A helmsman from the land of the dark

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Alexander Sokurov had a grim look on his square army veteran face as he walked into Nila Theatre for a conversation with IFFK delegates on Tuesday. The way the organisers whispered to themselves it looked like the dark hall had deeply annoyed the Russian legend. "A while ago, while standing outside in the sun, he was all smiles," one of the organisers was heard saying. A few minutes into the conversation Sokurov gave what was a possible explanation for his irritation. “I come from a land where the sun has gone missing,” he said. Sokurov comes from Saint Petersburg, the second largest city in Russia after Moscow.

The sun sets at 10 a.m. in Saint Petersburg. An orange ball can be seen plunging beyond the Bronze Horseman, the tar-coloured statue of Peter the Great on a horse in the foreground of the Senate Square. By 2 p.m. both the sun, and Peter the Great on the horse, are gone. “Just imagine the mood of the people living in such a land,” he said. The darkness inside the hall, perhaps, reminded him of his place. The climate was also a metaphor for the times he was living in. “You could negotiate with political control, not with economic control,” Sokurov said. Under the totalitarian regime, he had found it hard to make and release his films. Some of them, like ‘From the Commander’s Diary’ and ‘Soldier’s Dream’, were released only ten or more years after he made them, and are virtually unknown in Russia. Ironically, making films in the post-Soviet free market era has turned out to be even more difficult.

His “tetralogy of power”, a massive project spanning four films, was conceived in 1980, the year Gorbachev initiated ‘glasnost’, but was completed only in 2013, during the Putin era. “The financing is mostly done by the State. There is no scope for independent cinema,” he said. When asked about his new project, he just said that he would let it remain a “mystery”. A clue could be glimpsed in what he said a while earlier. “A sound mind is required for any work of art.” This has to be read along with his earlier lament. “There is no summer in most parts of Russia. The autumn was also harsh. And now we have a severe winter,” he said.
It was the fragility of the mind that Sokurov attempted to explore in his ‘tetralogy’.

The first three films focused on 20th-century leaders – Hitler in 1999's ‘Moloch’, Lenin in 2001's ‘Taurus’, and Emperor Hirohito in 2005's ‘The Sun’. The final movie is a loose adaptation of Goethe's Faust. Though Sokurov’s lens, these powerful men of history are weighed down by their fragile unhappy minds. “Name a happy powerful person,” he asked, as if happy and powerful were oxymorons. “And unhappy men are dangerous,” he added. Sokurov for most part of the conversation on Tuesday put on a sullen look, as though frustrated by all that was happening around him. It was only towards the last, when he was told that the event was over, that the man laughed, a child-like smile that magically altered his military severity. He was perhaps impatient to savour the tropical sun outside.