The Spiritual Worlds of Alexander Sokurov PART TWO: Sokurov's Search for Spiritual Identity in "Father and Son" & Other Films "We shouldn’t be afraid of difficult films, we shouldn’t be afraid not to be entertained. Mother and Son, with its score of references to the tradition of Western art, already articulated the idea of humans being integrated in a block of time and space that constitutes, as it were, an imaginary museum of variable and endless possibilities. He imputed this injustice to the cultural and spiritual vacuum of the day, proposing a film that would do away with the 20th century, and inviting its viewer to another approach of cinema, of time, and existence. He was born with a disability because of an anatomic defect of his leg, in 1951 in Podorvikha village in Siberian Russia. If you are an Australian resident, any donations over $2 are tax deductible. Following the death of his wife, a handsome father (Andrej Shetinin) shares an apartment with his son (Alexei Neimyshev). He is the great Russian director who once shot a whole film in a single take. His films, in a most transparent way, marked a departure, a retreat from the social sphere in these years of failed and aborted reforms and socio-economic turmoil, their hazy, ghostly aesthetics and the characters that float through rather than inhabit them being a direct reflection of the despondence and powerlessness felt by the director. So that the whole, be it in the wanderings in nature or even the conversations between the son and the dying mother, seems to take place in a perpetual present, an eternal spring time that is also an endless fall, an ever repeated routine, the universal cyclical repetition of life and death. As is well known, Russian Ark was shot entirely in the Hermitage, one of the world’s greatest art collections. There he became friends with Tarkovsky and was deeply influenced by his film Mirror. Source for information on Father and Son: VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever dictionary. Dreamy and eminently contemplative, with its near absence of plot, the film thus also boasted a subtle reflexive quality, which was lost on many critics, who opted to marvel at the painterly (and escapist) quality of it all. Read movie and film review for Mother and Son (1997) - Aleksandr Sokurov, Aleksandr Sokurov, Alexander Sokurov on AllMovie - Mat i Syn is quite literally a film unlike any… Aleksandr Sokurov talks to Steve Rose about Soviet spies, fallen dictators – and … Even the film’s carefully produced sound design, itself replicating the sensation of a cotton-like coating, enshrouded the whole (including the viewer) like a funeral veil. Following in his father's path, Aleksei attends military school. His father was a Red Army veteran of WW2. ‘Father and Son’ forms the second part of an intended trilogy by Sokurov, best known for last year’s ‘Russian Ark’. Founded in 1999, Senses of Cinema is one of the first online film journals of its kind and has set the standard for professional, high quality film-related content on the Internet. Mother and Son (1997, Russia/Germany, Alexander Sokurov) Given that Sokurov's 'Alexandra' has finally received a UK release, a full year after I saw it at the London Film Festival, it's perhaps useful to look at one of Sokurov's previous films about family bonds. Most of Sokurov's early features were banned by Soviet authorities. Sokurov clearly stated – most recently in his Francofonia (2015) – that the redemption of humanity (and the latter’s highest and noblest mission) was to rescue and uphold this tradition. 83m/C DVD . Elena Gracheva, “Kolybelnaya” in Arkus Lyubov (ed.). Jeremi Szaniawski is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It is an important piece in Sokurov´s art creation as it was his first internationally acclaimed feature film. Sometimes even like lovers. All rights reserved. We already have this email. With Andrei Shchetinin, Aleksei Neymyshev, Aleksandr Razbash, Fyodor Lavrov. Second chapter of Alexander Sokurov's trilogy on family relationships, the first being “Mother and Son”. Otets i syn) is a 2003 Russian drama film directed by Alexander Sokurov. They have lived alone for years in their own private world, full of memories and daily rites. Painterliness in cinema has its pitfalls. Aleksandr Sokurov Celebrity Profile - Check out the latest Aleksandr Sokurov photo gallery, biography, pics, pictures, interviews, news, forums and blogs at Rotten Tomatoes! Murmurs from a Shadowless Land: Fragmentary Reflections on the Cinema of Werner Herzog, Criminals Against Decoration: Modernism as a Heist, Claustrophobia and Intimacy in Alex Ross Perry’s, Thresholds of Work and Non-Work in Tulapop Saenjaroen’s, “Rouch Isn’t Here, He Has Left”: A Report on Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch, The 34th Cinema Ritrovato Has Full Resuscitation under COVID, Women at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, A Vitalising Cinema in an Agitated Age: The 58th New York Film Festival, Your Daughters Come Back to You: The 28th Pan African Film and Arts Festival. And not in money. He graduated from the History Department of the Nizhny Novgorod University in 1974 and entered one of the VGIK studios the following year. Conversely, there was undeniably a vibrant, ebullient (juvenile, almost) quality to Sokurov’s Perestroika films (Skorbnoe beschustviye [Mournful Insensitivity, 1982, released 1986], Dni zatmeniya [Days of the Eclipse, 1986, released 1987], and Spasi i sokhrani [Save and Protect, 1989]). The film begins before the first scene and ends after the last, with the sound of wind in the trees and the songs of birds. Plot. Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! To be sure, seldom has film been more transfigured, to the point of resembling a series of paintings. He also posited the use of sound in Sokurov as a third dimension, complementing and complicating the allegedly flat images and frequent absence of reaction shots in his films. However, there is another form of time-image other than the crystal-image, the transcendental time-image. Sokurov’s story is one of a torn connection between a father and son, a painful return and an uncertain future. Since Sokurov envisages the twentieth century as having lost this transcendental ability, we can interpret his aesthetic project in Mother and Son as the antidote to contemporary art: a blending of religious traditions with “natural religion” – as expressed in the painterly sublime. Sokurov’s time in Mother and Son is not “after”, but rather “in between” – a time of the interstice. This is not an entombment, then, but rather an en-womb-ment; no funeral veil so much as a placenta-like wrapping – with the quasi-uterine and aquatic, filtered sound design and promise of rebirth contained therein. Fredric Jameson, “History and Elegy in Sokurov”. But Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark has every right to the claim. Alexander Sokurov nos presenta en esta película otro poderoso trabajo de intensa belleza y emociones. Yet the mother dies in the end, and so this is not what Rancière (in reference to Bela Tarr’s films) has identified as the “time after”7. The film was entered into feature film competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. Try another? "Mother and Son" by director Aleksandr Sokurov is a visual masterpiece of cinematography reminiscent of Impressionistic paintings by Monet, Renoir, and Cezanne. This accounted for the sublime (if sedate) nature that I have identified in the film. The slow, morbid quality of Sokurov’s films, and particularly in his films of the 1990s (the post-Soviet and pre-Putin period) is inescapable. Mother and Son is a story of deep and tender affection between a mother and her son. Aleksandr Sokurov’s films include Russian Ark, A Russian Youth, Mother and Son, Faust… Aleksandr Sokurov's previous films have borne such titles as. In this film, the feeling of oppression is everywhere: not only in the faces of the main characters, not only in the claustrophobic, dimly-lit … Deep and tender affection between a father and Son “ Mother and her devoted. 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