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Historic space in Sokurov's Moloch, Taurus and

The Sun
a
Jeremi Szaniawski
a
Yale University
Published online: 06 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Jeremi Szaniawski (2007) Historic space in Sokurov's Moloch, Taurus and The Sun, Studies in
Russian and Soviet Cinema, 1:2, 147-162

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SRC 1.2_04_art_Szaniawski.qxd 2/19/07 8:52 PM Page 147

Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema Volume 1 Number 2 2007 Intellect Ltd
Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/srsc.1.2.147/1

Historic space in Sokurovs Moloch,

Taurus and The Sun
Jeremi Szaniawski Yale University

Abstract Keywords
Aleksandr Sokurovs first three instalments in his tetralogy of dictators are dis- Aleksandr Sokurov
cussed here from the perspective of spatial representation and history. As the film studies
Russian film-maker explores the morbid and intimate hours of Hitler, Lenin, and space
Hirohito (but also of Stalin, Goebbels, and General MacArthur), he creates strik- history
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ingly disorientated spaces, juggling with traditional cinematic grammar.

The effect and message offered through this approach is multi-layered and
manifold, and this article investigates how precisely these spaces function in the
mise-en-scne and what the implications of this might be.

Few film-makers have probed and blurred generic distinctions between fic-
tion and documentary more than Aleksandr Sokurov. His films, in all their
diversity, seem to follow the established generic borders, but they do so
only to undermine and question them profoundly. At first glance, there are
three main, distinctive categories: first, literary adaptations; second, por-
trayals of historic figures (Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Hirohito); and finally,
films based on original scripts. This division of types, however, might not
be the best way of approaching Sokurovs work. Where, for instance,
should we position Stone (Kamen', 1994), portraying the ghost of Anton
Chekhov, or Russian Ark (Russkii kovcheg, 2002) with its eerie display of
Russian history within the confines of the Hermitage? And, while his
elegies probably fall into the documentary category, they are at the same
time profoundly poetic diaries, a genre in its own right, which Sokurov
very much makes his own.
Sokurov himself proposes another typology: on the one hand, films
with basic human feeling, which is strong, intense and direct, simple yet
vibrantly private, such as the loss of someone close. Into this category fall
The Second Circle (Krug vtoroi, 1992) or Mother and Son (Mat' i syn, 1997)
films that, in Sokurovs own account, were written and shot in a short
period of time. On the other hand, a set of films shows another thematic
obsession of Sokurov and his faithful screenwriter Iurii Arabov: the so-
called tetralogy of the dictators, whose first three instalments, Moloch
(Molokh, 1999), Taurus (Telets, 2000) and The Sun (Solntse, 2005) will be
central to the present argument.
The tetralogy takes leadership and power as its subject. Its historical
actors, however, are not represented on battlefields or in moments of glory,
but in a morbid kind of intimacy, as they are immersed in their petty daily
shortcomings. While seemingly not secluded into a single domestic space

SRSC 1 (2) 147162 Intellect Ltd 2007 147

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(the Berghof in Moloch, Gor'kiis mansion in Taurus) and a single exterior

space (the mountain, the woods and meadows), both Hitler and Lenin
seem unable to go very far; they appear to be lost in the senselessness of
their own codified rites: Hitlers grotesque courtliness with his staff, as he
ritually shakes their hands and seems to obey some fantasy image of cour-
tesy rather than any spontaneous human feeling (Jameson 2006: 4) is set
against the simultaneous sheer refusal of life (Hitlers disgust at the sight
of young puppies) and death (his ultimate claims that he shall conquer
death). Hirohito, while offered a less bleak template, also remains for most
of The Sun a prisoner of the labyrinth-like domestic spaces that surround
him. Most important for constructing historical spaces in these films is
Sokurovs disorientated, and therefore obviously disorientating, camera
work.
This disorientation should not be interpreted in a pejorative sense, but
as a deliberately chosen instrument. The apparent weakening of cinematic
grammar, expressed in painfully drawn-out takes, oddly broken by sudden
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close-ups, showing no respect for classic cinematic rules, is very organic

