Chapter Four

Sokurov and Lacan, Painting’s Luminous Archive and

Anamorphic Imaginaries

A clock that is working will always be a disturbance on the stage. There it cannot be
permitted its function of measuring time. Even in a naturalistic play, astronomical time
would clash with theatrical time.
—Benjamin, 247

[H]aving gone mad; not even, perhaps thought considered as the steady bearer of its
madness; depriving us of that refuge which is the thought of death. False unity, the
simulacrum of unity, comprises it (disaster) better than any direct challenge, which, in
any case, is impossible. Have you suffered for knowledge's sake? (Nietzsche). Suffering
here means not to undergo, but rather that which goes under. It denotes the 'not' of the
utterly passive, withdrawn from all sight, from all knowing. Unless it be the case that
knowledge—because it is not knowledge of the disaster, but knowledge as disaster and
knowledge disastrously—carries us, carries us off, deports us (whom it smites and
nonetheless leaves us untouched), straight to ignorance, and puts us face to face with
ignorance of the unknown so that we forget, endlessly stress upon minutiae, sovereignty
of the accidental. This causes us to ackowledge that forgetfulness is not negative or that
the negative does not come after affirmation negated), but exists in relation to the most
ancient, to what would seem to come furthest back in time immemorial without ever
having been given.
—Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 2-3

I show in detail how things work and invite the viewer to join in the [death] ritual, as if it
were a rehearsal. If you have been through it once, it’s easier to find a way out the next
time.
—Sokurov, “The Solitary Voice,” 76

The surface of the screen and that of the painting are one and the same.
—Sokurov, “Plane Songs,” Interview with Sokurov

Alexander Nikolaievich Sokurov’s films are shot through with death and

transfiguration, with the fragility of private and public lives at the edge of empire’s

disintegration and reformulation. He has invented new categories of historical fiction in

which the projection of imagination binds the contradictions of great dictators, and

documentary fantasy discloses the private lives of soldiers, deceased artists, and

anonymous citizens of the Russian and Soviet metropolises and provinces. He studies

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the Russian spirit through an examination of twentieth-century empires in the throes of

death (German, Japanese, tsarist and Soviet-Russian). His cinema traces the emergence

on the surface of the screen the phantasmatic image as an artistic-spiritual trope.

Sokurov captures the interior life of his characters by studying their material relations to

the objects, landscapes and people encircling them. He degrades linearity by placing his

subjects flat on the illusionistic picture plane of the film screen. Sokurov has argued that

painting’s luminosity is located at the surface, and, similarly, that cinema’s mystery is

located not in its depth, but in “its sfumato, its frozen liquidity, its suppression of

volume in the illusion of the picture plane, as in icon painting or Russian symbolism”

(“Plane Songs,” Interview with Sokurov, ArtForum, 2001). The optical lens scans the

film’s surface, anamorphically recording it to elevate what is hidden in the simplest detail.

Through his eschewing of Albertian one-point perspective in favor of the confinement

of the circle (the film’s inner space), Sokurov assumes contradictory political stances on

the importance of a strong Russian state, his attraction to the military, leaders “thought

up” as people need to transfer a “psychological feeling onto a mortal person.” He

disavows eroticism in his films, he comments that it [eroticism] is rather a mythic, pure

love between people, (Sokurov, http://www.sokurov.spb.ru/island en/feature

film/otets i syn/mnp ots.html, “Author’s Preface, 1), and, yet, argues for uncensored art.

Sokurov’s prolific oeuvre of thirty-three documentary and sixteen feature films spans

the disintegration of Soviet Russia, perestroika liberalization, and the recent reconstitution

of the Russian Federation. He dissects the workings of empire (Russian, German,

Japanese) in a complex taxonomy of documentary essays and fictional histories. There is

no simple division within his work, as even the documentary films contain historical

imaginaries, and the fictional ones index commentary on the actual instabilities of

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sprawling, ethnically diverse Russian territories. Sokurov’s cinema presents a further

complication to its taxonomy in that he has completed a series of eleven films that

include ‘elegy’ in the title, and is divided between common and elite lives. One might

argue for the elegeic component in all of his films in that they are odes to death and

transfiguration of a period or way of life. He states that “the elegy is a very Russian,

emotional form.” Yet, he argues for restraint of this form, that something must be held

back, if the mysterious aspect is to precipitate out of the artwork (“Solitary Voice,” 75).

His search for the correct ambience of location, often undisclosed or collaged, creates a

ghosting of figures and dwellings that belong only to an imaginary domain, for example,

the house and hillside in Mother and Son (1997).

The elegeic in Sokurov is produced in the mid-nineteenth century tradition of Mikhail

Lérmontov’s classical form, itself at odds with its metaphysical content. The longings

and lamentations for the realm of the dead appear in Lérmontov’s poem The Angel

(1823), in which the “distant land” filters through the lens of the earthbound world.

Similarly, in Lérmontov’s The Demon and the Mtsýri (1839), the musicality of verse

overcomes the visionary artist, Vrúbel, moving him to heights of imaginative powers.

According to D. S. Mirsky, mtsýri, (a Georgian word) means novitiate, and involves the

death confession of a rebellious man to his spiritual father—a transgression in

Orthodoxy—and therefore, an expression of indomitable spirit. (D.S. Mirsky, A History

of Russan Literature, NY: A. A. Knopf, 1955, 135-36). Again, the split of formal technique

and mystical content is articulated in Sokurov’s constant balance of restraint and

exuberance. In Mother and Son, the afterworld is filtered through a mysterious, still-image

of their home (with moving smoke rising from its chimney in a video-transfer

technique). This image is projected and held for several minutes as the film’s opening

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 sequence. It is an image doubly shot through both the camera lens and a glass plate onto

which the house is painted.1 This twice-filtered light creates an image that is neither

merely painted nor filmed, but rather the result of a screen through a screen. There is a

tenderness, and minimalist simplicity in the circmscribed storyline, images and bodily

contact between the son and his dying mother. In a different tenor, Second Circle (1990),

creates an elegeic portrait of the educated son of a military father returning home to bury

his father’s corpse. The story is set during an indefinite period during which time

suspends as the son wades through the bureaucracy of funereal rites, and ends up

sleeping in the same bed with his father’s body. Both films are lamentations, disclosures

of parents’ hidden lives, and ceremonies improvised by the uninitiated living to carry out

last rites. Second Circle invokes the frozen Gulag atmosphere of Solzhenitsyn’s novella One

Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). However, Sokurov’s apparent naturalism breaks

with the detailed, narrative style of Solzhenitsyn, and especially with the montage of

Sergei Eisenstein. There is no narrative progression of images in which one image plus a

second creates a complete third image, as in Eisenstein’s polyvocal triads.

1 I owe the observation regarding the function of the close-up as linked with the affect-mage in film
to a discussion with Cesare Casarino, in this instance, the opening image of the decrepit home in the
film. The image was shot through painted glass, and the consequent nether space of the domicile as
an affect-image, a term in Deleuze that places “affect” in the limbo of neither non-individuated
persons or places, nor “indifferent,” undistinguished locations, makes the image (face or, here,
location) the materium of affect, or hylé (Cinema 1, 103). Deleuze underscores the condensation of
multiple individualities that refuses a stability of form, as in Maria Falconetti’s face in Carl Theodor
Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) or Bergman’s close-up sequence of the crossover of Bibi
Andersen’s and Liv Ullmann’s faces. These multiplicities, whether the doubling of optics in Sokurov,
the collage in Bergman or the circling of angles in Dreyer, avoids a singular specificity in its joins of
several faces, houses, or scraps of sky. There is a surface-focus on the image, “as if it were torn away
from the co-ordinates from which it was abstracted” (104), creating a mythical space-time with a
local, specificity of imagery, but a locationless, timeless quality to the shot. This is why in Sokurov’s
blend of metaphysical and corporeal imageries, we are not sure of the medium of the house, painted or
filmed. This affect-image produces a floating space-time in which the characters are non-specific as
to class or historical moment. The images become an any-moment in the elegeic format of passage
betwen worlds in their death lamentations.

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 It is arguable that Sokurov owes a debt to Andrei Tarkovsky, but this latter filmmaker

has a larger investment in a fragmentary, associative mise-en-scène, similar to that of

Bergman. Sokurov draws from Tarkovsky’s modalities in the dream sequences with long

tracking shots, ellipses and image-doubling, as well as in his use of painted landscapes

and prints in The Mirror, 1974; Solaris, 1972; and Ivan’s Childhood, 1962. If Tarkovsky used

a long-take of a house to become like a painting, Sokurov uses a long-take of a painting

to stand in for a house. However, Sokurov never allows us to read the painting as the

house. Tarkovsky’s early films used canted camera angles, and, in his later cinema,

minimalist angles and scenarios. Sokurov, in contrast, uses less expressionism, but not

necessarily more realism, as his films always stay at a depthless surface in relation to the

screen. However, these techniques and concerns appear as part of a balanced stage-set in

Tarkovsky, with none of Sokurov’s experimentation in the use of prints, and the latter’s

ubiquitous anamorphic stretch to establish a character’s private or historical imaginary.

For example, in Solaris, Tarkovsky employs painting and prints as human relics of earlier

periods in Russia, expressed as a nostalgia for Earth in the hunting scenes from Pieter

Bruegel The Elder’s Return of the Hunters in the Snow (1565). Tarkovsky may have chosen

Bruegel as an artist who, as an apostate, focused on the life of commoners who are

subordinated to the calendrical cosmos of death and transfiguration. In Solaris a panel of

Bruegel’s paintings serve as windows blocking the autumnal landscape outside the

earthly dacha, itself a replica or mirror for the space station “dacha” which is the

cosmnonaut Kelvin’s home on the mysterious, oceanic planet. Tarkovsky aligns Kelvin’s

and Bruegel’s apostasies in that they both rework death and life, diverging from Church

and State mandates, one in controversial paintings of Babel, and parables of Christ and

the Pharisees, the other in launching his dead wife Hari into multiple deaths and

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incarnations. Bruegel allegorizes national controversies through biblical text, and

Tarkovsky transform’s Stanislaw Lem’s text into a State that cannot rid itself of its

eternal return, just as Kelvin cannot rid himself himself of the memory of his dead wife.

The planet will not relinqish its hold on his memory which, in turn, the Solaris science

team has carried out for the planet, metonymic of the older Soviet regime, which

implants memories into Kelvin’s unconscious. Kelvin, before he returns to Solaris,

witnesses this regime’s mandates on a videotape of a thirty-year old television broadcast.

While in Sokurov’s Elegy of a Voyage, the time-traveler (with Sokurov’s off-camera

narrative) almost materially enters Bruegel’s Tower of Babel (1563). The surface-

exploration of the canvas has the effect of apocalypse, of humanity’s destructive impulse

overwhelming him in the night scene alone among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

Dutch and Flemish paintings in Rotterdam’s Boijmans Van Beunigen Museum. The

traveler is consumed by the Tower of Babel’s depiction of controversies over empire, but

he can enter and exit at will, unlike Kelvin. There is a nostalgia in Elegy of a Voyage for a

guide, a double through these unknown waters, and yet, Tarkovsky’s doubling of Hari

and Kelvin are collapsed in Sokurov. Sokurov is both the time-traveler and the unseen

voice exploring the surface of the museum (as planet), however, his interdialogics are not

between himself and a hostile planet (nation), but rather an introspective internal debate

about death and its immanent presence through art.

