Aleksandr Sokurov

In Sokurov’s cinema, History looms large with all its most hidden ghosts: the great figures who, through their decisions, caused the death of millions of people return insistently in Aleksandr Sokurov’s filmography. At times, they appear as rarefied beings, suspended in an ancestral limbo; at others, they take shape in historical narratives filtered through distorting lenses and softened lights. In Moloch (1999) – a title that alludes both to Goethe’s Faust and to anti-Semitic superstitions about the worship of pagan deities – the Russian director portrays a domestic Hitler, absorbed in his obsessions and trivialities. In Taurus (2001), he depicts Lenin, afflicted by neurological problems and aware that his time is drawing to a close. Yet it was with his reinterpretation of the Faust myth that Sokurov won the Golden Lion at the 68th Venice Film Festival in 2011. Sokurov does not limit himself to History: he also confronts science fiction and the specters of modernity in Days of Eclipse (1988), adapted from a novel by the Strugatsky brothers, who also wrote Roadside Picnic – the source for Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Here, the protagonist is thwarted by a series of accidents that prevent him from completing an important discovery.
With Russian Ark (2002), the director created a true cinematic experiment and a journey through space and time: the entire film was shot in a single continuous take – an achievement made possible only with the advent of digital technology – inside the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Years later, with Francofonia (2015), he returned to film inside a museum – this time the Louvre – crafting a grand work, though one that partly distances itself from the 2002 experiment.