Plane songs: Lauren Sedofsky talks with Alexander Sokurov.

STRADDLING THE PERIOD OF SOVIET DISINTEGRATION and perestroika/post-perestroika liberalization, the twelve features and twenty-seven documentaries directed by the fifty-year-old Saint Petersburg--based filmmaker Alexander Sokurov all testify, however obliquely, to this inextricable le historical upheaval. Their preponderant landscapes are populated not so much by individuated personae as by specimens of the human species lost in some highly generic situation: nineteenth-century urban desperation in Whispering Pages (1993); naval regimentation in Confession (1998); a father's interment in Second Circle (1990); ethno-medical research in Days of Eclipse (1988). In this "anthropology," which is neither social, nor cultural, nor too flagrantly theological, the object under scrutiny might be termed "external signs of inner life"--minimal signs, something both more and less than subjectivity, and otherwise affecting. No available distinction between fiction and documentary can quite account for the porousness that S okurov makes manifest between these two modes, often by exploiting archival material in the features and extracting muted drama and enigmatically poignant participation in the documentaries. And this interpenetration has only become more pronounced: Dolce (1999) circumscribes a central monologue that hoists the interview format to the altitude of Racinian tragedy; Moloch and Taurus (the private lives of Hitler and Lenin respectively; 1999 and 2001) rise from the archive, unleashing a controversial fictional genre of "historical imagination," one that rides on each viewer's own fascinated projections.

To situate Sokurov's films, it seems almost unavoidable to take the ring road through Eisenstein's retrospective illumination of the sequence from his own Potemkin (1925) known as the "Odessa Mist." In the slow lifting of a dense haze in the port at dawn, the master of montage would remark, at twenty years' remove, a "suite" of indistinct, imponderable landscapes relinquished to the fluidity of their internal form and, in their "matches," to a dissolving, one into the other, all at the very surface of the screen; hence, his recognition of the film medium's common lineage with Chinese landscape painting. Although the drift of Eisenstein's reading departs from his avowed intention, it temptingly suggests the possibility of an approach to film thoroughly antithetical to his theory of montage and far more radical (or regressive) than anything proposed over and against it by Neorealism, the Nouvelle Vague, or even Warhol. For the "imagicity" or integral image to which Sokurov's films aspire englobes the entirety o f the work and reposes on just those features of limited visibility, seamlessness, and the unprecedented eradication of linear perspective. His paradigm is indeed painting--the Byzantine icon, Northern decentered geometry, and the visionary legacy of sfumato--that is, all the plane-bound deviations from the Albertian model that might conceivably ensnare and confound the viewer's visual cortex and make of the film medium, loosed from its origins in the camera obscura, something other than the tardy avatar of a long-outmoded visual scheme.

With New York's Museum of Modern Art and Cinematheque Ontario gearing up for a major traveling retrospective of his films (debuting at MOMA in February 2002), Sokurov agreed to engage in the following exchange with me between the screenings of Taurus at Cannes in May and Elegy of a Voyage at the Venice Film Festival in September--all the while preparing his ninety-minute single take of an elaborate mise-en-scene at the Hermitage, intriguingly titled Waterloo.

LAUREN SEDOFSXY: How did you come to treat the screen as a two-dimensional Surface?

ALEXANDER SOKUROV: If film as art exists, then the real problem resides in optics. The camera lens is an immense reproach to the film director. It points to the dubious nature of the artistic result and, really, the very process of filmmaking. The picture created by an optical device possesses a high degree of objectivity; at the same time, it's monstrously subjective. This conflict is a real tragedy for film. Aesthetics comes down to seeing a good-looking picture on the screen. This beauty, however, has been created essentially by neither the director nor the cameraman but rather by the frozen liquid of optical glass. I've spent a long time familiarizing myself with this process, getting inside it, in order to find my own way of freeing myself from it. It was necessary to define the artistic hierarchy in the visual work and to decide, ultimately, that my model would be painting. The point of convergence with film was clear: the picture plane. Strictly speaking, the surface of the screen and that of the canva s are one and the same.