Both Tarkovsky and Sokurov employ Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut The Four Horseman of

the Apocalypse (1497-98) with divergent effects. In Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), the

Renaissance print squarely occupies the whole screen, as the war-orphan Ivan works

fanatically as a message-decoder for the Russians (he gathers shoreline twigs and nuts, re-

assembling the code). While in the bunker of the superior officer, he sees the Dürer in an

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album of prints, and discovers for the first time a pictorial representation of war. The

external encounter with the artwork allows him to develop a mirror identification with

himself as a subject of war. Later, he encounters an aged man gone mad from the trauma

of his village’s razing. Seemingly blinded, the elderly man hallucinates his wife’s return

and imagines the village to be still intact in a reversal of the stage’s exteriorization. The

unsighted man has split off his internal experience from the external reality insofar as he

has no mirror-object onto which he can displace his trauma. Ivan is uncharacteristically

gentle and non-confrontational with this man, whose losses parallel his own. In Sokurov

(The Sun, 2004), the Dürer print, anamorphically forces Hirohito’s entry into the print,

creating a new semiotics of Christian allegory and of wartime imaginary for the Emperor.

He visualizes himself among the commoners trampled by the Horsemen, and this, too, is

a turning point for his determination to belong to the fate of his people. He, however, is

not free to wander among them, while Tarkovsky’s young Ivan has known only the

unmoored reality of exposure to war, and is forced to wander among the living-dead.

The Dürer print allows him to develop the necessary distance to take action in an

imaginary scenario outside his post-traumatic nightmare. Ivan’s viewing of the woodcut

is the mirror stage which truly creates his symbolic relation to war, and in relation to his

fellow comrades. He allows himself to trust others, but is himself blinded to the ways he

is manipulated in the mono-focal vision of the superior officer. This new symbolic

relation opens up a world outside his own terror and drivenness for his missions, and

makes possible the encounter with the devastated man. Even though he rebels against

the proposed domestication by the officers (sending him to school and removing him

from the front), and on his escape from the encampment, he encounters the blinded man.

Ivan, now, has a choice about emerging from his trapped inner dream. The film,

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however, keeps him sealed inside the nightmare of war, while he has a waking-dream of

the Church in which his village was rounded up to be shot. He visualizes the prayer-

message scrawled on his bunker wall as a representation of his earlier experience. Ivan

moves himself through the trauma, but only with the outcome of his eventual capture

and torture, discovered later through his compatriots’ uncovering the Germans’

documentation (textal recording) of executions in the slaughterhouse. These texts

verbally record the events (aurally presented in the interior voice of the superior officer

as he reads the death records) leading to Ivan’s capture. Tarkovsky visually shows the

ghosted imagery of Ivan hanged upside down in an inverted imagery of this torture. As

in the opening, Ivan’s screams are disembodied from his physical torment, aurally

illustrating the text that the Russian officer discovers. Once, again, the events belong to the film rather

than to the diegesis of either character’s narrative or viewpoint.

Conversely, Sokurov’s Emperor is tortured internally before he represents to himself

the outside apocalypse in his waking-dream of the bombings of Tokyo. He escapes the

trajectory of external battle even as his mission is to transfigure himself into a commoner

through symbolic and state rituals of renunciation of his Imperial status. In Tarkovsky

we have Ivan’s disembodied scream at the opening of the film and at the end, first down

a well as his mother is shot, and at the end as he is tortured. The first is Ivan’s memory

of the event, and the second, posthumously, is the film’s memory of his torture, leading

to death. There are intermediary sequences that appear to belong to Ivan’s memory of

riding in a truck on a road and, his silent laughter as apples spill out, in a pastoral idyll of

a child-king. These unique sequences are done in photonegative filming. They appear to

present us with Ivan’s past, or his memory of it, but they stay close to the surface of the

war-time present of the film, in that there is no clear division between the war-time now

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and these memories. Also, there is the problem of viewpoint in Tarkovsky in that they

appear to belong not the to the diegetic Ivan, but rather are fantasias of the film itself. In

this vein, there is the coda after Ivan’s death that reads as a home-movie from a

viewpoint other than his own. As there is no omniscient narrator, we must assume that

the film itself records and replays Ivan’s memory of a scene on a beach playing hide-and-

seek with other children, but it is not filmed from his viewpoint in that we view him being

chased in a game, and his retreat, momentarily, out-of-field. The coda is apparently the

film’s memory recording its events on its surface, like the planet Solaris’s memory of the

events that implode and are subsumed on its oceanic whorls.

Sokurov adopts from Tarkovsky the replication of former regimes’ domiciles and

places them within new, estranged contexts. For example, the Russian apartment’s

library in Solaris’s space station, and the Emperor’s marine laboratory in the film on

Hirohito, The Sun (2004), both evoke domestic spaces of exile. In Solaris, the tension of

this duplication is the impossibility of return to a homeland, and the attendant

relationships’ repeated renunciation and resurrection, e.g., the death and re-awakening of

Kelvin’s wife. The planet, Solaris, in effect, an oceanic consciousness, traps the minds of

the scientists, and re-orders their fantasies. In The Sun, the tension derives from the

incongruence of the Emperor’s activity within the theater of the bunker-palace, and his

alchemical transformation from Sun-God to commoner through the overlay of Japan’s

former regime into a new era. Sokurov depicts the Tokyo bombings as pivotal in the

Emperor’s transformation. He juxtaposes a waking-dream sequence with fire bombs in

an aquatic environment, and the Emperor’s first car-ride through the bombed-out city in

real time. Sokurov, here, visually quotes a scene in Solaris of Kelvin’s delirium due to his

encephalogram extracted by Sartorius (his scientific nemesis), a delirium housed in a

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mirror-tiled room of mise-en-abyme refractions. Kelvin sees fire falling from a great

height, charring the ground, creating reflected light within a gridded wall of mirrors. This

grid ambiguously extends the dream-sequence as, in the dual scenes in Sokurov, it

dissolves into a contemporary highway with carlights against a night sky. The primary

difference between the two directors is that Sokurov mines the surface of his characters’

gestures in a historical context in which both subject and era materially determine the

other’s conditions. For example, Sokurov’s Emperor depends upon the Noh theater2 of

ensemble interaction, the masks (in the medieval Tale of the Emperor), and the presence of

phantasmatic forms that are invisible to the eye, but present in their effects (The Sun).

Sokurov privileges a structurally disruptive, anti-narrative format, deploying

hallucinatory, narrative scenarios, forming an integrated arc of history, in the time of one

day, one week or, even, over a period of months. He compresses time through a spatial

compacting of all visual and aural events, and expresses their sensory adhesion to the

immediate surface of the screen. The enclosure of spaces in many of the fictional as well

as the historical films produces a temporality marked by daily routines and schedules,

that mediates between inner and outer worlds. The spaces remain suspended between

the public world, often barred from access to the character due to his exilic status, and

the purely interiorized private world of mental disturbance. Instead, Sokurov produces,

through the cycles of routine, and idiosyncratic gestures, a space in which the outside

presses in, and the protagonist forcibly leaves behind his habitual circumscription of

action. He enters a new exiled space as he forges a connection to an external, geopolitical

space.

2I am indebted to Yun Peng’s observation regarding the ritual theater of the Noh inflected in
Sokurov’s scenography, for example, the height and structure of the imperial bunker, in The Sun.

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 In Second Circle, the son must leave his father’s barren apartment and encounter the

bureaucracy of certificate offices, yielding to the funeral director’s statist mandates for

burial. In both external spaces, he re-lives the death of a former Soviet period under the

law of Lenin, a death which is alive in the dictates of formal bureaucratic structures, and

is forced to march outward and away from his dead father. Similarly, in The Sun (2005),

Hirohito must leave his imperial bunker and enter MacArthur’s domain. As a

Nietzschean subject, he enacts the refusal of the eternal return. He begins the

transmutation of his spirit in the Dionysian pleasures of MacArthur’s chambers, eating

food before untasted, cigars, before unsmoked. MacArthur is a true Theseus in that he

‘carries’ the burden of Judgment, and Hirohito becomes the dancer, Dionysius, who puts

down his load, waltzing in the silent ballroom to his internal music (Bach). Their riposte

concerns opposing geopolitical stakes. MacArthur’s condemns Hirohito’s pact with

Hitler, and expresses his pity for Japan’s boundness to coastal ecologies (fishing): “We are

also a coastal nation but we do not need to fish, we can buy at will from other nations”

(TS). Hirohito retorts, denying an encounter with Hitler, and points to America’s

‘beastial’ behavior in the Hiroshima and Tokyo bombings. He also underscores that fish

are a central poetic and imperial trope for the Meiji lineage. Time’s line expands for

Hirohito, opening back onto court poetry and forward onto modern science. He

ultimately enters secularity not through science, but through an imperial, poetic tradition.

Hirohito, at the point of negotiating with MacArthur, refuses his former anxiety of

enclosure (marked by ochre and sepia colors in the bunker’s décor), and its consequent

opening onto the world (through capitulation to the Allies). This determined refusal is

preceded by the intense anxiety of the color, video-transfer of the Emperor’s waking-

dream of bombing missions over Tokyo, carried out by primitive fish. Ichthyologic

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airplanes press against the screen, their “beast[ial]” roar impinging claustrophobically

nearby. Similarly, in the next scene, there is an impossible proximity of cricket chirps,

these creatures seemingly present in the ochre-brown tones of the airless palace-bunker

as the Emperor is dressed by his nervous manservant, whose sweat beads on his bald

head flush up against the screen. His servant is undone by the mental absences of the

Emperor’s neurologic disease-state, and his professed desire to renounce his immortal

status. Sokurov has Hirohito express himself throughout the film in twitching mouth

movements yielding, alternately, unarticulated whispers or crisp articulations, “My body

is the same as yours; there are no distinguishing marks [stigmata].” He assumes the

Nietszchean position of negating bad conscience, “[I] have not died for your sins” (TS).

His mouth becomes a separate object with which the actor “builds” his character and his

liminal condition “around it” (Pudovkin in Benjamin, 247). Like Gogol’s Nose, his

phantasmatic mouth stands in for both the existential and bureaucratic conditions of

self-involvement that mark his passage towards the masses, and his separation from

them. Compare this vocal/non-vocal surface-event with the shallow sound-depth of

American soldiers’ voices, distant, disembodied, and unaligned with particular bodies, in

an ironic reversal of their indistinct “orientalized mass,” as contrasted with the

“individualism” pertaining to the particular moments of the Emperor’s speech/non-

speech (whether whispered or articulated), the specific idiosyncratic gestures of each

member of the Japanese court, or the Cabinet of War Ministry’s distinct personalities.

Sokurov’s disruptive structure also depends on the seamless dissolve of reality and

fantasy, video and film stock, classical and experimental musical genres in his five-hour

documentary of Russian soldiers patrolling the Tadzhik-Afghan border (Spiritual Voices,

1995), or on the tight arc of a single day (dawn to dawn) in the ritual mourning and

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intimate detail of a son’s physically meshed bodily contact (overlapping forms describing

a single body mass) with a death-bound parent (Mother and Son, 1997). In Spiritual Voices,

the multiplicity of genres breaks apart a linear flow dividing the film into three genres: a

musical prologue of Sokurov narrating quietly Mozart’s brief, embattled life accompanies

a slowly shifting (dawn to dusk) video-transfer of a minute figure of a soldier patrolling

the edge of an arctic frontier; the main body of the documentary essay on the border

battalion’s daily, communal life; a fantasia employing Hugo Simberg’s Wounded Angel

(1908), an etching of a white angel carried on an ambulance sheet by two young, Finnish

soldiers, dissolving into a screen-sized close-up of a sleeping soldier’s face.