in purpose. It serves to create a homology between the characters state
of mind and the world that surrounds them. We could see here an
Eisensteinean influence on Sokurov, who does nothing to hide his debt to
his illustrious predecessor in this regard. It has been argued that The
Russian Ark constitutes a reversal of, or engages polemically with, Soviet
modernist classics like Eisenstein and Vertov (Kujundzic 2004). Already in
Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Groznyi, 194546) space is treated in a way that
expresses the paranoia of the films hero. In Sokurovs films, it is not so
much a question of paranoia, but rather of a debilitated, infantilizing
dementedness that slowly destroys those it befalls, which is seen through
Hitlers grotesque crises, Lenins senility (both men indulging in idle ban-
ter, absurd speeches and unwholesome pranks), and through the gap
between the figure that Hirohito supposedly stands for the Descendant of
the Goddess of the Sun and the frail and lost being that he, in fact, is.
Instead of concentrating his focus on the title figures perspectives
(their point of view), Sokurov unburdens their weak shoulders. But this
does not mean that his films assume a traditional, referential, third-
person, transparent narrative; quite the opposite is the case. Indeed,
Sokurov opts for an apparently random distribution of the point of view
onto various instances of narration. While these instances, as we shall see
below, express the omniscient gaze of the great image-maker Sokurov, we
can attempt to delineate them in the following categories. On the one
hand, nature is expressed in takes often verging on the sublime (the fog-sh
rouded Berghof mountains, a summer meadow, a ravaged Tokyo beautified
by a blinding white sun). On the other hand, the characters have distinct
points of view (Eva Braun and the German snipers, Nadezhda Krupskaia
and the anonymous drivers, General MacArthur and Hirohitos servants).
A possible third category making the referential subjectivity even more
complex is the incursion of rare subjective visions of the title figures
themselves (Lenin facing his dead mothers ghost, Hirohitos nightmare
of flying-fish bombarding Tokyo). Moreover, there are plain point-
of-view shots with a physical anchorage in the diegetic world, which
abound at certain moments in the film, although it is often difficult to

148 Jeremi Szaniawski

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determine whether they are indeed point-of-view shots. Examples in these 1. One way of enjoying
three categories create and legitimate this explosion of perspectives, and Sokurovs films is to
watch each frame as
enable us to accept the defamiliarizing jump from a close-up to a long shot one would regard a
and vice versa. These spaces are thus a matter of gazes, of points of view, painting that comes
all organized through idiosyncratic editing and decoupage. For someone alive, with the length
and duration that it
used to the well-established and codified rules of classical montage, these implies. Sokurovs
violated scales of shots and axial jumps are arresting in the sense that they films require concen-
are clearly not the clumsy strategies of a beginner, but obviously done tration to appreciate,
because of their often
deliberately. ponderous pacing and
In Sokurovs films each shot, regardless of the category to which it minimalist narrative
belongs, is worked out to absolute perfection like a painting, an aspect style (Galetski 2001).
which Jacques Rancire has discussed in his seminal article Le cinma
comme la peinture? (Rancire 1999), emphasizing the eminent picturesque
quality of Sokurovs cinematography. This is in accordance with Sokurovs
own view:
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When I compose my frames according to the rules of my gaze, I endeavour to

observe my artistic imperatives with a very precise goal. The frame should be
a work of art. The aesthetic and artistic tension must be transmitted to the
spectator. My artistic needs and imperatives: thats what matters most. All is
subordinated to my inner tensions and to art.
(Sokurov 2006: 24)1

In practice this works as follows: we know where we are, we understand

that we find ourselves in the living spaces of historical figures; but we soon
discover that these spaces are not merely referential, and that in their rep-
resentation they are just as mad and over-determined historical accounts
as the ghostly figures they accommodate. As Fredric Jameson points out:

The physical buildings then, the Berghof and the manor house, become the
experimental maze in which these world-historical figures are trapped, and
the spatial becomes a kind of unexpected third term. But to this space corre-
sponds a new kind of temporality as well []. The pressure of this tempora-
lity of the days routine is not so much anti-narrative [] Rather, mediated
by film, it marks an approach to real time which now brings us back to
Sokurovs unique dual talent, as a fiction filmmaker and extraordinary
documentarist.
( Jameson 2006: 6)

Therefore, we are never given the comfort of following one definite and
fixed instance of narration, but we are lost in these bizarre, disorientated
spaces. In his commentary Jameson underscores that not only is the
diegetic imprisoning for its character, but also for the gaze of the camera:

The private life recorded by the movie camera is also a kind of helpless
imprisonment in its gaze; both psychic immaturity (in Gombrowiczs sense)
and physical incapacitation are remorselessly registered, and the screen
becomes an experimental laboratory, an isolation chamber in which we fol-
low processes that are neither public nor private in any traditional sense.
( Jameson 2006: 56)

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Figure 1: Hitler in Moloch.

Photo courtesy of Iskusstvo kino archive.