LS: How does this involve altering photographic perspective?

AS: The question is whether we need a three-dimensional space at all. The development of pictorial art reposes on the artist's understanding of the flat surface as a canon, an objective reality that should not be fought. Filmmakers treat it as a void that has to be filled--an absolutely ridiculous practice. If you accept this canon, however, it leads to a system of restrictions that allow you to concentrate on the main matter, the moral dimension. Since camera lenses are generally designed specifically to create the impression of volume, we have had two developed in Russia specially for our films. They reverse traditional illusionistic volume and emphasize the illusion of a plane. These are the first steps, but we still have a long way to go before we have significant artistic resources for the flat film image.

LS: Pavel Florenskij's 1919 text Inverted Perspective extrapolates the alternatives to linear perspective from the study of icons. Is the icon the paradigm?

AS: In Russian artistic practice, the most brilliant examples are Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin [Russian Symbolist-primitivist, 1878-1939] and certainly the Russian icon as such, of the Yaroslavl and the Novgorod schools and, to a lesser extent, the Pskov school. But these are ideal and even paradoxica examples because Petrov-Vodkin and the Russian icon painters were working under conditions of absolute freedom, that is, directly, without a medium. A painter creates his work by directly touching the canvas or wooden plane with his brush. A filmmaker creates his work through mediums, that is, more than one: The first, the most rigid and disagreeable one, is optics; the second, a less rigid one, is the space filled with air; the third is the strictly photographic one, with technical difficulties of its own, whether chemical or electronic. Then there is the dependence of the image, its quality and its different parameters, on the technique used to reproduce the picture: the projector lamp's intensity, the screen's reflect ive quality, its dimensions and distance from the projector--though these factors have less influence on the artistic nature of the image.

LS: In both your films and your rhetoric, you make frequent reference to the "confinement of the circle" and the "unexplored possibilities of the sphere." Some of your films, in fact, have left me with a curiously spherical mental after-image...

AS: That's quite accurate. There's a feeling of geometry, air, a work of the imagination. Personally, I don't like sharp edges or straight lines, nor quarrels or conflicts. A sphere is circumscribed, suspended, protective: a universal formula, like an egg, by which my nature is shaped. The spherical organization of the film's inner space is probably due to the structure of my character.

LS: How do the flat and spherical coexist in your films?

AS: Such theoretical questions are best answered by the film critic.

LS: To what extent can painting serve as a model for the photographic film Image?

AS: The film image must be created according to the canons of painting because there are no others, and there is no need to invent them. They have already been meticulously worked out and extensively tested by time. The director of photography need invent nothing; he has only to educate himself. The task is much easier for filmmakers than it was for painters like Caspar David Friedrich in his time. The great painters were trailblazers; filmmakers now have their example, many different examples.

LS: A tour de force of movement, right down to the micro-undulations that give the screen the aspect of tremulous living tissue, your new documentary Elegy of a Voyage traces the trajectory of your own silhouette from Saint Petersburg across Finland and Germany to Pieter Saenredam's painting St. Mary's Square and St. Mary's Church at Utrecht, 1662, at the Boijmans Museum In Rotterdam. it's a study of equivalences: painted and fumed landscapes; human and artistic encounters. But why Is the voyage portrayed as bleak, whereas the Saenredam painting exudes warmth and bonheur?

AS: That's what the film is about.

LS: Beyond your signature cloud formations in movement, you employ an "art of air" that involves floating, pulverized matter, subtle dominant colors, lento sostenuto camera movements, slow motion, and effects of emergence and dissolving--all of which deflects from the Image's legibility...

