compassion. What has inspired this approach to the body?

AS: No word can elicit the deep, inner, specifically human reaction that a human being's touch can. In this affective sense, the body is a blessed reality, because it is only through this sensory feeling of the human body, its warmth, that one gets an idea of the soul's location or an answer from it. The body is a noble part of reality, the part that suffers most. If one believes in various religions, one knows the soul will survive, whatever happens to it, whereas the body will necessarily perish. It tortures its owner, it ages and becomes a source of disgust and shame. Compassion is necessarily compassion for the body; the soul can get along without it.

LS: The extreme detail with which the characters' material conditions are constituted in all of your films forces me to ask whether you adhere to a materialism.

AS: One is not literally connected to the other. The philosopher's credo and the filmmaker's hand are not comparable. Yes, the material world has a great effect on human beings. I have faith. But I also have many questions that no priest has ever been able to answer. Or perhaps I didn't understand the answers. I am very much concerned by the cruelty that exists in the Bible, the triumph of cruelty or of hardship in some of its plots. In this respect, I stand in between. But I have a position: I believe in the divine origin of humanity, although I consider the creation and development of nature a physical process without divine provision.

LS: All of your films allude at some basic level to personal experience in its specific relation to history.

AS: History in our films is only a more or less elaborated background, sometimes detailed, sometimes as one finds it in Leonardo's works: an abstract perspective, a line of mountains in the mist, an opening sky, a shore, an ocean or river. There is no past or future in history, just as there is no past or future in art, only the present. This background, however, is often an active one, sometimes embodied by one of the characters. A historical event can be an actor in our plot, but always on the same level as the rest, never exaggerated.

LS: An interpenetration of fiction and documentary has been present in your films from the beginning. What are the dynamics of these two modes?

AS: There's no difference in importance, only of tools. The aim is to create a work of art. With a documentary, we are never trying to be objective. As soon as any object appears on the screen, all objective criteria vanish, yielding their place to the absolutely subjective dictatorship of the filmmaker's will. One might compare fiction filmmaking to therapy and documentary filmmaking to surgery, or vice versa.

LS: In Moloch and Taurus, why have you subjectivized figures central to the major disasters of the twentieth century?

AS: The perception of these figures is defined by the immense historical weight they drag with them, the terrible shadows cast on our conscience by their actions. We have resorted to showing such people only to make it clear that large-scale events, extreme limit-cases, are not the result of exceptional circumstances or destinies. So-called great historical figures are animated by human mechanisms; the circumstances, events, and complexes of their everyday lives drive them to their "great" actions. Character and behavior are decisive. The purpose of art is to repeat the most fundamental ideas, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Because people forget.