In Moloch a scene takes place in the dining room, where presumably

bored by the idly demented afternoon chatters punctuating the film
Hitler dozes off for a minute. No one dares stir the Fhrers sleep. Most of
the shots in the scene are close-ups or medium shots; then, suddenly,
Sokurov offers a most disturbing and cinematic grammar-disrupting long
shot of the whole room, when Hitler, a small spot in-between the windows,
spreads out his arms with a shout of sick joy, having played a trick on the
whole company (I heard everything! Lets go on an excursion!), only
pretending that he had fallen asleep like a mischievous child. The only
element of the scene which gives some diegetic legitimacy to this final long
shot is a maid, standing at front stage, with her head bent forward:
a silent and submissive witness to all the madness displayed by the Nazi

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2. Thomas Mann spoke

of the curative virtues
of the Berghof in his
The Magic Mountain
(Der Zauberberg).
Sokurov greatly
admires Mann, whose
Doctor Faustus he is
planning to adapt as
the closing instalment
to the tetralogy.
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Figure 2: die frische Bergluft in Moloch.

Photo courtesy of Iskusstvo kino archive.

dignitaries. The mise-en-scne, therewith, comments upon the vicarious

nature of the Fhrers petty and grotesque shortcomings.
The following sequence shows the spectacular outdoor excursion, com-
plete with butterfly hunt, picnic, Bavarian gramophone, and dancing
scene. Here Sokurov alternates beautiful romantic painting-like shots of a
misty nature and anamorphous shots of the silhouettes of soldiers, with a
structurally dismantled set of perspectives, where it is impossible to say
whether we follow the gaze of Eva Braun, Hitler, Goebbels, Bormann or
one of the German snipers. The result falls a mile short of the bucolic exal-
tation of German virtues of die frische Bergluft.2
There are several other such occurrences throughout the film, in
which Sokurov freely discards the verisimilitude in favour of his own
authorial view. This explains the peculiar absence of classical shot-counter-
shots in these films. Instead, it is the vision of the author, an invisible yet
present third party of sorts, which prevails. Consequently, in scenes featur-
ing two characters, we are not in a one-to-one type of situation, calling for
a real shot-counter-shot, but rather in a triangular disposition, centred
around the film-makers gaze. Similarly, Sokurov disregards not only the
psychological verisimilitude of his films in order to build his frame, but also
the even more conspicuous unity of lighting: during one of the dinner
scenes, close-ups of Hitler violate the rules of lighting of the whole, creat-
ing almost expressionistic clairages on the face of Leonid Mozgovoi, the
actor playing Hitler. Again, Sokurov comments:

I frame my characters sitting at a table. My inner feeling is that the makeup

and the light for a close-up are not correct, although they respect the whole,

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3. Interview with the logic of the scene. I decide, however, for the sake of the shot, to modify
Sokurov on Lenfilms them. This decision must not be made in relation to the subject of the scene
DVD of Telets.
or to tradition, but out of the artistic intuition in me inspired by painting.
Such a decision is only to be made when taking the authors perspective.
(Sokurov 2006: 24)

The picnic scene in Moloch, where the perspective is literally scattered

among all the characters present creating at least a dozen, not to men-
tion the omniscient, perspectives is a model in its own right. The disori-
entated spaces are felt even more in the hazy and glaucous universe of
Taurus. Where Moloch was still clinging to some vague sense of Germanic
grandeur, working through its mountain dcor and Wagnerian music,
Taurus indulges in an impressionistic mawkish sweetness which becomes
strikingly unnerving as the story unfolds, a feeling underscored by the
use of a decadent soundtrack including a variation on an unctuous
and lugubrious theme by Rachmaninov. Against the fixity of Molochs
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near-expressionistic shots, Sokurov here substitutes very long panning

shots with slow tracking shots, which marvellously capture and render
Lenin between the grandeur of a political or ideological construct, half-
paralysed by strokes, probably suffering from syphilis, dying helplessly; this
figure is exposed to the condescending, cruel, or indifferent gaze of his
entourage. These gazes, often framed within the shadow of a door or a
window, justify the jumps of the sacrosanct 180-degree axis, of broken
perspectives and unexpected camera angles, which suggest the clumsy
work of an amateur were it not but for the perfect pictorial composition
of each frame in itself. Sokurov comments upon an important aspect of his
film, which correlates it with an idea of decrepitude, immaturity, and
incompletion. In a video interview,3 Sokurov explains why he used the
image of the Taurus as a metaphor for his dying Lenin: the young bull,
immature, unfinished, not accomplished, ignorant perhaps, yet willing to
do all on his own, and already about to die, reflects upon the qualities of
the main protagonist as much as on the space and time in which he lived
in and which he marked so deeply. The thematic and formal homology
could hardly be more obvious.
Early on in the film Lenin is shown resting, as he has his nails clipped
by a soldier at the bottom of the frame, while Nadezhda Krupskaia
arranges the bed next to his head before she begins reading to him. A
space is left behind them, showing the dark frame of a door, which in
principle (according to classical rules of depth of field and psychological
verisimilitude, at least) should have someone enter the room during the
scene. Nothing happens here; instead, the scene continues for a long time
without this space being exploited diegetically, except for an anonymous
house-dweller looking at the scene through this opening. It is this appar-
ent lack of coherence which gives a concrete nature to the unexploited
depth of the field. The useless empty space is inverted in the scene of
Stalins visit to Lenin, where we witness the height of breaking the laws of
cinematic continuity editing and the use of disturbing camera angles.
At first, Stalins arrival is almost ceremonially slow-paced and silent,
but when the two men are reunited, their child-like behaviour and ver-
bosity stand in stark contrast to the preceding ponderousness. In this