AS: Fog, smoke, vapor, and gliding movement distance the viewer from the overly sharp quality of screen reality. The most important quality the film image can possess is its capacity to offer the viewer sufficient time to peruse the picture, to participate in the process of attentively looking for something. Not meditative contemplation--that's something else--but looking for something. It should be possible for information to be concealed or for the entire image to be gradually withdrawn. Ideally, the filmmaker would never allow the viewer to comprehend or even perceive the image, at once, in its entirety. Confronted with a true cinematographic work of art, the viewer is never a passive contemplator, but someone who participates in the creation of this artistic world. All works of high art are built on confidence in the delicate consideration and intuition of this person. They always leave something unsaid or, conversely, say too much, thereby concealing some simple truth. Tarkovsky's films, for example, wit h their wordy speeches and numerous objects in a single shot, create a contradictory impression about what is primary and what is secondary in the image. There is no true visual work without mystery.

LS: Your techniques produce a certain seamlessness, a characteristic associated with digitized film., of which you're making increasing use...

AS: I might have continued to regard video with disdain if it hadn't become apparent that I wouldn't be able to continue making films unless I used this medium. Once I began shooting in Betacam, I realized that what I was trying to achieve was entirely possible; I could even imagine future possibilities. My coming to video has been perfectly conscious, and it offers me maximum control over the creative process. The unsatisfying distance between the filmmaker and his work is dramatically reduced, while the work's artistic particularities can be developed more extensively and with more variety.

LS: Why does a powerful and defining physical landscape play a preponderant role in the films?

AS: This is a moral issue: landscape as a witness of death, landscape as an absolute category. In itself, it carries an artistic image or idea. Not every human face contains some artistic essence, but every landscape does. Each one is the indifferent countenance of nature looking at human beings, some lofty art that doesn't care whether humanity exists or not. There is a special pain and tragedy in it. Soon there will be no landscape at all, only light and shadow in geometric spaces. But the landscape already plays an ever-diminishing role in our mental, emotional, and cultural formation, a process that also accounts for the diminishing role of art.

LS: You situate your characters within these landscapes as anonymous or relatively impersonalized human bodies that ultimately become objects of compassion. What has inspired this approach to the body?

AS: No word can elicit the deep, inner, specifically human reaction that a human being's touch can. In this affective sense, the body is a blessed reality, because it is only through this sensory feeling of the human body, its warmth, that one gets an idea of the soul's location or an answer from it. The body is a noble part of reality, the part that suffers most. If one believes in various religions, one knows the soul will survive, whatever happens to it, whereas the body will necessarily perish. It tortures its owner, it ages and becomes a source of disgust and shame. Compassion is necessarily compassion for the body; the soul can get along without it.

LS: The extreme detail with which the characters' material conditions are constituted in all of your films forces me to ask whether you adhere to a materialism.

AS: One is not literally connected to the other. The philosopher's credo and the filmmaker's hand are not comparable. Yes, the material world has a great effect on human beings. I have faith. But I also have many questions that no priest has ever been able to answer. Or perhaps I didn't understand the answers. I am very much concerned by the cruelty that exists in the Bible, the triumph of cruelty or of hardship in some of its plots. In this respect, I stand in between. But I have a position: I believe in the divine origin of humanity, although I consider the creation and development of nature a physical process without divine provision.

LS: All of your films allude at some basic level to personal experience in its specific relation to history.

AS: History in our films is only a more or less elaborated background, sometimes detailed, sometimes as one finds it in Leonardo's works: an abstract perspective, a line of mountains in the mist, an opening sky, a shore, an ocean or river. There is no past or future in history, just as there is no past or future in art, only the present. This background, however, is often an active one, sometimes embodied by one of the characters. A historical event can be an actor in our plot, but always on the same level as the rest, never exaggerated.

LS: An interpenetration of fiction and documentary has been present in your films from the beginning. What are the dynamics of these two modes?

AS: There's no difference in importance, only of tools. The aim is to create a work of art. With a documentary, we are never trying to be objective. As soon as any object appears on the screen, all objective criteria vanish, yielding their place to the absolutely subjective dictatorship of the filmmaker's will. One might compare fiction filmmaking to therapy and documentary filmmaking to surgery, or vice versa.

LS: In Moloch and Taurus, why have you subjectivized figures central to the major disasters of the twentieth century?

