Moscow Elegy
Moskovskaya elegiya
Soviet Union
1987
88 Min
Black and White
Russian
Synopsis
Moscow Elegy is a part of Elegy series, created by our team at the Leningrad State Documentary Productions, LSDF. The films in this series have an “elegiac mood” in common — Moscow Elegy was originally intended to mark the 50th anniversary of Tarkovsky. But disagreements within the Soviet Professional Union of Cinematographers about the style and content of the film forced us to suspend production for a long time.
The film is a subjective perception of the personality of the great film–maker and his destiny in the context of History. Let me add that our task was to create a special human approach towards the memory and the personality of Tarkovsky. We attempted to treat the footage in a tender and caring way, with kindness. We were not trying to embrace all aspects of Tarkovsky’s life and work. We are speaking only about what he has left in his Motherland, and what was going on during those years in the West, where he had had to work.
Who knows what Home is? The “My dear Russia” that Shalyapin is longing for in his letters, or the “bottles, jars, rags, all this precious, essential garbage” that Tonino Guerra is here speaking to Andrei Tarkovsky about — in the second Sokurov Elegy, following the first, on Shalyapin? While making his film on Shalyapin in 1984, Sokurov thought and spoke about Tarkovsky, who had just left Russia, and suffered over this rupture.
A Russian artist, no matter where his fate takes him, will always remain a part of his country. He remains a part of his homeland, no matter what takes place there. Thus Moscow Elegy is the next natural step in a cycle of films about the destinies of artists. Historical changes are treated by Sokurov as the tragic locations on the journeys of personal destinies. —Sokurov.spb.ru
Director
Aleksandr Sokurov
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
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