The complexity of genres, and their divisions, creates a hypnotic dream-state in the

viewer. Sokurov’s voice privately narrating several of his films in a monotone contains the

film on one plane, producing this effect, aurally. Sokurov’s hypnogogic, visual anti-

narrativity derives from formal breaks in time that he creates through his actors’

obsessive relation to public genres (newsreel and theater), visual mediums (photography,

etchings and painting), and local sites (museums, monastaries, palace-fortresses and army

barracks). For example, in Moloch (2005), his Eva Braun (Elena Rufanova) performs a

body-stockinged, Olympic acrobatics on the outer balstrade of Kelsteinhaus in silence as

she is observed through binoculars. It is a theatrical rite of spring meant for the eyes of

her master, while her self-involvement in the perfection of her Aryan body comprises a

narcissistic delight as she pretends that she is unobserved. For his part, “Addie” (Leonid

Mosgovoi) dresses each evening in a tuxedo and conducts his private newsreel viewing of

the German air-bombings of Europe. They perform for each other filtered through the

intermediary of film or dance, creating an evental discontinuity that operates both to

integrate and set apart the action in the film’s narrative flow. This operation neither

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moves the narrative forward, nor halts it; instead, the discontinous sequence belongs to a

third domain that adheres to the characters’ private make-up, and is shot as if the

spectator were privy to an entirely private moment.

In The Sun, Hirohito, literally has alternating trance and normal speech moments, and

in this same line-of-flight, his solo ballroom dance in MacArthur’s chambers is observed

by the General from behind a door, slightly ajar. The character appears as if in his or her

own trance-state, and this private performance (accompanied by music outside the

diegetic flow) often watched by a hidden eye, produces a false continuity. The delinkage

achieved through false continuity sequences occurs as the result of the apparent unity of

cinematic form operating under two equal demands: the scenario understood both as a

whole and through imperceptible camera sutures of discontinuous parts (Cinema 1, 27-

28) . Deleuze discusses false continuities on the level of recalibrated, non-sequence

shots. The parts to the whole are separated out and then, re-equilibrated, Deleuze citing

Pasolini’s aversion to sequence shots as a prime example of this technique. Indeed,

Pasolini uses false continuities to bring about a dream-state in the viewer. In Sokurov,

however, the discontinuity occurs at the level of the au dehors, the displaced mise-en-

scène’s suture with the entire film narrative. The narrative break occurs not in our doubt

regarding the unlikeliness of the performance, but rather, the anomaly of our bearing

witness to it in the context of the whole film.

Sokurov effects his deepest fissures, however, in compressions of time brought about

through anamorphic images, paintings and film, or video and film, dissolving seamlessly

into one another. At times, his camera enters a series of painted works, alternating with

dark spaces, and in this punctuation, he explores a transversal time in which the present

moment embeds itself in the surface of a past era, and returns again to the surface of the

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cinematic screen. Elegy of a Voyage (2001) is emblematic, as is Russian Ark (2002), for the

singular painterly surface, as the latter film is executed in a one and one-half hour

traveling shot. Sokurov encrypts self-referential, disruptive lines of meta-narrative on the

cinematic screen itself, verbally and visually. Sokurov frustratedly asks: “Where is the

[museum] director [to serve as my guide]?” (Elegy of a Voyage). Sokurov, here, creates a

direct parallel, pressed up against the political surface, to the film-director’s isolated

position, the lonely dictators or the tyrannical fatherless, leaderless characters in his other

films. Hirohito, in The Sun, asks at the film’s end, “What became of the sound-engineer

[who recorded my speech]?” His chamberlain answers that the sound-engineer’s transfer

of speech registers from God to commoner induced his ritual hara-kiri. Breaks in registers

of mediated, cinematic sound induce political suicides. Or, again, Sokurov’s deployment

of the disavowal of events produces a paradoxical affirmative condition. Hirohito: “I do

not go to the movies, either.” We are caught between truths in that the Emperor may

not go to the movies, but they come to him through the photographic portraits of movie

stars in his meticulously catalogued albums. These albums of epochal registers, imperial

and Western dress, and his cabinets of marine life preserved in formaldehyde formulate

the evolutionary time-scale of poetic, sacred and political analyses that transfigure his

status from immortal to mortal. The Emperor’s different registers of voice, his silent

articulations of an internal script, and his fully articulated poetic, military and scientific

discourses drive his transformation. He implicates himself affirmatively in a series of

negative statements: “I do not go the cinema; I did not meet [Hitler]; I did not give the

order [for the bombing of Pearl Harbor]” (The Sun). In these statements he balances out

a level of discourse that folds, chameleon-like into the imperial model that his Japanese

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translator (working for MacArthur, but serving Hirohito) seeks to maintain of him, and

the sloughing of his immortal carapace.

If we transfer these absences, suicides and denials of the presence of cinematic

machinery to a political register, we find that Sokurov’s discourse destabilizes location.

We neither know where the father is, nor where the leader locates himself: Lenin, exiled

from cosmopolitan Petersburg to provincial Gork’ii, struggling to remain autonomous

(after his stroke) and iconically immortal as Stalin takes over (Taurus, 2000); Hirohito

sequestered from the people and seeking contact with the masses as a human-monarch

(The Sun); Hitler’s infusion of race ideology with Christologic harmonics (Moloch, 1999).

These leaders remain apart in their slippage of ideological registers, located in unreadable

spaces. The State makes its invisible presence felt in the elusive status of leaders (fathers),

in absentia, and manifests in the inertial lives of the populace (sons) of co-ordinateless

northern provinces (Second Circle) or the anonymous city-center as garrison (Father and

Son, 2003).

Dmitri Shostakovich. Viola Sonata (1981) is a titular reference to the only piece the

composer wrote that he did not live to hear performed. The delay of distribution. The

insertion of the State. The audience is foregrounded with photographs of the premiere

of Shostakovich’s opera (1928) of Gogol’s The Nose (1835). The contemporary public

(narrated by Sokurov) queries: “‘Will the opera be understood?’ Shostakovich: “Judging

from today’s audience, yes, it will. I write for the workers and peasants.” Education

minister Stepanov: “Where is the root of bureaucracy?” Shostakovich: “We should get

rid of our noses.” Stepanov: “Why this form? It has not the beauty of [classical opera].”

Shostakovich: “It is the form of common cause, and art is difficult. It requires attention

and an effort of will.” Shostakovich, through the medium of theater, ventriloquizes

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 Sokurov concerning new cinema and its reception. We have the Gogol-Shostakovich-

Sokurov nexus, flattened in similar issues about bureaucracy and art; pointing to the

original in art, transformed as it is inflected for its time. In this film, Sokurov disinters his

disavowed master, Eisenstein, through his insertion of montage-driven footage of the

revolution, excerpted from October (1927). In the film, Shostakovich himself is dead,

diegetically, when Sokurov plays a recorded conversation with the Russian emigré

violinist, David Oistrakh. The composer returns as the father who confers approval on

his son, the violinist of whose performance Shostakovich says, “I would have played it

that way myself” (DS: VS). Sokurov absents the full content of the conversation in an

earlier scene, focusing on Oistrakh’s nearly missed telephone conversation with the

composer.3 This sequence presents the composer’s absent-presence for his “son.” The

3 On the question of the absent father, I note that his film essay on Andre’ii Tarkovsky (Moscow Elegy,
1987) uses Sokurov’s off-screen voiceover on several levels. First, Sokurov narrates the film; second,
he translates the dialogues excerpted from Takovsky’s films as the actors speak in their own
languages; and third, he recites Tarkovsky’s father’s (Arsen’ii Tarkovsky’s) poetry in the diegesis of
Andre’ii Tarkovsky’s films. Although Sokurov follows Tarkovsky, generationally, this last move
positions him with, and, symbolically, as, Tarkovsky’s father. Tarkovsky’s father’s poetic recitation
embedded in the son’s film Nostalghia (1983) is part of a discursis, a dialogue between the male and
female couple in Italian about the translation of poetic verse, and its impossibility. Sokurov’s off-
screen voice parallels (with a slight delay) the soundtrack of their dialogue with his Russian
translation of their speech. Here, again, the father (Tarkovsky, whether père or fils) is absent, except in
his artistic legacy and voice. That is to say that Sokurov films Tarkovsky at a remove (done in indirect
observation, and an absence of direct interview), and his father, Arsen’ii, is present only in his poetry
recited by Sokurov, in voice-off. Sokurov translates the “texts” of Tarkovsky’s father and the son’s
film-within-the-film using a sequence from Nostalghia in which the male and female interlocuters
discuss the need to remove national borders for the comprehension of foreign literary traditions.
Nostalghia was completed after Andre’ii Tarkovsky’s permanent emigration from Russia to Italy.
The commentary of translation and inheritance of literary tradition is critical in Godard’s
Allemagne 90 neuf zéro: Solitudes, un état et des variations (1991). Godard appears to draw upon this
sequence of Nostalghia in that each character in Allemagne, also a duet of male and female translators,
is at odds over the possibility of translating Hegel. In Sokurov, translation is the barrier and delinkage
between the two worlds of homeland and exile, insofar as the enunciated is split from the énoncé. Of
import to both Sokurov and Godard is Christian Metz’s argument that signification arises through
the sequencing of discontinuities (signifieds deriving from or corresponding to an equivalence of
signifiers). Metz cites Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin’s separately filmed stone lions (Film Language: A
Semiotics of the Cinema, 36) sequenced in motion through stasis, as a syntagma that creates a new linguistic
meaning. The disarticulations in Sokurov’s Hirohito’s speech observe the same process, as does
Sokurov’s delayed translational voice in Moscow Elegy, all three films producing new language-

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 crossover mirrors the book-ended threat of absence by the son and then imminent

absence by the father in Father and Son (2003).

The role of poetry and its political inflections also bridges patrilineal relations in the

writings of Meiji Emperors, the same haiku of Hirohito (singular surface) shifting

contexts in the military offensives of Second World War Japan, first, written in

calligraphy to his son, then, pedagogically produced for his cabinet ministers of war, and

finally, recited to his wife. All versions serve the same surface, to posit himself as mortal,

to choose the scientific over the poetic tropism, but achieved through the poetic form of

haiku, embedded in the dynastic relay of father to son, here, and to emphasize the

biological rather than the mythical delinkages. Sokurov’s Hirohito is bound in a fasces of

neurological disorder (dream-state) and cogently articulated Western-inflected tropisms.

He transfigures himself through the haiku from a lineage of emperors descended from

an original Sun-God(dess) to a mortal (Westernized monarch). The cut (haiku) operates

on one surface, but proliferates in an infinite regress of seamless variations. In effect,

Sokurov never leaves the surfaces he explores, but joins them by association or dissolve

transfer (not Eisenstein’s montage-splicing) creating a variegated but apparently singular

surface. The multivocal surface is singular with a host of interpenetrating texts

comprised of heterogeneous visual and aural modes.

sequences. The new language derives from a framed disjointedness in the films’ shots or sequences,
visual or aural, placing the delay in evidence, one that creates a syntagma, or a new visual utterance.
Metz argues that it is the autonomy or the divide of the separate utterances in the chain of
semantemes that gives meaning to poetry and cinema. Sokurov’s method differs from Godard’s in
that the excitement of meaning, visually, in Godard comes in the rapid alternation of backward and
forward time-cuts (briefly filmed scenarios) as in the couple’s escape scene from the balcony down
the drainpipe in Pierrot le fou (Metz, 218), or in the path that Odile (Bande à part) takes through the
little zoo, handing the wrapped meat to a lion, between her patroness’s home and meeting the two
men, whose weavings of imagery creates a chronicle re-arrangement of spatial-imagery. In Moscow Elegy,
the discontinuity between Sokurov’s voice-delay and Tarkovsky’s filmic dialogue creates a new
language, a meta-syntagma, in which the feedback loop of translations multiplies and builds a new
dialogue, one neither replicated in subtitling, as that technique causes an erasure in this theater of
distantiation, nor in dubbing, which effaces the graced notes of radio delay.