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scene Sokurov alternates several faux shot-counter-shots whose angles are 4. Rancire, echoing
distorted and which cross the habitual 180-degree axis in the process. the consensus on
Sokurov, underlines,
Sometimes these jumps seem justified by the presence of a character polar- one knows Sokurovs
izing the perspective, sometimes not. The disturbing quality of these shots claims: cinema must
is made even more sensitive by yet another contingency in the point of conquer its dignity as
art, by affirming for
view: at one point, Lenin and Stalin are talking next to a table. The first its own account what
shot is taken from upfront as a quasi worm-like view, the other taken from is the proper charac-
behind the characters and a little above shoulder level, peering down on teristic of art: the
work which replaces
them. The two men engage in a conversation whose establishing shot undergone reality
shows Stalin on the left and Lenin on the right. A series of close-ups of the by a totally decided
two men ensues, while their eyes never meet, as if they were not really reality, by a material
surface where the
talking to each other. As the frame takes more length again, Stalin appears spirit draws its own
on the right side of the frame and Lenin on the left. Following an initial figures (Rancire
sense of loss of spatial points of reference, we realize that Sokurov has 1999: 30). All of
this clearly implies
operated yet another faux shot-counter-shot a parenthesis of sorts, clos- Sokurovs notions of
ing the first part which preceded the long dialogue in close-ups. But the anamorphosis and
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second part to that shot-counter-shot occurs so long after the initial one the minimal place he
leaves to chance -
that we feel lost in this strange and disorientated space. Then follows an unless, of course, he
even more bizarre arrangement, which occurs with the wide space of the integrates it as part
terrace appearing almost bare, as Stalin and Lenin stand in peripheral of his design.
positions in the shot, literally deep in the background, while an odd dark
patch (presumably a shadow) occupies centre stage. This void space sym-
bolically underscores the emptiness and sense of waste of the films uni-
verse, but diegetically it makes little sense indeed. Furthermore, around
the middle of the scene, a third person an anonymous officer (not unlike
the German snipers spying on naked Eva Braun in Moloch) makes his
appearance near the two Soviet leaders, totally unexpected to the viewer
and with no diegetic legitimacy or use. This cinematic aporia is only justi-
fied and justifiable if we accept the arrangement of space, in which no
instance of perspective focalization dominates over another at any given
moment. It would be nave to attribute these disorientated spaces to clum-
siness or negligence on the part of the director, readjusted in the editing
process. Sokurov takes great care with his storyboards, carefully working
out what each frame will look like, constructing it, as Rancire argues, like
a painting.4 Likewise, we only have to observe the classical formal rigour
of his films (or, more exactly, of scenes) to understand that nothing is left
to chance. This is especially true in the case of Taurus, where he made use
of a new lens that made it necessary for the light and, consequently, the
framing, to be precisely calculated.
A typical case of this overdetermination and overlapping of several
points of view is the shot of Lenin in the bathtub, where it is difficult to say
whether we see the scene from a referential, third-person, objective per-
spective, or a subjective, point-of-view shot (but whose?). Following the
scene of his violent outburst, Lenin is seen in close-up and face-to-face,
talking to an old woman, presumably his mother, possibly death, or both.
This scene, obviously Lenins vision subjectivized, dissolves into a gloomy
sound and an image of dark water, both apparently contained in the bath-
tub. A cut to a larger shot reveals the bathroom and Lenins naked body as
he emerges from the bathtub. A couple of soldiers and doctors help the old
cripple to get to his feet, while it is unclear whether we are still in Lenins

