Temporary Floods, Eternal Returns: Opera, Technology, and History in Two Films of Alexander Sokurov

Strive to project the timbre of documentary records. But, as opposed to the familiar sound of his voice in historical phonograms, we should not forget that he will be speaking softly, discreetly, as if cautiously, all but delicately in most of [our film's] scenes. In these situations his voice becomes pleasant, "velvety," almost beautiful. Sometimes he enunciates so softly that his voice sounds more like a whisper; but it is not a whisper, it projects that special, masterly softness that prompts his interlocutor to hear and comprehend his every word.

His voice is always balanced, revealing a good oratory skill.

The actor ought to remember that his hero is a man who has to constantly observe himself, who needs to control himself all the time. Along with that, he is a deeply unhappy man, perhaps not even realizing this, and it is precisely his voice, the gradations of its timbre, that betrays his inner timidity. A certain amount of brittleness, fragility can be discerned in that timbre, the sort of brittleness the changing voice of a teenager possesses. He laughs strangely, almost unnaturally, but he does so with pleasure, losing control over himself in these moments.¹

The description above comes from the Russian auteur director Alexander Sokurov, one of the few post-Soviet cinematographers to have come to international attention in the last decade. The director's vigilant attention to voice, clear from this explication of a whole spectrum of vocal inflections produced by one notorious historical personage at the center of a feature film, is rather unusual for a latter-day filmmaker. It is also more than a one-film fling. Voices—whispering, speaking, humming and singing, vocal and instrumental—dominate the cinematic texture in his films, marking out a whole new brand of film aesthetics. The slightest shifts in timbre and intonation provide as sure a ground for Sokurov's cinematography as subtle changes of visual angles and tints. "The image consists of three components: the movements of camera, actors, and intonation," the director explained in an early interview. He pointed to the special role of music in his films: "The movement of intonation is realized during postproduction," but "it is important that music does not surrender to the picture, but goes above and beyond it. If sound illustrates, it becomes equal to image, which is vulgar. The musical dramaturgy should not depend on the visual, but be superior. What the film may not have achieved visually, it should obtain from music."²

It seems almost inevitable to find strong ties to opera in the films of the director who thought it necessary to title his first (1978) film A Solitary Voice of Man, and whose latest feature, Alexandra (2007), stars the opera diva Galina Vishnevskaya. It comes as no surprise that between these two landmarks sits a documentary about Fyodor Chaliapin and a feature film entitled Ampir [Empire] filled with the sounds of Verdi's Traviata. Sokurov's recent staging of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater may even be seen as his belated directorial debut at the opera house.³ (See Robert Bird's discussion of this production in the Reviews section of this issue.) Operatic mise-en-scènes and vocal inflections, however, interest this filmmaker, who is also a historian, only insofar as they relate to the voices of history. Refusing to choose between documentaries and feature films—he has directed twenty-eight documentaries and sixteen features—Sokurov seeks to recapture the past through both its renewed iteration and a creative reconstruction of its faint images and sounds. Fact and fiction—the steely "timbre of documentary records" and the imagined brittleness of "inner timidity"—join freely, for instance, in the voice that Sokurov detailed so scrupulously in this article's opening quote: that of Adolf Hitler.

Historical actors such as Hitler, Lenin, or the Japanese emperor Hirohito play major roles in Sokurov's conceptions. Suspicious of official historiographies, the director offers his own vision of history, probing the sources and limitations of power through cinematic exploration of his heroes...