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 Thematically, he fixes on the death-bound trajectories of individuals, private and

public figures of ordinary, military or artistic status; the State as it impinges on private

lives; communal life as it is inflected in the military; private reminiscences of the director

himself or dictators (Lenin, Hitler, Hirohito) filtered through religious rites of private

madness or public transformation; elegies to the common life, deceased artists, and

finally, a complex reading of elite culture as it is inextricably woven into the composition

and decomposition of the nation, or empire. He uses the luminous, watery surface of

painted canvases, anamorphic imagery in the film celluloid itself, etchings within films,

small archives of famous drawings, archival photographs, video and digital transfer

images, as well as older film stock, political newsreels and archival film-footage. Sokurov

constructs documentary essays or fictional documentaries through the camera’s visual or

verbal “interview,” and by its long, single-shot takes of his subjects’ (museums, people,

landscape) interior theaters. Interior theaters mined for their spiritual, invisible spaces.

These subjects dissolve into and out of interior or exterior ascetic landscapes, highly

decorative operatic stages (Russian Ark), or minimalist ocher and brown-toned bunker

‘palaces,’ military barracks and ships, museums and private homes. These five categories

of dwellings often blend in Sokurov, museums or bunkers as imperial spaces; private

homes as military garrisons, and palaces as museological or archival spaces for the

sequestration of leaders of state or culture, prior to transformation, transfiguration, death

at the dual levels of their personal and public personae. Sokurov creates studies of the

immobility of figures, and their paralytic movements (Moloch; The Sun; Second Circle); their

neurologic disturbances (The Sun); their necrophilic obsession (Moloch, 1999) as these

conditions mime the moment of the nation in its disturbances. He creates immobile

“studies” through still paintings transferred onto moving film that is halted and haunted

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by these still-lifes, as in Mother and Son and Spiritual Voices. He, conversely, moves fast

tracking-shots through high-speed chases across borders and frontiers of nations,

monastic, nautical, and museologic spaces. Finally, the complexity of audio tropes,

classical and traditional music, and ambient sound, both interior and exterior, elicit a

Haiku of shifts in the existential conditions of his subjects. He dissolves musical tracks

into one another, with moments of tonal overlap, Mozart, Beethoven, Messaien in

Spiritual Voices, and sharply articulates acoustical passages, muted ambient (crickets) and

musical passages from Wagner’s Gotterdämmerung in crisp phrasal units (The Sun). Nothing

in Sokurov meanders, winds down or slowly phases out. His productions exist at the

surface of the screen and are deliberatively orchestrated, whether in fast or slow motion,

lingering on screen or spaced in intermittent, staccato phrases.4

4
The dissertation argues that a related hallucinatory function occurs through the painted canvas,
the photograph, the fantasia using video-transfers dissolved into film-stock, Renaissance etchings,
architectural spaces and surveillance maps in the films of Alexander Sokurov. Sokurov moves in
between these modes not as commentary on the camera’s capture of the object as specimen, but
rather as meta-commentary on movement and stasis in mediations on historical time. In The Sun
(2004), an exploration of the moments of transition for Hirohito as divine emperor to
commoner, Sokurov examines the nightmarish rapidity of a video-transfer of the Emperor’s
waking-dream, the slow takes of the photographs in his albums, and thus, Sokurov’s setting up
the ‘evolution’ of cinema from the ‘moving’ photographic stills to video-dissolves. Sokurov’s
cinematic commentary is ventiloquized by the characters in the moments of transition between
these last two modalities. American military photographers taunt the Emperor with the moniker,
“Charlie.” “Do I look like that actor [Chaplin]?” the Emperor questions his Japanese translator
for the Americans. [He was just looking at his private album of stars among whom were featured
three photographs of Chaplin]. “I don’t go to the cinema,” the translator answers. “Neither do
I,” the Emperor retorts in a complicity that camouflages his knowledge of Chaplin, and also
gives us Sokurov’s read on the status of photographic stills and their relation to cinema as this
differencing inflects the Emperor’s transition from still figure to moving image.
Similarly, the movement between radio reportage and the live-sound recording of Hirohito’s
public voice has a similar evolution, in that the old dynasty had control of the radio dial, but
must now relinquish the hermitage existence of their God to the lower depths of mass capture.
This evolution, a concept that the Emperor embraces from his marine studies, to the Northern
Lights to Darwin’s work, emblematized by a statue of Darwin on his desk, comes “at a price.”
The movement towards a new Japan (his transition to mortal man) through the live sound-
recording of his speech to the nation brings the downfall of the lineage of the Meiji Emperors.
Hirohito examines Albrecht Dürer’s Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1498), and as the camera
scans down the etching, the image becomes enlarged with the bottom opening onto the
devastation of the trounced and pillaged masses. Anamorphosis reveals death, and the camera

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 Fredric Jameson notes of Father and Son (2003), and his attendant, recent

collaboration with scenarist Sergei Potepalov, that Sokurov departs from his two main

locates the Emperor, Christ-like amidst the torments of the damned. Sokurov places the
Emperor in Gethsemane, here, and, similarly, in the garden among the pharasaical
photographers, taunting him in the temple of his rose garden. The evocation of Leonardo’s Last
Supper is reworked in the cabinet ministery scene, in which Hirohito is displaced to the side, but
backed by an aureole of gold, when he begins his public eclipse as Sun-god. Sokurov, in the very
first scene, shows the Emperor listening to a radio broadcast of the masses (student martyrs)
who ritually drown themselves in protest to the war. Hirohito appears troubled, requests that the
Chamberlain tune out the report of the mass sacrifice, while deciding to place himself among the
masses. He moves away from the emptiness of his role as Pantocrator, and embodies the figure
who suffers on behalf of the masses, becoming one of them, ultimately.
Photographic images determine the meaning of present histories through three instances of
surveillance maps serving as a background in the film. Two of these scenes occur in night-
darkened landscapes, creating volume and flatness, noise and mutedness, magnitude and
diminutiveness, in their respective scenes. In one instance, the Emperor’s Waking-Dream
sequence, the map is a two-dimensional template for the three-dimensional charred building
structures, showing them as having volume in the apocalyptic landscape of the Tokyo bombings.
The trope of marine life is extended in an aquatic environment producing bomber-planes figured
as ichthyologic primitives (“I expected ‘beasts,’” Hirohito will later recount of the invading
American troops to MacArthur) that drop fish-missiles onto the horizontal ground-map. The
second appearance of the surveillance map is a vertical screen against which American military
police search with night torches the base of buildings for unexploded bombs. The map, here,
creates a flattened screen against which the soldiers appear in diminutive form, with muted
voices. Sound, as well as visual effects, has a parallel function in Sokurov, e.g., the soldiers are
filmed at a distance, and for all their invasiveness, their voices are muted, disembodied (not
identified with individual speakers). The spectator and the actors are confused about their spatial
co-ordinates and the objects that they are viewing due to Sokurov’s distantiation of sound and
visual markers.
The Emperor’s mouth-twitching, gaping, gasping, silent mouthings of speech are critical to
the text that Sokurov imprints on Hirohito’s oracularly channeled, counter-dynastic conceptions.
His mouth is an unearthly presence that shifts to a spoken opposition, and derives from oracular
references to speech unattributable to mortal production, a new speech that flattens out his
presence (vocal and disembodied) in the final picture-plane of the film. The photographic still of
a map of Tokyo at dawn, with the film credits rising upward, enunciates the technological
workings of “rolling” film credits against the static imagery of the surveillance still. Hirohito’s
voice broadcast as Emperor-turned-commoner transforms his body into the third surveillance
map of Tokyo. His voice rises, also, from the surface, that temporal-spatial entity dividing sounds,
making them “independent of bodies, into the elements of a language.” Sokurov “retrace[s] that
history which liberates sounds and makes them independent of bodies” (LS, 214).
Sokurov’s penultimate meta-commentary on sound occurs in the final act of the film when
Hirohito asks his imperial servant what became of the producer of the Emperor’s sound-
recorded speech, and he was told (the price of sounds translated into language) that the sound-
engineer committed hara-kiri. The Emperor asks the Chamberlain if he tried to intervene, and he
answers in the negative. Sokurov thus unbinds imperial traditions as a direct consequences of the
Emperor’s embrace of technology, his self-imposed mortal-izing for peace, the immanence of
speech and its lethality for the dynasty’s death in the present-moment.

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 strategies, the intensity of dyadic relations in his fiction films, I note, here, Second Circle

(1990), and that of the communal documentary on institutional life (military), notably

Confession (1998) and Spiritual Voices (1995). Father and Son, instead combines these

modalities (“History and Elegy in Sokurov,” Critical Inquiry, 2006, 8). I would complicate

Jameson’s apparently strict separation of these two modes, for example, in Sokurov’s

earlier collaboration with Yurii Arabov his documentary mode already included dream-

like sequences (short inserts, dissolves, a forty-minute long prelude with a slowly shifting

image, and an eleven-minute fantasia, all located in Spiritual Voices). Similarly, his fictional

mode had near documentary sequences such as the arrival of the female statist funeral

director of Second Circle, whose dialogue, although replete with the dreamscape of literary

and national references, nonetheless, suddenly color-saturates the film, jolting it into the

hyper-realism of István Szabó or Béla Tarr (of the late 1970s).

The setting of Father and Son is the apartment, the miltary barracks and the intentional

unidentifiability of location (shot in Lisbon)5, further complicating national histories and

location) during the unstable period of post-Chechen Russia. All three landscapes are, as

Jameson notes, garrisons, architecturally, but I argue, also, fortresses of time. Moloch

(1999), a self-standing film on Hitler in the final days of the Reich, part of Sokurov’s

proposed tetralogy, is a prime example of spatial fortressing. It is one that produces an

anamorphic portrait of a period, and uses compressed time in the life of a dictator. Time

and spatial compression in these later films, Taurus (2000) and The Sun (2005), produce a

psychological anamorphism through which we are privy to the incestuous private lives of

national figures as they are locked in airless and non-passageable circuits of generational

5This unidentifiability of location builds on the dream aspect of the earlier discussed false continuity
sequences in Moloch and The Sun, as well as the painted di-optrics of the dwelling in Mother and Son. It
creates an outside to the narrative constructed of disparate parts neatly sutured that presents a whole
with a troubled tension due to a subliminal gap or delinkage.

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filiality. This is the space of exilic relations between the nation and the world, a delinkage

that produces the despair of “unrelinquishable” national (Soviet) claims and their

complex roots in older empire-driven (Russian) modes of relations.

