The Degraded
Razzhalovannyy
Soviet Union
1980
31 Min
Color
Russian
Synopsis
This was the young filmmaker’s debut at the oldest Russian cinema studio Lenfilm. This short film was based on a short story by the modern Soviet writer Grigory Baklanov who, though, removed his name from the titles, stating that his “motivation for writing this short story had been totally different”. From Baklanov’s prose the director borrowed only one theme which would always attract him subsequently — the theme of “transition period”, in this case, the transition from the helm of State to the prostration of submission. A traffic inspector was demoted to a taxi driver — that meant the authority was accidentally falling out of step. That was a first sign of the upcoming crash of the whole system. However, not even this theme itself was surprising in those old pre-Perestroika years, but the author’s concentration on the inner world of a man for whom the lost of power seemed catastrophic injustice.
Sokurov shows with compassion what has been gained — the pain and the reflexion of an alive (as if just awaken) creature is revealed in a representative, however insignificant, of those authorities who ordered to annihilate Sokurov’s first films, who banned them and created obstacles for the artist in his further activities. The young filmmaker manages to recoup himself by means of art: he places his “degraded” into a cinema auditorium where Sokurov’s first, long-suffering, never existing for the authorities and yet, despite all the obstacles, rescued film — The Lonely Voice of Man — is shown.
The main role was performed by the non-professional actor Ilya Rivin, who subsequently played in three more films by Sokurov: Painful Indifference, Empire and Days of Eclipse. —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
Wall
Displaying 0 wall posts.
Related Films
Lists
Displaying 1 of 1 lists.
Reviews
No reviews yet — Write the first
Forum
Displaying
0 discussion topics.