Newshufa’s Weblog

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The festival finishes tomorrow and it was my good intention to write little notes on all the films I’ve seen – so these scant, hastily assembled notes will have to do.

Good Friday seemed like a good day to be watching two films by Sokurov, starting with Alexandra , starring Galina Vishnevskaya, set in Chechnya; a soldier’s grandmother comes to visit the encampment where his unit is stationed (you need to set aside the implausibility of this) and we feel the heat, the dirt and dust of military life, the boring everyday of war (‘You’ve been fighting for so long, you’re used to it’). She climbs inside a tank, handles a Kalashnikov, wryly noting how easy it is to use and then when she’s tired of wandering around the camp, she decides to walk to a nearby market, striking up conversation with another woman, who takes her to see the bombed out house where she lives; this is a war movie without war, a commentary on language and culture and on the closeness of Russia and Chechnya, taking no clear position on the conflict (except perhaps for a civilian one: ‘I’m sick of this military pride. You know how to destroy. When will you learn to rebuild?’

There’s a very good discussion of the movie by Nancy Condee on the Kinocultura site

After Vishnevskaya’s masterful performance in Alexandra I had high hopes for Elegy of Life, Sokurov’s documentary about Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, and although there’s fascinating discussion of music (Rostropovich’s comments on Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Bach), a 50th wedding anniversary dinner in Vienna, with a bizarre mix of European royalty, Boris Yeltsin & his wife (Rostropovich is buried beside Yelstin in the Novodevichy cemetery), a somewhat patronising portrait of Vishnevskaya, this is not a great documentary. But it was finished just a few months after Rostropovich died, and he would have been dying while the film was made, a fact which is not acknowledged in the film, so this is truly an elegy of life. [Around the same time the film was released, Alisher Usmanov, the oligarch who had earlier paid £75m for a stake in Arsenal Football Club, bought the Rostropovich/Vishnevskaya art collection, which Sotheby's had listed for auction in London last autumn, and part of which we see in the documentary. It will end up in the Konstantin Palace in St Petersburg]