All events in Father and Son, both military figures, the father as a war veteran and the

son as an active recruit, are drawn back into the vortex of the singular relationship of

signifiers speaking only to other signifiers, neither as (in the position of) or to full-fledged

subjects (Four Fundamental Concepts, 198). The signifier-to-signifier relationship is one in

which the subject is perpetually in the birthing process, and emerges only as a signifier

within the field of the Other. The Other, whether son or father, is the potentiating

matrix for this expression of the signifier, not the subject, but only that which represents

the subject. Signifiers do not speak to subjects, only to other signifiers. The ball passes

between the men in their rooftop game; the photographs on the wall are not recalled by

the interloper son (only one signifier-one per subject), and dreams are recounted

between the pair in an erotic, anamorphic field. This field is not to be confused with

narcissism or sexuality per se, rather it is an auto-erotic matrix out of which sexuality

emerges. Here is a signifying sexuality, a signifier representing, as it is barred from a

subject, not a sexuality consummated between subjects, but the perpetual presence of the

signifier for the subject. Anamorphism is only fleetingly present at the end of the

opening sequence of Father and Son, when the mouth of the son, presumably, in his

domination and fulfillment by the father, sexual or no, opens onto an orgasmic groan,

seamlessly edging it out. The father demands that he “scream louder or they will kill

you,” referring simultaneously to the space outside their couple, another garrison, and

the enemy of the Chechen rebel. Sokurov balances this imperative in the doubled space

of personal generations and empire-ethnic bloc relations. The allusion to death in

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combat and sexual union are joined as a screen for the entire relationship. This act

comprises Lacan’s O and all its distorted contents. At the film’s end, the figure of the son

is anamorphically extended in the dream sequence that the son reports to his father as he

holds him. He is on a road, and the father is not in sight, he reports this to the father’s

disappointed query: “Am I there?” but with the rueful expectation of his eventual

absence. He is training him to combat an enemy. This enemy, however, is not a national

enemy, but rather any lethal moment of attack on subjectivity, threatening to abort it. At

the end of the film the son identifies his father as “you,” and asks “Am I there?” “No,”

is the father’s ambiguous answer, in a book-ended reversal to the opening dream

sequence. The film’s theme is about the father presenting to the son his imminent

absence, separation, death, and his son’s pending fatherlessness. Sokurov separates father

and son even in their contemplation of one another. The son asks his father to watch the

military practice combat between soldiers. His father is lost in abstracted thought, and it

is the distress expressed by the son (trying to keep eye-contact with his father) of the fear

of his own loss in their twosome. Later, the son views a radiograph of his father’s lungs

(his military training enables him to analyse the films, a form of photographic evidence),

while the father remains unmoved by the news that there is no spot apparent, and as

these x-ray (films) visually intercede in a dissolve between the two figures, the son

tenderly outlines the lungs in the films as he had touched his father’s mouth, earlier in

another scene of erotic, searching contact. The act of haptic displacement is also a motif

in Hirohito’s touching of his young wife in the album, and Eva Braun’s outlining Hitler’s

artwork with her fingertips. It is as if understanding, “reading” information about the

Other (here, his father) can only occur in the space of remove or mediation through a

photographic medium, a photograph, an x-ray, a dream, or while engaged in physical

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 activity. There is a restlessness and irritability when they need to confront one another,

directly, in the enclosed space of the apartment.

The photographs on the kitchen wall of the father’s engagement in the past war, his

refusal to explain the relationship he had to his war compatriot (the dead father of the

intruding son who shows up later), all intercede between the two through the father’s

refusal to explain his wartime past. These are references to other deaths, insofar as

Sokurov perpetually rebalances the power of the son and father, both teetering on the

edge of this abyss. The son parades his physical bravado with the invader “son” of his

father’s compatriot on a board between their apartment and the neighbor’s apartment, in

an allusion to warring territories in which both combatants might fall into oblivion. The

other major presence of memento mori sequences lies in the sudden ghostly apearance of

either son or father within the apartment or walking on the edge of its parapets. Sokurov

has the viewer question whether these are memories of one or the other (father or son),

or simply ghosted images that holographically emerge for the spectator to bear witness

to a moment in Soviet history.6 These blockages between them serve to move the

narrative out of the local moment to a historical, intergenerational past that has receded

(dead compatriot as translation of a non-existent original) and that hovers in the form of

the unfocused gaze of the father looking through the son as a form of hallucination or

a remembrance, exposed in his smile, contemplating the past. He never meets the son's

demands for answers and interaction in the present. "You came to watch my military

exercises, why, now?" The father’s warning about separation and the movement onward

of the son as a new generation and a new nation, that "[each generation] has to discover

6 A more dramatic and prolonged example of this appearance/disappearance of fleeting images

occurs throughout Russian Ark (2002), a full-on historical film in which members of national and
international courts intermingle in the St. Petersburg of the past three hundred years.

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for [it]self" is a translation of the separation of ethnic groups from Russia, and the breaks

in the apparently unified seam of the empire.

Lacan speaks of the "lamella," a phantasmatic trope, as representing that structure en

doublure between linguistic and psychoanalytic topographies through which a subject

emerges and must pass, not through a sexed polarity (masculine/feminine), but rather in

relation to the living subject and 'that which he loses' of necessity by passing through, for

purposes of reproduction, the sexual cycle (Four Fundamental Concepts, 198-99). There is

an affinity in each drive with the zone of death, reconciling the drive's two sides, death

and sexuality, by "mak[ing] present sexuality in the unconscious and represent[ing]

death" (FFC, 199). As for the matter in the film of the impossible to recollect

photographs, Lacan argues that the transference, an enactment of the presence of the

closure of the unconscious, is both a fortress against remembering, and a making present

this closure. This exposure is a perpetual miss of the touch, the encounter, at the right

moment (145). The faux son complains to the signifier-son, "we were going to talk, and

you are [only] taking me on this [endless] trip." This doléance of the interloper doubles

the frustration of the son’s relation to his own father. The son ripostes with the claim

that “we will always have each other, but he (father) will be alone” (Father and Son). This

claim acts as a seduction to quell the others’ rage, and is a reference to the status of the

Russian states’ relation to an imaginary empire. In the film’s narrative, the mother (Mother

Russia) has been dead for the memorable past, and the orphaned states and Empire must

perpetually fight for a new reconstitution. The sons will suffer solitude and fatherlessness

in a more profound isolation than the father(s). The father has his past, his remiscences

as anamorphic re-mise en scènes provide optical filters for loss. Memory serves as a part-

object of solicitude, auto-consolation for past and future losses, with a maddening

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myopia of the sons’ present conditions. Only the interloper’s inquest into the past of the

father produces the son’s eruption of violence against him. He tries to knock him from a

vertiginous plank between apartments, smother him with the radiograph of the father’s

lungs and disciplines the interloper to submission vis-a-vis locating the truth of his own

father’s history as archived exclusively by him (father), in memory. Memory is presented

in the film through anamorphic dream sequences, and the material photographs have no

defined narrative attached to them. They are atlases without a key, uncollated albums7 of

an impenetrable, untranslatable history.

7 Gerhard Richter in his photographic project, Atlas (1976), returns to the singularity of the
photograph embedded in its serial formation. He interrogates America’s and Germany’s
journalistic histories as cross-entablatures in this at once public testament and private collection.
Hundreds of photographic panels interpenetrate each other in various genres, drawn from
newspaper photographs of the eight nurses murdered by Richard Speck, (Eight Student Nurses,
1966), and, originally, from their college yearbooks, an album twice-removed; his own photo-
paintings of the October Cycle, 1977; Famous Men series; concentration camp photographs on a
page opposite pornography shoots, and many more banal photo-album subjects of anonymous
people, soldiers, and Richter’s own serial paintings. It is a commentary on seriality and the non-
existence of the singular image until viewed within the flood of categorically similarly reduced
images to the status of the photographic panel. Atlas stands in contrast to the Bechers’ seriality
of landscapes emptied of all marks except towering, silenced industrial structures, and to Aby
Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. Richter’s project is noteworthy for its formal organization, with none
of the collage elements of Kurt Schwitters (1920s) or Hannah Höch (1930s). Perhaps there is, as
Buchloh suggests, a “precedent in the teaching panels of Kazemir Malevich (1924-
27)…[however, these are] considered as mere complements to the actual aesthetic objects”
(Buchloh, “Atlas/Archive,” The Optic of Walter Benjamin, 1998, 13). Benjamin Buchloh comments
on Richter’s use of the amateur camera, and makes a connection to Siegfried Kracauer’s practices
in the 1920s in which he “analysed the actually existing usages of the photographic image in the
media practices of Weimar…specifically…the illustrated weeklies” (Buchloh, 29). Kracauer’s
own commentary on the photographic media image in Weimar is telling, “they are not an aid to
memory…the flood of photographs sweeps away the dams of memory [of the illustrated
papers]” (Kracauer quoted in Buchloh, 29).
Richter’s project is reminiscent of both Sokurov and Godard, on micro and macro scales of
history, and in their collage aesthetics of cinema as history. Richter, like Godard, credits not the
formalist model, for Godard, Eisenstein’s montage aesthetics, of collage aesthetics established in
the soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, but rather that of Robert Rauschenberg (Welles, Hawks,
Hitchcock, for Godard) as introducing him to a collage aesthetics. Rauschenberg gradually
grounded his total collage aesthetic in the processes of mechanical reproduction: silk screen,
transfer drawing, and photography. This, as Douglas Crimp points out, allowed for the “absolute
heterogeneity of photography…and the museum” (the latter in its role as cataloguer), a
heterogeneity that “moves across the entire surface of his work” (On the Museum’s Ruins, 53). The
same argument can be made for Godard as he argues that Baudelaire wrote “his poem, not by

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 It is in his discussion on the emergence of the signifier in the field of the Other that

Lacan adumbrates the concept of the lamella. He declines the centrality of sexual

polarity, the masculine-feminine relation, for the signifier’s relation to the Other. He

emphasizes, instead of this sexed polarity, the primacy of “the relation between the living

subject and that which he loses by having to pass, for his reproduction, through the sexual

cycle” (FFC, 199; emphasis added). In Father and Son, the stalled-out movement into the

next generation is this troubled passage, one of non-reproducibility. There is no next

generation, only a focus on present relational impasses, a kind of static, time-stopping

exploration. The radio is a symbolic mediator in the couple, the father tuning up the

chance, and that it described cinema….even on the level of the text, “run across our minds stretched
like canvases, your memories in the horizon’s frame, that’s certainly a cinema screen as well” (Godard
and Ishaghpour, Cinema, 56). This commentary foretells the coming of cinema, according to
Godard, as his use of the Baudelaire is a re-inscription of the memory of this prophecy in his
films, notably 2x50 ans de cinema francais in which the poem is recited to Michel Piccoli, acting as
the head of the Century of Cinema Association at the site of the Lumière factory. One of the
questions posed is how to commemorate an unremembered history [cinema]? Photography in
Richter’s colossus functions differently than in Godard’s Histoires in that Richter is decidedly
anti-avant-gardiste, he denies the instructional practices of the avant-garde. His primary interest
lies in demonstrating the erasure of the image as purveyor of memory through photographic
practice. He, unlike Godard, does not weave a logic of correspondence in his montage, and more
oppositionally with the syntactic lay-out of the Russian avant-garde. For Richter, there is no
pretext of memory-bearing. Godard’s project explores the potential for memory conveyance
through its dissociation of images and montage. Richter explores the erasure of the image in its
monotone and, predominantly, monochrome repetition. In Sokurov and Richter, there is a
frozen stillness, a rigid stationing in space, a monotonous repetition that produces a negation, an
erasure, a double death of the image. Godard’s migration of images through quotations in
multiple mediums, literature, painting, film, photography sets up a repetition as well, but one that
re-instantiates the doubled and trebled valences of images as reinforcers of memory. Memory,
that even if stripped bare to, for example, painting alone, or a gestural motif of a painter or a
painting (Yves Klein’s blue paint savagely striped on the face of Pierrot, Courbet’s Sea flowing
into a moving animation of a quadrant of the canvas, and then into a real sea), is captured in the
movement of the mind, stretched like a canvas extended to the horizon’s frame. Memory that is
explored inside out, irreduceably as an analogue to the cinema itself, for example, the moment
when Michel-Ange attempts to enter the film screen (Les Carabiniers), and even its destruction,
memory and camera keep on projecting as a residual matter outside the mentation of a character,
and overwhelm him with its overpowering presence. In the same film, the King’s letter, as
artifactual testimony (arising at the opening of the film as as seduction into the war) decrees the
brothers’ (Lumiere?) deaths at the end of the war and the end of film. It is a simulacrum of death
in cinema and historical memory that crosses registers and serves the heroes to erasure in
History. Yet, Godard’s cinema uses the image as a re-instantiation of memory, not its negation.

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volume to drown ambivalent thought about his son’s inability to move on, and

simultaneously his fear that the son’s moving on will nullify his own existence.