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minds eye, looking at himself from a distance, following the internalized

vision of his dead mother, or whether this is an objective third-person
shot or the vision of some character. Then we notice a pair of boots in the
left lower side of the frame, before the image pans upwards, so that the
boots disappear from our view. Finally, by the end of the scene, as Lenin
has been towelled down and lifted out of the bathtub, a soldier (whose
boots we have probably seen) comes in from the direction of the camera
and enters the frame. While the whole scene might have been taken from
his perspective as character, as soon as he crosses the field of vision,
thereby unloading himself from the presumed subjective focalization of
narration, we are again left guessing and forced to put some order on
these disorientated and disorientating spaces. This leaves us with a third
hypothesis as to where the point of focalization was poised, neither of
which prevails over the other.
There are countless occurrences in Taurus when secondary characters,
coming in and out the frame, seem to become, albeit for a brief moment,
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the recipients of the instance of narration, centring focalization only to

lose it a moment later. The classical referential mode of discourse (when
the presence of the author is invisible), the presence of a third invisible
party (when the authors presence is indicated indirectly) and the subjec-
tive mode of discourse (when the mode of discourse is conveyed through
the eyes of one of the characters) are confusingly intertwined during the
entire picnic scene, where Lenin and Krupskaia are driven through the
woods to a meadow. With alternating subjective perspectives (presumably
Lenins, then Krupskaias as she watches the skies) and referential ones
(shots of the driver and the bodyguard, long shots of the meadow), the
scene has both characters looking at each other at one point. The alterna-
tion of close-ups that follows is far from a traditional shot-counter-shot, as
Sokurov explains:

Take the scene in which Lenin and his wife look at each other during the pic-
nic in the meadow. I can of course make a classical shot-counter-shot, but
that does not interest me because it is not possible. It is not Lenin whos look-
ing; he is not there at that moment.
(Sokurov 2006: 24)

Obviously, Sokurov and his camera are there at that particular moment,
creating this triangular template for a situation that, traditionally, would
require only one axis.
If less bleak in content than the two films analysed above, Sokurovs
The Sun (Solntse, 2005) presents similar formal features pertaining to point
of view, perspectives and spatial organization. Flocks of secondary characters,
mostly the Japanese emperors staff of servants, polarize momentarily the
perspective, sometimes to a welcome comical effect. This juggling of spaces
that are disorientated through the articulation of points of view is best
illustrated by the second and decisive encounter between Hirohito and
General MacArthur. The latter has just dismissed an interpreter who
refuses to translate the generals questions as he considers them to
infringe on Japanese imperial etiquette. All the same, the interpreter will
spy on the meeting at one point at a door, conveniently slightly ajar. After

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Figure 3: Lenin and Krupskaia in Taurus.

Photo courtesy of Iskusstvo kino archive.

it becomes apparent that the emperor speaks English quite well and that
the two men can have a conversation without the intercession of a third
party, MacArthur leaves Hirohito alone in the large room where the meet-
ing takes place. Although we have become aware of the dimensions of
the room thanks to camera movements and tracking shots which do not
trick our understanding of spatial reference points, Sokurovs disorien-
tated spaces come in play yet again. As Hirohito awaits the generals
return, we are, just as the emperor is, convinced that he is alone in the
room. Hirohito allows himself a little dance under the bemused eye of
MacArthur, who observes him through the half-open door (the same one
through which the interpreter had earlier made his exit). We would locate
this door behind Hirohito, as the latter is shown from the front to the cam-
era, facing what is a space which we do not suspect to contain MacArthur,
as the two men would then, logically, face each other, and this would

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Figure 4: Hirohito at the dinner table, as MacArthur has left the room (The Sun).
Photo courtesy of Artificial Eye.

contradict the slightly undignified, or at least casual, behaviour of the

emperor. So, unlike the emperor, we know that he is being observed, but
we cannot be entirely sure about the direction from which MacArthurs
gaze originates. The result is twofold. On the one hand, as viewers inside
the theatre we cannot know whether we identify with MacArthur or not
(rather not); on the other hand, we are obviously sharing in his scopic
impulse and voyeuristic act of watching the emperor in the very intimacy of
his behaviour when he thinks he is alone. Then Hirohito returns to his original
position in an armchair (if we assume the position of the camera from the
earlier shot, he is then logically with his back to us in other words facing the
door from which we assumed that MacArthur was spying upon him). As
MacArthur emerges from behind the back of his guest, our perception of an
apparently referential, logical, oriented space is shattered once more. This
peeping Tom exercise, which certainly featured prominently in Moloch and
Taurus as well, sends us back to the classics of early cinema of a pre-
Griffithian, pre-decoupage medium where all the rules had yet to be invented
in order to be broken. History thus recoups the private history of a medium
that belongs to the same century as the leaders depicted in the tetralogy.
What, then, is Sokurovs message? While this question obviously calls
for a multi-layered answer full of paradoxes and contradictions, not unlike
Sokurov himself, history as such is never a matter of one perspective. What
can we deduce from the absence of clearly delineated narrative authority,
from the permanent side jumps, from the loss of reference points, except the
fact that they at least evoke the properly deranged, demented, or infan-
tilized state of their title figures and, therefore, of the represented historical
universes? Sokurov has discussed the issue of his sick characters contami-
nating a whole nation and leading it, like the Pied Piper from Hamelin,
to its doom, to war, and to extremism. Yet the nature of the mise-en-scne
raises the question whether it is the diegetic world that is contaminated
by its central issue (a centripetal approach) or vice versa: the character

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5. This is the case from

his first documentary,
Maria (1975), which
Jameson considers the
thematic matrix for
Sokurovs oeuvre and
which finds resonance
in Days of the Eclipse
(Dni zatmeniia, 1987).
For a discussion of
death in Sokurov, see
Iampolskii (1994).
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Figure 5: Hirohito and MacArthur in The Sun.

