Plane songs: Lauren Sedofsky talks with Alexander Sokurov - Interview

ArtForum, Nov, 2001 by Lauren Sedofsky

LS: With Taurus, you resuscitate one of history's most powerful cadavers: Lenin. Does this signal a final liberation from the regime?

AS: By no means, because this film is merely an artistic effort on the part of a small group of people, with no connection to the tradition of Russian cinema or any changes in Russian society. In fact, it confirms that the problem remains entirely unresolved. Nothing will produce any changes, not even knowledge of Stalin's crimes, until the older generation of Stalinists is gone.

LS: You awaken Lenin in 1922 as the "sick body." His evolving paralysis and acalculia, his fits of rage and disgust--all documented--immediately open up enormous "plastic" possibilities. How important were they to the conception of the film?

AS: Aesthetically, but also ethically, the "plastic" component is vital for the inner life of the film. It permits us to show the "plastics" of character, which would have been impossible or unethical had we used the plot or dialogue. The key is to avoid showing the entire field of action. In that field, there are things I can justify in some artistic way with the means I have at my disposal. Other things, like domestic life, life within the silences of a dialogue, relations between relatives, I cannot know or reconstruct. Whenever my right of entry is not assured or I doubt my ability to render the content of the situation, the "plastic" decisions become more sophisticated and allow the details to be less concrete.

LS: Shooting this film yourself, why did you choose a Vermeer-like milky blue light?

AS: Perhaps only because I like Vermeer very much. The particular characteristics of his atmosphere are especially difficult to reproduce. Nobody knows how Vermeer achieved it. In film, it is even more difficult. So perhaps it was the desire to learn.

LS: in a striking change for you, the final frame shows a clearly focused, Immobile sky. Is this fixity the rigor mortis that will soon rigidify Lenin's body and, with it, the body politic?

AS: The issue is life, resistance to death: how eagerly and stubbornly a man clings to life, how he resists quitting this unfriendly, cruel, earthly existence. I take full responsibility for taking this man out of the past to show what his life was like, rather than his departure to hell to be judged and burned on a spit. Despite Lenin's power over the life and death of millions of people, his life was that of an ordinary human being. The closer one is to power, though, the more primitive one's life becomes.

LS: Although Hitler and Lenin are portrayed in a much more psychological or symptomatic mode than your earlier protagonists, they are all suggestive less of internal motivation than of an incarnation through artistic procedures.

AS: I am resolutely a realist.

LS: How do you explain your well-known position as a traditionalist when it strangely echoes socialist realism's backward glance and accommodates modernism's obsession with the fiat picture plane?

AS: My weltanschauung and my position are resolutely traditional because all of my Indisputable authorities are people of classical culture, who have no connection whatsoever to contemporary literary or artistic practice. And, with only some very rare exceptions--Flaherty, and certainly Elsenstein, Dovzhenko, Bergman--for me, there are no authorities among filmmakers. I am a conservative.