In his analysis of Father and Son, Fredric Jameson writes of the father’s over

attentiveness and indifferent narcissism (“History and Elegy in Sokurov,” 8). Jameson

comments on the complicated oedipal relations of the pair, but he does not address the

function of the sexual aspect of auto-erotic subjectivity that the father’s possessiveness

belies. Yet, it is through the auto-eroticism that Sokurov demonstrates the impossibility

of filial, generational and national passage. The auto-eroticism that Sokurov presents is

the partial drive’s non-satisfaction of orality, its figure as a mouth closing in on itself, and

the endless circuitry of the partial drive towards an unengulfable lost object, the petit a.

The drive’s aim does not lie in reproductive coupling (179). Instead of reproduction

generationally, and the threat of its erasure of the past, there is only the now and its

death-zone. There are only three instances—and these weakly indexed—of futurities’

filiality derived through the parturitive genitivity of sexual reproduction. The first is the

son’s ex-girlfriend’s recognition that “[his] time has not yet come [for producing a son].”

The second is the son’s solace to his father that, in recompense for his (the son’s) leaving

him, “you will marry soon.” The third instance, the most strongly indexed, is the

neighbor Sasha’s desire (envy) to live together with them, in effect to be their son. He is

multiply sent away, and openly disavowed by father and son, and yet he returns with the

same mute request. At the end of the film when he verbalizes his desire he is renounced

tearfully by the son and sent back to his own “apartment,” (“nest” was a term used

earlier by the father). The son simultaneously disavows their union and separated status,

“we are together, we [just] have different [dwellings]”(FS). Each of these is an

instantiation of the lamella, the relation between (himself) as a living subject and his loss

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accrued by passing, for the sake of his reproduction, through the sexual cycle. Lacan

concludes that each drive and the zone of death has an affinity, and the lamella (as

placenta) reconciles (and separates) the two sides of the drive, illuminating its (the

drive’s) sexual presence in the unconscious, and standing in for its death (199).

In The Second Circle (1990), historical transmission between generations of father and

son is a motif for generational, national passage. The transference as activator of the

unconscious for Lacan appears in Sokurov's film as the son reaches an impasse with the

immoveability, the untransformability of the dead body of the father. In this film, the

miltary competence of the woman (funeral 'director') serves as a dialectical counterpoint

to the son's impotence to move the past out of the way of the present moment’s mandate.

His inability to bury his father re-enforces the unbreakable ties to the military and its

legacy8 throughout the film. Remembering and contemplating the past equates to

preserving it by refusing to move it out of a present that does not breathe, except in

relation to its past. In several moments of the film, the position of the father (deceased)

is compared to Lenin’s legacy for the benefit of the next generation (the son). Titularly,

of course, The Second Circle postdates Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, a novel that concerns a

community of intellectuals in a gulag. Later in the film, he has a verbal exchange with a

woman at the death certificate office who states that "[t]here is only one Vladimir Ilyich."

8 Sokurov writes: “I, of course, cannot mute in myself an attraction to the military. I am after all a
Russian (translated by and quoted from a manuscript chapter in a forthcoming book on Soviet
cinema by Nancy Condee, “Sokurov: Shuffling off the Imperial Coil” (2008). I interpret the
son’s inability to bury his father (TSC) and the son’s comment to Sasha that they (three, father,
veteran, son, recruit and Sasha, coming from a military family) “are together [already], we just live
apart,” as well as his impossible relationship with his girlfriend (a phenomenon external to the
military) as evidences of the binding ties of military legacy. All references to activities (the son’s
training as a military radiologist) and past ties in their lives (father’s lost war comrade) derive
from their military-inflected, collectively, garrisoned existence. I posit that Sokurov is embedding
a nostalgia for the collective in military life in most of the films about male, homosocial
communities, e.g., Father and Son, Second Circle, Confession (concerning life on a submarine) and
Spiritual Voices.

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The father is clearly a Vladimir Ilyich, but his lying in state is troubled by the

bureaucratic mandate to burn him. He must be passed on to the next circle so that the

singularity of Lenin remains untroubled. On a purely visual level, the bust of Lenin in the

father's room is viewed from nearly all angles except the back. Why not the back? Is

there no looking back? If not, there is no memory. All events in Sourov occur on the plane

of the present, or Benjamin’s Now-time. In Lacan, transference is the only access to an

unconscious that bars the signifier, dividing it in two. The foreclosure of memory is the

time of the Unconscious, that time through which the subject “is born divided” and

“emerges from the field of the Other.” The Unconscious emerges from the foreclosure

of memory (FFC, 199). There is a lunar ambience in Sokurov’s lighting of the backyard,

with the abandoned military tank, and the barrels that take on more softened, warm

color and texture than the flattened, barren sepia and green tones of the father's room

throughout the rest of the film. The film itself is an allegory of apotheosis surrounding

Lenin's lying-in-state.

Paul de Man’s allegory is not a totalizing trope, it seeks to un-unite, unmoor

fragments one from the other. There is no putting together, again, as there was no

‘together,’ ever. The unaffordable bridal color (white) choice is that of the son, who

sleeps with his father’s corpse, as against the pragmatics of cost (“red is cheaper”)

underscored by the military funeral director. Why slippers and not shoes, the son

protests, “[h]e wore shoes his whole life.” She retorts, "It's the law." The film translates

the original text of in-fighting within the Soviet empire, and the bondedness/alienation

of generations and partisans. The original text, the history of the empire, is revealed as

cracked in Walter Benjamin’s vessel through the film as translated text. This text keeps in

motion, in circulation those elements, that on a prosaic level, in its disruptedness, assure

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the text’s survival, beyond its own death. The film as text imagines the non-

correspondence of the past and the present that keeps the past, in this case, the non-

existent original, alive. It is only in the non-correspondence of the fragments, or here,

two sides, whether they be the drives and narcissistic love (Lacan, FFC, 200), or the

futureless present of the sons in relation to alternately dead and phantom fathers, that

the original has any claims to existence (de Man, “The Task of the Translator,” RT, 97).

Deleuze’s son-signs (sound) and op-signs (visual) are two units of perception in

Godard that operate after the film-subject's position is unlinked from sensori-motor

causality in postwar film. Our (and the filmic subject's) agency lies not in perceiving what

new image will follow, consequently, but rather what we see in the image before us.

Deleuze claims that virtual/actual imagery, and the son/opsign in parallel fashion,

oscillate around a dividing point forming an irrational cut that is indiscernible. The op-

sign frees the image to a disconnected any-space-whatever, in which time is directly

present, not represented, and the son-sign produces an event disconnected from

traditional voicings (direct speech, flashbacks) such that both, through their mutual

contact, prevent the eye from seeing the image voiced, or hearing the image seen (Cinema

2, 277-79). Sokurov’s cinema is fitting in that these delinkages bear on time and its live-

preservation (direct experience) in history, and history's release (event-creation) through

these connected/disconnected images' intervallic spaces. They comprise a montage-form

that is opposed to Sergei Eisenstein’s in his concern with the alignments of sound and

image tracks in a polyvocalization of elements that give rise to a complete image. Through

son/opsigns there is a new slice onto the 'meat' of history's politics. In Sokurov’s Father

and Son, the 'flashbacks' are shown directly as present-effects, e.g., the dream of

separation, and its anamorphic images (at the beginning and end of the film) of

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the father/son dyad, is a son-image of indiscernability through contact that bends

time, and releases new historical readings of relations over time. Even the scene of the

wall of photographs is not real evidence of the vanished 'father' for the 'prodigal son'

who comes to visit. And, the horizontality of the relations between the main couple (so

charged as to feel homoerotic) is due to the direct presentation of time, blurring

anamorphically their images when any total vision is attempted. On another note, the

son takes the 'interloper' on a tram ride out of town (set in Portugal, now) showing

him streets of the former's past, making doubly inaccessible (in space and time) through

its present-ness, a history for review. These postwar filmmakers are concerned with the

non-alignment, and non-totality of images. History, then, is under scrutiny, in doubt, in the

present moment.

In Spiriual Voices (1995), part fantasia, part documentary essay, Sokurov embeds

himself in a Russian regiment patrolling the Tadzhik-Afghan border during active

warfare. He takes part in and films the daily life of soldiers surviving both the

bombardments and intermittent boredom of encampment. Part I consists of a 45-minute

multi-tracked video of dissolves that effect a still-image background of a winter tundra

landscape, slowly changing over time. Sokurov’s voice acts as a narrative suture between

soundtrack and visual imagery, and serves as a key to the moment of dissolves in the

soundtrack itself. The narrative relates the brutishness of Mozart’s physical presence in a

world that he must battle for survival, with inadequate nutrition (rickets), a pock-marked

face, emotional restlessness and an early death. He tended to his mother who, while he

looked for work in the daytime, lay while she ldying in his cramped, unheated flat.

Mozart (in a letter read by Sokurov) describes his night vigil at her deathbed, transcribed

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from Mozart’s letter, as “the saddest moment of [his] life.”9 Mozart’s Piano Concerto

KL525, plays quietly as Sokurov talks about music “as if self-generated, as though there

were no piano player, but just the piano in the room with self-generated sound.”

Sokurov narrates, sparely, while the musical track introduces the multichordal music of

Olivier Messaien as if they were separate notes within a larger field. “It is as if each note

were separate” with its modal transpositions, blending with the Mozart, dissolving in and

out of each other (SV). These dissolves also parallel the corporeal merger and division in

Mother and Son, and evoke the opening and closing of the unconscious in Lacan:

[The unconscious] marks that time by which, [by virtue of being born with the

signifier, the subject is born divided]...the subject is this emergence which just before, as

subject, was nothing, but which, having scarcely appeared, solidifies into a signifier....The sexual

relation is turned over to the hazards of the field of the Other (FFC, 199).

The music and image tracks dissolve, and ghost each other’s presence. Messaien’s modal

transpositions move in and out of the Mozart score, as troops will move in and out of

the summer tundra. There is a struggle between the narrative voice (Sokurov’s) and the

border-patrol figure moving between layered visual/ambient sound and musical tracks,

the tracks themselves, and sound and image. Sokurov’s voice carefully parses out

language to balance the weight of musical, ambient sound and visual texts.

In Elegy of a Voyage (1997), a journey through spiritual, military and museological

crossings, Sokurov asks us to examine the meaning of encounters that, however, fleeting,

fix the viewer in liminal (unconscious) spaces. Insofar as the film has a battlefield tone of

a long-march, the trajectory from East to West invokes a reversal of Germany’s wartime

9Embedded in this sequence is a reference to an earlier film, Mother and Son (1997), a long elegy
and vigil by a man, unidentifiable by class or history, for twenty-four hours by his mother’s
deathbed.

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 West-East invasion of Russia. The traveler (Sokurov’s voice and partially visible body)

enters a monastery in Valdai (Old Russia) on a highway between Moscow and St.

Petersburg, crosses the Finnish-Russian border, takes a night voyage by boat, travels an

autobahn through Germany and ends in a Dutch museum (New Russia, as a stand-in for

Petersberg’s Hermitage). In Valdai, the camera follows Sokurov as he muses on why he

is following a monk who enters the monastery. There is a baptism in process, and the

camera moves from a young boy with a tear-streaked face to the gestures of prayer of

another monk, to the family witnessing the ceremony. The monk who led us in stands

apart and is the first visual dialectical partner for the narrator, heard but unseen. Sokurov

and the monk are paired10 in the director’s voice-off and the monk’s physical presence of

silent observation. Sokurov uses this interdialogics to explore the mystery of oppositions

required to mine the observation of passages, from life to death, and from unbaptised to

entering the community. Both are limns of crossings that the medium of film exploits to

chart these crossings. Nancy Condee, in a forthcoming book on Soviet cinema, notes

that Sokurov places a similar question in the mouth of the Hitler of Moloch (1999). The

setting is an antinomical exchange between Hitler and a priest at the base of a staircase

with a statue interposed in the fortress of Kehlsteinhaus. Condee points out that the

priest is both supplicant and Christ’s interlocutor, and that Hitler is both Christ and the

leader of Judea (Pilate). Condee points to the necessity of these pairings for the fragility

and impossibility of inhabiting power by any leader (Lenin of Taurus; Hirohito of Sun)

without the dramatic rituals of solitude while ensconced within their entourages, and

their railings against the pains of the human body, in short, the rising decripitude of the

body in time. Sokurov underscores the seclusion of sequestered life required to

10The pairing of the monk as old world “guide,” and an unknown, narrator voiced and partially seen
(acted by Sokurov) parallels Marqis de Custine, a nineteenth-century time-traveler and the “dead,”

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illuminate Hirohito’s neurasthenia and preoccupations with marine life, specifically, of a

species of crab that has historical referents for the empire of Japan; Lenin’s psychotic

rampages and awareness of his inaccessibility to political life in his exile to the town of

Gorky; and Hitler’s review of newsreels of bombings, as if dressed for the symphony and

accompanied by Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, both an apogee and a twilight of his political

existence.