Photo courtesy of Artificial Eye.

contaminated by the world in which he evolves (a centrifugal phenome-

non). But such questions of contamination lead into philosophical contem-
plation, where space should be addressed as much as time. It seems evident,
diegetically and structurally speaking, that Sokurov tends toward an
overdetermined historical discourse, minimizing the real impact of the indi-
vidual in the course of history while exemplifying the perversely iconic
value of these fallen idols. The mechanism which first organized, articu-
lated, and created power and the cult of the individual by focusing attention
and means on one narrative authority and one narrative, is inverted here
in order to exemplify the absence of genuine power of these more or less
inept and mediocre beings. Death, an important trope in Sokurov,5 catches
up with these living gods, who got lost in their own private chaos and their
lurid, hallucinated worlds, in which perspective no longer has any weight,

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or at least less weight than that of a secondary character, insignificant and

never mentioned in school manuals, an anonymous bystander looking
upon the rapid highway of history. These disorientated spaces in Sokurov
thus cancel hierarchies, placing the long shot at the same level as the close-
up, and the potentate at the same level as the soubrette.
When asked about precisely this issue, Sokurov admits that he mulled
over the question of perspective and point of view for a long time in his
historic films:

I realize that I am constructing everything with my own gaze. Sometimes, I

move toward a compromise, and to prevent the creation of a world that would
be totally absurd or closed, I play tricks; I assume the perspective of a character.
And each time that I do so, I realize that this is only a detour, a roundabout
connection with my own perspective as an author, with my point of view. In
the beginning, I could not provide a precise answer for this question of point of
view. And then I told myself that my proximity to the characters allows me to
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take their perspective. I am sitting next to them, they vanish, our gazes merge.
My internal point of view cannot not be true. So it is toward this that I move.
And besides, as a director, I allow myself to construct my frame, as a
function not only of the relationships among the characters but first and
foremost of the artistic imperative. If I construct my frame simply as a func-
tion of a certain realism of the action, as a matter of verisimilitude, I can tell
that my art suffers from it.
(Sokurov 2006: 24)

There is thus but one single gaze in Sokurovs films, cleverly disguised and
dispersed throughout, but the truth that it speaks through its dispersion
and through the disorientated nature of its organization is manifold.
The relativism of the notion of the historical leader and his power, and of
the notion of power itself, rendered concrete by the mise-en-scne, underscores
the fact that power and leadership are not the central themes of the tetralogy
(in spite of its title), since they are merely a construct and not a genuine force.
It is evident, both in form and theme that nothing is less impressive, less
impotent than this sickly uxorious Hitler in his underwear, grunting like a
pig as he chases his mistress. In the same way, nothing could be more base,
less spiritual. This is perfectly logical, to the extent that, for Sokurov, the cen-
tral theme of the tetralogy is the price at which man will choose to sell, or, on
the contrary, not sell his soul. So in fact the three films move far away and
deviate from the apparently central theme of power. Where Hitler and Lenin,
one mad and the other paralysed, drift towards their doom, Hirohito, more
gentleman-like no doubt, ultimately opts for the second choice, that of not
selling his soul, but saving thousands of souls by relinquishing his divine
imperial status and abdicating to the American vanquisher however
grotesque and preposterous the very act of renouncing ones divinity might
be (Jameson 2006: 11). It is not the emperor who will have to pay the high
price in the final account, as the last sentence of the film emphasizes: from the
mouth of one of the servants we learn that the man who pronounced the
capitulation speech on the national radio committed ritual suicide. After
learning the sobering, yet hardly surprising news, Hirohito and his wife run
out of the room like two children, to be reunited with their beloved son, as a

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Figure 6: Hirohito and an American soldier outside the palace in The Sun.
Photo courtesy of Artificial Eye.

new sun rises over a ravaged Tokyo. Again, the dramatic, diegetic and formal
stakes are intertwined, this time as a result of skilful decoupage (here once
again clumsy in appearance), offering an entre-deux, between continuity edit-
ing mistake and doubling of the magical moment (when the imperial couple
run through the door leading to their happiness and salvation). This magi-
cal moment is both another nod to practices of early cinema (e.g. Edwin
Porters editing, where actions are shown without cross-cutting from two
different perspectives) and an opening of the medium on a new century of
cinema. The end justifies and expands the films reach, as Sokurov says:
The most important thing to me, and the reason why I do each one of my
films, is the denouement. And I build my films like an inverted pyramid.

