The first Elegy by Alexander Sokurov appeared in 1984. The legendary fame of the great Russian singer Fiodor Shaliapin, the fame that was still alive in his homeland, resisted to the official tendency of reproaching him for emigrating from Russia. When Sokurov, whose first films seemed to be buried forever in the closed film archives and whose every new work was stopped in the very beginning, made his Elegy — without financing, supported only by the enthusiasm of his team, — the Leningrad Documentary Films Productions tried to legalize the film, but with no success. The answer of the highest cinema officials was: “Shaliapin is not forgiven.” It was the time when Shaliapin had not yet got the “imperial” pardon.
The film is centred on the reburial of Shaliapin from les Batignolles cemetery in Paris to Novo–Devitchye cemetery in Moscow. The daughters from Shaliapin’s second marriage came to this ceremony to Moscow and then to Leningrad. It was quite an official event timed to the jubilee of Soviet–French diplomatic relations.
Sokurov used Shaliapin’s destiny, Shaliapin’s name, Shaliapin’s Elegy as facts of Russian life and culture, as a point of reference on his scale of values. In the film the family, the children, the home are important parts of History. All these touching photos, reminiscences, details do not appear to be just details of a private life, but important links in a historical and cultural epos. The archive images are submitted not to an exact chronology of facts, but to a logic of interior individual experience. The archive footage of the post–revolutionary Petrograd, documentary plans filmed in the beginning of 1920th in a hungry Russia and in a western music–hall find their place in the story of Shaliapin not as illustrations of objective historical and biographical narration, but as expressive outbursts of somebody’s anxious, acute and suffering memory. —Sokurov.spb.ru
Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Соку́ров) (b. June 14, 1951, Podorwikha, Irkutsk Oblast) is a Russian filmmaker from St Petersburg who has been hailed as successor to renowned director Andrei Tarkovsky.
Sokurov was born in Siberia in the officer’s family on June 14, 1951. He graduated from the History Department of the Nizhny Novgorod University in 1974 and entered one of the VGIK studios the following year. There he made friends with Tarkovsky and was deeply influenced by his Mirror.
Most of Sokurov’s early features were banned by Soviet authorities. During his early period, he produced numerous documentaries, including an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a reportage about Grigori Kozintsev’s flat in St Petersburg.
Mother and Son (1996) was his first internationally acclaimed feature film. It was mirrored by Father and Son (2003) which baffled the critics with its implicit homoeroticism (though Sokurov himself has criticized… read more