In the monastery, the narrator’s voice essentially asks the question, “Why am I

invested in Christ’s sacrifice, if He was unwilling to make it?”11 Sokurov leads up to the

tri-partite question, echoing Christ’s “Why, Father, have you forsaken me?,” with a

camera tracking-shot of the dwellings of his former village now moved closer to the road

as the population has “become fewer,” and they seek to live closer together to avoid

isolation. Sokurov in not mentioning the word “death” foregrounds it. A black “sheet”

hovers over the camera lens and stands in for both the shroud and the monk’s supplice,

one immaterial, the shroud, and the other specifically material, the supplice. Sokurov is

consumed with the pairing and metonymizing of the two states, death and the ritual

preparation (rehearsal) for death. He narrates that he had known them and lived among

them, and that when someone died we wept. This collective moment has passed, and as

he moves through the snow-blinded street he does not know anyone, nor does he enter

any door, until the monastery. The monastery has two sides, “day and night.” He is a

stranger among them, observing. The camera lens has the same fluid optics that Sokurov

uses for the paintings in the museum. They are both, after all, a telling of a past history,

in part his own, to which he “returns.” Sokurov forces us to reflect on the fluid nature of

11“I ask him [the monk who, knowingly or not, leads Sokurov into the monastery] why did
Christ pray that his Father not send him to his sacrificial cross? Why did Christ want to avoid
crucifixion? If he so loathed being crucified, then how can I accept his crucifixion?”

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documentary history and fictional story. He argues that the camera suspends the

objectivity of documentary by subjectivizing the object filmed in the moment that the

camera captures it. The watery effect of the objects and environments filmed is the

moment of subjectivity. The object is removed from a fixed context or an ascribed

history, and instead inhabits its own unique time and space. Return is a necessary

element in Sokurov’s use of the picture plane, and then torquing it in this unstable

optical space. Mystery is the kernel of all the objects of any of his films, and the mystery

of the crucifixion leads us to place Christ on an equal plane with all of humanity in his

resistance to death.

After Valdai, we are lost as to actual locales, and find ourselves located in

uninhabited, nocturnal sites that become the space of narrative, and move us outside any

nameable space. Sokurov creates a unique space-time marked by dream-signs and

encounters with the inanimate and animate inhabitants of each zone. For example, the

kind, idiot stranger he meets in the cafe—“he was waiting for someone and needed me

as ‘confessor’ – I never will see him again,” equates the unseen and about to be forever

unseen to the space of a confessional—the stranger talks of his rage at being

maltreated/falsely arrested by immigration in the USA, but comes to an understanding

of suffering.

The time-traveler (Sokurov) narrates his expedition through all of these East-West

shifts until we and he are properly dislocated in small continents of death. He ends in

Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, the camera ensuring that we focus,

exclusively on the painted object before us. Otherwise we might fall into an abyss.

Notably, there are two frames that are empty, miming a musical passage requiring a

pictorial silence. All of the paintings are shot with a camera-focus yielding a shimmering,

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underwater quality as if they were the still-living, “warm” tissue cultures from post-

Deluvian artifacts of the Flood.

An example of the off-setting of Northern Albertian perspective and the “warmth”

created by the camera is in Pieter Saenredam’s St. Mary’s Church at Utrecht (1662). The

voice-off narrator reflects “the canvas is still warm.” Sokurov experiments with multiple

recursions of time, eternal time,

Although Elegy of a Voyage precedes Russian Ark (2002) by one year, the former

appears to be a blueprint or chapter of the latter. It is a melancholic elegy upon the

themes of passing through borders, and landing on islands of fixed, eternal time-spaces.

Through the unlit passages of the palatial galleries, the director’s solitary night

movements are charted by the camera, one foot in front of the other, unaware of what

will appear before him next. He is frustrated and disappointed as he had expected to be

met, and as if blazing a military reconnaissance through the museum, deplores the

broken promise of guidance (he claims he was promised a map, an accompaniment, a

score). He encounters the paintings as if they were cultural entities, islands between

which he voyages. The film hyperbolizes the necessary loneliness of discovery of as yet

unrecorded existences located in the paintings’ residual histories. Sokurov’s narrative

forms intertextual dialogics of high culture, the quotidien passing of time and life in the

paintings themselves. Each painting has certain elite submotifs, each stranded in a realm of

Dutch nineteenth-century post-Impressionism, seventeenth-century landscape or

sixteenth-century Renaissance, but ones that are heavily populated by ordinary figures or

iconic popular events, such as Pieter Saenredam’s empty, vast Nordic light in his St.

Mary’s Square, a sailors’ and voyagers’ homecoming, or a canal visit outside a ‘non-

existent’ apartment window, when he (Sokurov) argues that “when I was there, there was

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no window” (EV). This anachronistic statement moves us backward in time, from the

present to the past, returning to an estranged present-past. It also, as in Father and Son,

enters an invisible discontinuity into the mise-en-scène, in that we are left to determine the

living or dead status of Sokurov’s reporters. This doubtful status forces a timelessness to the

scenario, disengaging it from the whole, while immediately tying it in. There is an

immanence to these moments, their doubled quality of occurence in the now or then, or

both simltaneously.

Similarly, Peter Brueghel the Elder’s Tower of Babel (1563) foregrounds the eponymous

Babel as a crumbling ur-text or museologic dwelling, an empire, both as an ark which

never is borne away, but is earthbound and demolished by its internal linguistic conflicts

(Russian empire), and as the ark of the Torah, that which holds in a sacred, inviolate

space, the T’rath or traditions of the East/West. The ark of the covenant is held in a

suspended space between man and God, and the writings of the Baal Shem are, again,

swallowed up by the rock they lie upon. Sokurov invokes spaces of nature as sites for

cataclysmic, but benevolently enveloping experiences, such as his musings at the

precipice of a ship’s deck on the crossing from East (Russia) to West (Holland). He

articulates his feelings about the sea below as “a violent, but indulgent body over which

could flow these waves over my own body” (EV). The traveler is an agunoh, a figure both

divorced from his homeland and, in this rift, marked by his attachment to that nostos. He

revisits these landscapes as if still aboard ship, as ports of call that are familiar, fixed

(eternal day’s end in one painting) and remembered differently, as with the window that

was not present, that now (in the painting) opens onto the courtyard. It is as if either the

paintings, anachronistically, are recordings of his experience in the recent past, or that

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the paintings are encoded dreams in which recording is distorted for the purpose of

discovering a dreamscape that is his Russia, longed for and unavailable.

The Sun (2004) is set in 1945 Tokyo, at the moment of Emperor Hirohito’s reverse

transubstantion from Divine Emperor (124th of the Meiji line) to common man. The

film opens with the intertitle, “End of The World War Two - Year 1945 Tokyo.”

Götterdämmerung. Twilight of the Gods, the Norse myth cycle of the battle among the

gods that brings about the end of the world. Germany/Japan. It handles the questions of

ascent and descent in Sokurov’s existential quadrivium of scientific evolution, divine

lineage, poetic and geopolitical domains. These four areas are paired alternately, in

verbal, sonic and visual discourses. The Emperor must relinquish his status as God to

create a peace to which he has until this moment appeared both paralyzed and

indifferent. He capitulates to General MacArthur, according to the film, to spare his

people further bloodshed by publically accepting responsibility for his regime’s war

atrocities. His voice had never been heard publically until this moment. A reparté on the

politics of war’s responsibility is played out in a battlefield of move/countermove

between the Western scion and the Eastern progenitor.

The film demonstrates a remarkable equilibrium in terms of atrocities on both sides

as expressed in the verbal duel enacted as an imperial ballet between MacArthur and the

Emperor, a profound exploration of inner and outer spaces, and voicings, silent and

disembodied, that punctuate the film. The time-image “splits in two.... as the actual

image of the present passes, and the virtual image of the past is preserved” (Deleuze, TI,

81) through the vehicle of the Emperor’s body. Sound and spatial imageries are the two

platforms on which Sokurov mounts his campaign of attractors competing for the

Emperor’s body’s trajectory. Sound in the film has three domains: vocal, ambient and

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musical. The vocal domain is divided into two counterpoised arenas, voice as emanating

from the body, that of the Emperor, and that of the others in the film. The opposing

arena is that of the voice as disengaged from the body, either as a silent event, for

example, the Emperor’s mouthing silently an unheard transcription. This latter

phenomenon occurs in alternating rhythmic sequences, one in silence and one in sound.

He appears to have a neurasthenic disorder in which the hysterical movement of his lips

produces no audible sound. The alternating sequences create a mythopoeisis of discourse

in which he deliberatively moves between levels of science and poetry, politics and war.

His deliberations are disrupted when he enters a trance state and slips between meaning

levels: a text of incoherence. The film further divides chronologies between his isolation

in his underground bunker, his departure into the light of day in the garden of his

compound swarming with American MPs. In his imperial bunker’s laboratory he

discourses on marine biology and the hermit crab, as the lines of the monologue’s

precious disquisition on the crab’s carapace and structure morph into a poetic

commentary on survival and existential disintegration. His official scribe falls asleep as

his trance-like commentary, hermetically sealed, with no interdialogic engagement creates

a slippage from evolutionary biology and warfare to the words “decomposition,

disintegration, death.” After being dressed by his manservant, who sweats in an effort to

button the narrow holes, he crosses a threshold by allowing himself to pass under a low

door frame. He then states to his manservant, who has noted that he had lost weight and

begs him to have an evening barley broth, that “The Emperor does not eat.” Hirohito

notes that his breath had “a strange taste, a bad smell and bad taste.” He moves his

mouth in attempt to rid himself of the stench, as if he needed to purge himself of toxins,

almost consequent to the clautrophobic quarters. Sokurov here alludes to

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transformational fasting (religious) and self-starvation (body’s release of

ketones/glucose), as well as the already deadness of the transsbstantiated coporeal body, the body,

the mortal carapace that the Emperor is sloughing.

Hirohito then has an exhausting meeting with his generals and heads of state who all

oppose, mostly non-verbally, but with horrified expressions and a minister’s apoplectic

protest to his surrender. A war minister comments that primitive, wooden boats would

have better served Japan’s devastated Navy. Of note are the close-up shots of faces

drenched with sweat, as servants clothe him, as ministers oppose him and as they all seek

to re-balance the move away from Divine body to common-law relation to the nation.

This, along with Hirohito’s marine biology excurses, serves as verbal fulcrum for

MacArthur, who in a later scene triumphally comments on the trope of catfish that the

Emperor began, and the General disrupts by leaving the conversation and spying on

him. This spying mirrors, in the singular, the Emperor’s own staff constantly scripting,

circumscribing and forcing his actions, through spying around corners, in the field of

their indirect gaze onto his movements.