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Because the end must be open, wide, full of meanings. The beginning is
narrow and the ending full of meanings, of openings.
(Sokurov 2006: 18)

This opening confers all their value and legitimacy onto these historical
films, as they have us behold less memorable facts as the soul of a certain
history. After all, these films do not aim to reproduce a historic reality in
the strict sense, but to project us into Sokurovs other life.
The notion of opening also puts in question the alienating nature
of Sokurovs disorientating spaces, and the inescapability of times and
deaths grip over the figures depicted therein. To be sure, this might
be pledging a bit too much allegiance to Sokurovs logocentrism as a
theoretician of his own art. Sokurov (and Arabov, who reportedly went
through volumes of archives of Hitlers mad ranting, while having to rein-
vent all of Hirohitos private life, of which virtually no source remains if
it ever existed) works simultaneously with our foreknowledge while taking
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this hindsight against the grain. If his Hitler is reminiscent as much of

Mikhail Chiaurelis grotesque Fhrer seen in Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina,
1949) as of the real Hitler we have been given to behold on newsreel
footage and, indeed, in Sokurovs Sonata for Hitler (Sonata dlia Gitlera,
1999) he is by no means reduced to this mask. Yet, as Jameson observes,
the films about the dictators do not unmask them in the psychoanalytical
sense. The little we know about them we probably knew already. It is not
factual data we bring back home, but rather the experience of peeping (yet
hardly more than that) beyond the image, catching a glimpse of a well of
an unfathomable maze. We glimpse the dark ocean of history which both
swallows and spits back these figures like a wrecked ship on its shores,
where we dwell before being swallowed ourselves, miserable grand figures
or magnificently unnoticed. The feeling of the maze is reinforced by the
sense of enclosure and loss of points of reference. But the maze is also
temporal: in all three films it is almost impossible to determine whether we
follow the action over the course of a couple of days or hours, several
weeks or months. Ellipses are never clear, just as are the characters dark
psyches. And yet, unity is achieved and we accept this new genuinely
new historical time. In this sense, the films play both with Foucauldian
heterotopia and plain Ungleichzeitigkeit (i.e. the idea that history is always
a smoothing out of its very a-synchronicities). The switches in point of
view in the films efficiently dramatize and instantiate these frictions,
decalages and lapses in both historical and psychic niveaux.
It appears, then, that Sokurov could not have used another form and
spatial poetics than the one he deploys in these films. As Vivian Sobchak
stresses in the introduction to her collection of essays, Hayden White has
taught us that

the traumatic events unique to the twentieth century (events of such

magnitude that they can neither be completely forgotten nor adequately
remembered) can only find their appropriately tenuous representation in the
de-realization effected by the modern media and modern forms such as
collage and fragmentation.
(Sobchak 1996: 8; see also White 1996: 27)

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Modernist modes of expression, with their psychopathologies appear 6. It may be not so

