Unhappy people are dangerous, Russian writer-director Aleksandr Sokurov has opined, and Heinrich Faust, alchemist and dirt-poor scholar, is miserable. In his filthy quarters, Faust’s anticipation of Frankenstein hovers over the cadaver he is dissecting and ruminates about the soul he is unable to locate. Ostensibly, he is talking to his Igor-like laboratory-servant, but, solitudinous, he […]
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Long, slow and quirky, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Spasi i sokhrani is a highly creative filming of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Written by Yuri Arabov, it is a thing of interiorities, images that express the deepest feelings of its characters, especially Emma Bovary, who feels strangled by her marriage and the provincial village into which it tightly fits. […]
Robust, in her element working the earth, 41-year-old collective farmer Mariya Semionovna Voinova provides a smiling portrait of Soviet industry, strength, endurance. This is the centerpiece of the first of the two segments of the short documentary Mariya that Aleksandr Sokurov made nine years apart. This first segment is in color, and this color, which […]
A young man has returned home to bury his father. At one point he stares into the corpse’s eyes. In this staring contest, does anyone’s eyes—anything’s eyes—see any more clearly than anybody else’s? What do we know about anyone else’s suffering except that we share it, and somebody’s death doesn’t end what we share but […]
Stark, sturdy, Pierre Chenal’s Crime et châtiment strips Dostoievski’s novel nearly bare, dispensing with its plot density and philosophical richness, to focus on two things: dropout law student Raskolnikov’s anguished poverty, which motivates his rash acts (whatever his rationalizations, including the compensatory one of his intellectual and moral superiority, hence, existence above the law); after […]
Dennis Grunes 