The Emperor raises his head in an upward arc, dances to non-diegetic Bach’s Cello

Suite No. 2, and snuffs out the candles in the room. When the General returns, he takes

a seat (as transferential analyst) and asks Hirohito why he thinks that despite America’s

coastal status (like Japan’s) that American economy is not dependent on fishing. The

geograhical-geopolitical answer, rhetorically ‘interpreted’ by MacArthur is that America

chooses not to rig its vessels for fishing as it can buy anything it needs from the seas of

other nations. He whispers to the Emperor, and then slides in his provision that the

Emperor, although he won’t force him to take any action, can return to his palace and

his family as a commoner. Yet, the transformation is Hirohito’s own, it is a refusal of

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passivity, an affirmation through incorporating the negative, and, ultimately, externalizing

the interiorized false sacrifices that open and close the film, the honor drownings of the

students taken as sacrifices for the state, and the hara-kiri of the sound-engineer, who

upholds the ‘image’ through a denial of the transmission he has just engineered of the

Sun-King. What of the private third identification of which Hirohito unburdens hinself?

The child-Meiji ancestor who drowns with his army, the lot consumed by the Samarai-

faced crab that Hirohito stares down, and announces as a “Miracle.”

What a miracle!! What heavenly beauty! Like our Kabuki actors’ masks. Migrates not

far from [its birth place]. Found along shallow waters from the North to Hong Kong

and South to Hokkaido. Settled. [first in Japanese, then in English]. Migration.[stares

into eyes of crab inducing a trance in himself/the only other time he stares closely

into another’s eyes is with MacArtur lighting he cigars off one another] Distant

migration.

[Götterdämmerung] Migration of species. [Scribe falls asleep] Migration. Emigration!

Discrimination! Unfair immigration law! Write! Wake up! [to scribe] I remember the

causes of the Great Asian War. [Mouth movements] The other international

participants in the conferences did not believe in the idea of racial equality which the

Japanese government put forth at the end of the First World War.

[Götterdämmerung] When the American government forbade Japanese immigration

which occurred in the State of California in 1924, that kind of race discrimination

became a serious source of indignation and anger for our people and the military

rode the wave of this protest. [He mouths unheard speech, touches walls,

‘channeling’ oracular history] and this indignation morphs into an unqenchable rage.

[The chamberlain stalks the Emperor down the corridor, listening]. We have been

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 informed that an American column is moving towards Tokyo, you should go to the

bunker [Shostakovich Symphony of War—tense strings/overlaid with

Götterdämmerung] as they prepare to descend.

The Kabuki-mask of the Samari-crab is one of the shifting masks that the Emperor

adduces he can remove, and in its place he becomes the commoner who moves beyond

the “last Japanese [man].” He becomes “[t]he man who wants to die” (Deleuze, Pure

Immanence, 82). He dies a waking-sleep from a pragmatic madness, lying under the Moon,

driving all residuals of the ancien regime (the elderly manservant) from his chambers.

Alone, under the sign of Midnight, he eclipses his reign of the Sun, one lived in the

bowels of a dark palace. “And at this moment of the completion of nihilism [the nihilism

of affirmation], (midnight), everything is ready, ready for a transmutation” (82).

Sokurov’s final meta-commentary on sound occurs at the end of the film when

Hirohito asks his imperial servant what became of the producer of the Emperor’s sound-

recorded speech, and he was told [the price was] that the sound-engineer committed

hara-kiri. The Emperor asked the servant if he tried to intervene, and the servant

answered in the negative. Sokurov thus unbinds imperial traditions as a direct

consequences of the Emperor’s embrace of technology, his self-imposed mortal-izing for

peace, the immanence of speech and its lethality for the dynasty in the present-moment.

Sokurov articulates a related hallucinatory function of the painted canvas, the

photograph, the fantasia using video-transfers dissolved into film-stock, Renaissance

etchings, architectural spaces and surveillance maps in his films. He moves in between

these modes as commentary on the camera’s capture of the object as specimen, but

rather as meta-commentary on movement and stasis in mediations on historical time. In

The Sun (2004), an exploration of the moments of transition for Hirohito as divine

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emperor to commoner, Sokurov examines the nightmarish rapidity of a video-transfer of

the Emperor’s waking-dream, the slow takes of the photographs in his albums, and thus,

Sokurov’s setting up the ‘evolution’ of cinema from the ‘moving’ photographic stills to

video-dissolves.

Sokurov’s cinematic commentary is ventiloquized by the characters in the moments

of transition between these last two modalities. American militay photographers taunt

the Emperor with the moniker, “Charlie.” “Do I look like that actor [Chaplin]?” the

Emperor questions his Japanese translator for the Americans. He was just looking at his

private album of stars among whom was featured two photographs of Chaplin. “I don’t

go to the cinema,” the translator answers. “Neither do I, ” the Emperor answers in a

complicity that belies his knowledge of Chaplin and also gives us Sokurov’s read on the

status of photographic stills and the moving pictures as this differencing relates to the

Emperor’s transition from still figure to moving image.

Similarly, the movement between radio reportage and the live-sound recording of

Hirohito’s public voice has a similar evolution, in that the old dynasty had control of the

radio dial, but must now relinquish the hermitage existence of their God to the lower

depths of mass capture. This evolution, a concept that the Emperor embraces from his

marine studies, to the Northern Lights to Darwin’s work, emblematized by a statue of

Darwin on his desk, comes “at a price.” The movement to a new Japan (his transition to

mortal man) through the live sound-recording of his speech to the nation brings the

downfall of the lineage of the Meiji Emperors. Hirohito examines Albrecht Dürer’s Four

Horseman of the Apocalypse (1498), nominally, Death, Famine, War and Plague. As the

camera scans down the etching, the image becomes enlarged with the bottom opening

onto the devastation of the trounced and pillaged masses. The Emperor’s dream needed

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to precede this examination by the camera in the movement from film to etching,

internal gaze (the subject’s eye) to that of the camera.

Lacan, in “What is a Picture?,” notes that the modern in art, as commented on by

André Malraux, the audience’s gazes (even when not in attendance) replacing those of

the Icons, and are ubiquitous, “[b]ehind the picture, it is their gaze that is there.” Malraux

refers to the dominant gaze as that of the “incomparable monster,” or that of the painter.

Nothing is really new (in the modern) in that there was “always a gaze behind...[b]ut

where does this gaze come from?” (FFC, 113).

The fact that the Emperor’s gaze, as a figure of modernity (joined with that of the

camera) on the Dürer etching, produces an anamorphism, an image that reveals death in

its distension, is Sokurov’s shift of the gaze from behind (no longer located in the gaze of

his courtiers or MacArthur’s court). The gaze is now located in the eye of the Emperor

himself. However, what determines the Emperor is the gaze that is outside. Sokurov evokes

Lacan’s bi-partition, the splitting of “being to which the being accomodates itself.” This

split goes beyond the “dialectic of the surface and that which is beyond” as constituting

“[the subject’s] presentation of himself to himself; this split in consciousness is the

awareness that beyond this surface is the “thing itself” (FFC, 106). The two instances of

the surveillance map as background in the film, both occuring in night-darkened

landscapes, point to a function of creating volume and flatness, noise and mutedness,

magnitude and diminutiveness, in their respective scenes. In the Emperor’s earlier

Waking-Dream sequence, the map is a two-dimensional co-ordinate template for the

three-dimensional charred building structures, showing them as having volume in the

apocalyptic landscape of the Tokyo bombings. The trope of marine life is extended in

the aquatic environment produced as bomber-planes are figured as ichthyologic

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primitives (“beasts,” as Hirohito called what he had expected the Americans to manifest

as to MacArthur) that drop fish-missiles onto the horizontal ground-map. The second

appearance of the surveillance map is as a vertical screen against which American

military police search with night torches the shells of buildings for unexploded bombs.

The map, here, creates a flattened screen effect against which the soldiers appear in

diminutive form, with muted voices. Sound, as well as visual effects, has a parallel

function in Sokurov, as the soldiers are shot at a distance also in an earlier scene, and for

all their invasiveness, their voices are muted, disembodied, i.e., not identified with

individual speakers, and they are confused about their co-ordinates and what they are

viewing. The Emperor’s mouth-twitching, gaping, gasping and silent mouthing of speech

are critical to the text that Sokurov weaves on Hirohito’s channeled and counter-dynastic

conceptions, unearthly presence shifting to a spoken opposition, and oracular references

to speech that is unattributable to mortal production.

In a brief section of The Knot. Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn (1999), an 188-minute

documentary essay on the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sokurov interviews the Nobel

laureate on his language project. It is one that invents a recombinant-return to the old

Russian, and archives language for future use. Language written in exile, stored for the

future. This utopian-archive resembles Benjamin’s dialectical imageries in the “Theses on

the Philosophy of History” or the Arcades Project in which images come into violent

contact. Angelus Novus, the wings of the angel are blown from a future wind as he turns

his head to the past. The abrasion of images reveals passages from a lost history that

looses spores of past eras into a fissured present to re-assemble a new world-image. The

introduction of dialectical images also wipes clean the slate of homogenizing, statist

neologisms that destroy a past language, and prevent new formations of thought.

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Sokurov's classical formalism seeks to do the same, to produce new cinematic thought

that disintegrates a plot-driven montage. He introduces long single-shots, with subtly

shifting dissolves and overlays of video and film-stock into an anti-narrative essay. His

project may mirror Solzhenitsyn's. In an intimate close-up of their hands, Sokurov takes

the author's hands into his own and studies them. Solzhenitsyn’s project is to re-capture

a collective narod-language. His provocation includes inviting the Kazakhs to join

Russia, consequently, receiving opposition from Kazakh nationalist groups. Sokurov and

Solzhenitsyn concur in their preference for the name, Petrograd, as opposed to St.

Petersburg. Phonemes from the original tongue.

Solzhenitsyn’s language-project parallels Sokurov’s cinematic arc, one in which each

film shows a different angle on an inventive Russian Orthodoxy of empire-military-

religion, much as Solzhenitsyn’s ‘dialects’ prismatically refract the mother-tongue.

Solzhenitsyn went through four volumes of a Russian dictionary in a gulag-camp. His

dictionary studies were cloaked in this seemingly innocuous activity from the censors, as

Sokurov’s early films were smuggled under the guise of Eisenstein’s films, one of whose

“originals” may have been erased to preserve the Sokurov. Invention under the sign of

orthodoxy. Shostakovich writing symphonies to the revolution to remain under Stalin’s

radar. Solzhenitsyn re-integrated dialectal idioms in his thirty-five year-long project, The

Dictionary of Language Extension.

When I re-instate genuine Russian words, they are seen as my inventions. The reader

may not see these philological-political projects. When I combined already existent

prepositions (phonemes) with verbs to create new words, I was condemned. There

were cases in which the pamphlet was condemned, but the word was adopted, and

widely used and abused. For example, to ‘pre-know,’ cannot exist, according to

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 accepted standards, but its legitimate[d] brother, ‘to verify,’ can. Different

prepositions, same root verb. Too few combinations are accepted. We have a wealth

of prepositions, and yet we cannot combine them. When I combine them, they

shout. Yet, I did not invent anything. I combined things that already exist (The Knot,

1999) .

Sokurov’s audience also may not easily receive his contradictory points of view. For

example, he favors a ‘strong’ Russian state, belonging to the people who must serve it

(the military). Sokurov’s Turkmenistan, Novgorod, Tadjikstan, the Arctic waters, Japan

(as a screen for Russia) are all dialectal passages between regions, united not as in an

empire, with a foreign and Western-inflected center, but, rather, as semi-autonomous

regions in relation to an imperial tradition. They are defined by their nuanced

differences, and produce new relations to other regions, with a set of common concerns.

They are akin to linguistic phonemes in recombinative motion, creating a new, but

utterly Russian worldview. The role of the artist demonstrates the transfer from the

people (narod) as icon to the mortal, concrete person, the nation outward to its

peripheries in all their specificity.

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