"There is no one in cinema today crafting more luminous images than Sokurov."
-Philip Lopate, Film Comment
The Russian master Alexander Sokurov is the rare director who engages both film and video, attuned to their formal properties and intent upon expanding their potential. Sokurov's films, such as Mother and Son and Days of the Eclipse, have garnered critical acclaim for their masterful depth. His extraordinary body of videoworks, however, remains largely unknown in the U.S. Our series offers most of these works in their Bay Area premieres.
Anointed by Andrei Tarkovsky as his spiritual and aesthetic heir, Sokurov strives toward similar ends, addressing the great abstractions such as destiny, divinity, and death. His films and videoworks often express a yearning for a simpler past and revel in the vestiges of once-great cultures. The desire for a more innocent moment coincides, however, with a pessimistic knowledge of the barbarism that has endured throughout history. And so Sokurov's greatest videoworks, like the twin monuments Spiritual Voices and Confession, become aching meditations, "elegies," about a loss of harmony and honor. Favoring a painterly palette and trancelike rhythms, the director offers us poetic and death–haunted portraits of figures who are in some way isolated from the common world by their art, their political power, or their withdrawal from life. At once serene and feverish, despairing and exultant, Sokurov's visionary videoworks conjure a sense of the eternal.