AS: The perception of these figures is defined by the immense historical weight they drag with them, the terrible shadows cast on our conscience by their actions. We have resorted to showing such people only to make it clear that large-scale events, extreme limit-cases, are not the result of exceptional circumstances or destinies. So-called great historical figures are animated by human mechanisms; the circumstances, events, and complexes of their everyday lives drive them to their "great" actions. Character and behavior are decisive. The purpose of art is to repeat the most fundamental ideas, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Because people forget.

LS: With Taurus, you resuscitate one of history's most powerful cadavers: Lenin. Does this signal a final liberation from the regime?

AS: By no means, because this film is merely an artistic effort on the part of a small group of people, with no connection to the tradition of Russian cinema or any changes in Russian society. In fact, it confirms that the problem remains entirely unresolved. Nothing will produce any changes, not even knowledge of Stalin's crimes, until the older generation of Stalinists is gone.

LS: You awaken Lenin in 1922 as the "sick body." His evolving paralysis and acalculia, his fits of rage and disgust--all documented--immediately open up enormous "plastic" possibilities. How important were they to the conception of the film?

AS: Aesthetically, but also ethically, the "plastic" component is vital for the inner life of the film. It permits us to show the "plastics" of character, which would have been impossible or unethical had we used the plot or dialogue. The key is to avoid showing the entire field of action. In that field, there are things I can justify in some artistic way with the means I have at my disposal. Other things, like domestic life, life within the silences of a dialogue, relations between relatives, I cannot know or reconstruct. Whenever my right of entry is not assured or I doubt my ability to render the content of the situation, the "plastic" decisions become more sophisticated and allow the details to be less concrete.

LS: Shooting this film yourself, why did you choose a Vermeer-like milky blue light?

AS: Perhaps only because I like Vermeer very much. The particular characteristics of his atmosphere are especially difficult to reproduce. Nobody knows how Vermeer achieved it. In film, it is even more difficult. So perhaps it was the desire to learn.

LS: in a striking change for you, the final frame shows a clearly focused, Immobile sky. Is this fixity the rigor mortis that will soon rigidify Lenin's body and, with it, the body politic?

AS: The issue is life, resistance to death: how eagerly and stubbornly a man clings to life, how he resists quitting this unfriendly, cruel, earthly existence. I take full responsibility for taking this man out of the past to show what his life was like, rather than his departure to hell to be judged and burned on a spit. Despite Lenin's power over the life and death of millions of people, his life was that of an ordinary human being. The closer one is to power, though, the more primitive one's life becomes.

LS: Although Hitler and Lenin are portrayed in a much more psychological or symptomatic mode than your earlier protagonists, they are all suggestive less of internal motivation than of an incarnation through artistic procedures.

AS: I am resolutely a realist.

LS: How do you explain your well-known position as a traditionalist when it strangely echoes socialist realism's backward glance and accommodates modernism's obsession with the fiat picture plane?

AS: My weltanschauung and my position are resolutely traditional because all of my Indisputable authorities are people of classical culture, who have no connection whatsoever to contemporary literary or artistic practice. And, with only some very rare exceptions--Flaherty, and certainly Elsenstein, Dovzhenko, Bergman--for me, there are no authorities among filmmakers. I am a conservative.

LS: Is this linked to the Russian situation?

AS: I'm very disturbed by the fact that I'm Russian, that I live in a society that has been mentally ruined along with its very real economic ruin. It hampers the creation of that special world where incentive comes from art, because it is not enough to create a harmonious work; it is imperative to keep it from being stifled by a society in the grips of hatred and disaster. Unfortunately, Russia is still in such a state.

LS: Isn't that why the "men in power" tetralogy [of which Moloch and Taurus were the first two installments; Hirohito will be the next subject] puts a considerable burden on the viewer to bring his or her own "historical Imagination" to bear on the film?

AS: That's very accurate. Some basic historical knowledge is important background for the films made by our team, because we are oriented toward viewers who read, who know and think about history. We work for these people.