more germane to express the psychopathologies of troubled times and much an issue of
melodramatic
human beings/characters. Sokurov seems to deliberately avoid the direct representation as of
representation (or even evocation) of the major aforementioned traumas. misrepresentation,
But this might be the most efficient way of addressing them: in absentia. offering a presence
where there can only
In the film, Hitler seems even to ignore the existence of the concentration be absence (Elsaesser
camps, while it is doubtful that a spectator of his films would. In that 1996: 147).
regard, Sokurovs filming comes close to Thomas Elsaessers argument 7. Jameson asks the
question in terms of
that the most appropriate mode to approach the work of mourning of the survival of an almost
Holocaust in art is through melodrama6 (summarized by Sobchak 1996: extinct tradition of
9), a move away from realism not alien to Sokurovs, but whose morbid cinematic modernism:
and elegiac style addresses a different (and perhaps unique) representa- Is Sokurov [...] the
last modernist, the
tional possibility. By endeavouring to depict the souls of men instrumental last great modernist
to the historic, grand-scale traumas, Sokurov resorts to similar means, auteur? If so, he is
which has prompted Jameson to compare Sokurov to the late modernists generationally very
of literature a more complex version of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo belated indeed
( Jameson 2006: 10).
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Antonioni or Luc Besson. As Elsaesser underlines, it is part of the post- Jameson points out
modern hubris to want to restore the past, to rescue the real, even rescue two fundamental
that which never was real (Elsaesser 1996: 166). However, Sokurovs aspects of Sokurovs
films do not as much rescue events as they embalm them into shrouds of films in this context:
his untimeliness, and
thickly enmeshed layers of facts and phantasmagoria, in spaces just as also what Sokurov
referential and jumbled. has in common with
The (unfinished hitherto) tetralogy may be summarized as a depiction all these artists and
of the human soul, which is both very personal and rather persuasive. what would seem to
account for our
Men who are both historical figures and fictional constructs, admired and lingering impression
loathed, decaying in old age and falling back into a strange new child- of a modernist
hood, while still deciding the fates of millions of individuals. It is this para- survival his
dox that is expressed in the unsolvable tensions, in the dialectic of abstruse commitment to the
idea of great art
form, extremes of focalization and the madness in the narratives at the and its autonomy
heart of this tetralogy of dictators. This aporia has a direct relationship ( Jameson 2006: 10).
with the disquieting hubris of the protagonists who, in spite of their
proclamations on their divine status or their immortality, cannot defeat
death. Their increasing awareness of their own madness, or at least of
their limits, requires a treatment which is homologous in formal terms. It
is Sokurovs artistic triumph to have created worlds of closure (by their
apparently incoherent, disorientated spaces) that are simultaneously worlds
of absolute openness (in their final organic nature and their curiously ger-
mane harmony with the narrative). This provides us with the possibility of
an analytic reading, while also offering a liminal cinematic experience.
Consequently, watching the films again and again, we would con-
stantly discover new elements, new ventures, new reflections,7 because
these films offer as many viewings and visions as they have points of views
(points of entry, so to speak). This might be Sokurovs most important
message: that history is a matter of perspective, converging towards
and then moving abruptly away from these central figures, forcibly mon-
strous and forcibly human. The perspective is of the film-maker, the
secondary characters, but also of the viewer, challenged with every new
viewing and poised between contemplation and critical inquiry of these
disorientated spaces, whose main force is to arrest ones attention,
especially when one has grown so accustomed to transparent historical

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narratives. But history, distorted by various interpretations and ideologies,

never ceases to appear as an opaque epistemological object with a geome-
try that is more or less moving and variable, giving rise to new and
repeated visions: a practice that Sokurovs cinema inevitably calls for,
offering besides a sign of its depth and riches a singular experience
renewed with every viewing.

Notes
The author would like to express his gratitude to Fredric Jameson, Katerina Clark,
Thomas Elsaesser, Kate Holland, Patrick Hanrahan, and Aleksandr Sokurov, as
well as the two anonymous readers and the editor of SRSC for their help.

Works cited
Elsaesser, Thomas (1996), Subject positions, speaking positions: from Holocaust,
Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindlers List, in Vivian Sobchak (ed.),
The Persistence of History, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 14586.
Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:36 21 June 2015

Galetski, Kirill (2001), Sokurov takes intimate look at Lenins last days, St
Petersburg Times, 2 March. http://www.sptimesrussia.com/index.php? action_id=
2&story_id=14590.
Accessed 6 January 2006.
Iampolskii, Mikhail (1994), Smert' v kino, in L. Arkus (ed.), Sokurov, St Petersburg:
Seans, pp. 27378.
Jameson, Fredric (2006), History and elegy in Sokurov, Critical Inquiry, 33: 1,
pp. 112.
Kujundzic, Dragan (2004), After After: The Arkive Fever of Alexander Sokurov,
Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21: 3, pp. 21939.
Rancire, Jacques (1999), Le cinma comme la peinture?, Cahiers du Cinma, 531,
pp. 3032.
Sobchak, Vivian (1996), History happens?, in Vivian Sobchak (ed.), The
Persistence of History, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 114.
Sokurov, Aleksandr (2006), Interview with Aleksandr Sokurov, conducted by
Jeremi Szaniawski, Critical Inquiry 33: 1, pp. 1327.
White, Hayden (1996), The modernist event, in Vivian Sobchak (ed.), The
Persistence of History, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 1738.

Suggested citation
Szaniawski, J. (2007), Historic space in Sokurovs Moloch, Taurus and The Sun, Studies
in Russian and Soviet Cinema 1: 2, pp. 147162, doi: 10.1386/srsc.1.2.147/1

Contributor details
Jeremi Szaniawski is a graduate student at Yale University in the joint Ph.D.
programme of Film and Slavic Studies. He is the co-founder of the Cinema at the
Whitney, Yales 35 mm film society; he also curates the Yale Slavic Film
Colloquium. His fields of interest include contemporary art-house cinema, Polish
and Russian cinema, popular culture and music, but also modernist French
literature, specifically the circle of Georges Bataille and the journal Documents.
Publications include an interview with Aleksandr Sokurov in Critical Inquiry
(Autumn 2006). Contact: Slavic Languages & Literatures, Yale University, PO Box
208236, New Haven, CT 06520-8236.
E-mail: jeremi.szaniawski@yale.edu

162 Jeremi Szaniawski