The Russian nature of Tonino Guerra
The artist receives the award dedicated to the poet and reflects on the relationship between Europe and his country also through the film 'The Director's Notebook
Key points
As you read, and until tomorrow, Alexandr Sokurov is travelling through the hills of Romagna to receive the award named after Tonino Guerra. To the bard from Santarcangelo - a friend of another great Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, - Sokurov is linked not only by cinema and a nostalgic poetics of the image, but also by an idea of Nature that is both radical and sweet. The beginning of Russian Ark - the long sequence shot in which 300 years of history run through the corridors of the Hermitage - is set in a garden with bluish, opalescent snow, of a spiritual rather than earthly beauty. Marguerite's perdition in Faust is a backflip into a pool of water. To dominate Nature or to be dominated by one's own nature is the game of this mossy film, which smells of yeast and wet dust even in the interiors.
The Boundless Nature and European Interior
In his films, Sokurov seems to contain in calibrated geometries the boundlessness of the land from which he comes, central Siberia, closer to Mongolia than to Moscow. And the interiors, to which he has been educated by the severity of the climate, are reinvented on the big screen on the imprint of the mysticism of the landscapes and, almost always, in the European key of the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In Francofonia, he had shown the old continent as a ship in distress, set sail with its masterpieces through the ocean's storms with the naive confidence of one who is deluded by the beauty produced over the centuries. Inside the Louvre takes up the details of the great works with almost piteous delay:The Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David, The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, the mocking smile of the Gioconda by Leonardo Da Vinci.
Italy is home and training school
Italy for Sokurov is a training school, it is home. On 21 November at the Turin Film Festival, he will receive the lifetime achievement award. 'Tintoretto was the world's first director,' he explains to 'Sole 24 Ore', as his hands linger on a desk cluttered with pencilled notes. 'I write all the time, every day'. In the new film he recently presented Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival,The Director's Notebook, in cinemas from March for Revolver, Dante and Tintoretto appear several times in illustrations and paintings. "Where could we go without them?". On the carpet of Sokurov's voiceover, as he reads his own reflections, literature and cinema merge into a single stream, transcending the genres of documentary. A review of events of the 20th century that brings together chronicle, Soviet and international politics, air disasters, nuclear disasters, cinema, Nobel prizes, the edition of Doctor Živago by Boris Pasternak published in Italy by Feltrinelli.
The first time as a 'protagonist'
"This is the first time I am on the other side of the camera. I don't tell about other people', as in the case of Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, protagonists of the Trilogy of Evil. "I am at the centre of the flow because I witness the events I narrate. I personally expose myself by showing characters and songs that I like, historical events that I didn't understand and those I was indignant about'. A kind of Dantean Virgil. "Let's not exaggerate. I am a modest traveller, who sometimes ends up where he shouldn't. Virgil knew very well where Dante was leading, but he clothed the journey in mystery. He was very clever. Everyone loves and remembers him, but he is a mere ferryman. I, on the other hand, do not know what happens to me because the event happens in front of me and I cannot anticipate it'.
The Western Front Russia
Today the only possible front seems to be the one pitting the 'West' against Russia. "In Europe you have always resolved political conflicts with wars. All the wars of the West were born in the heart of Europe and then spread to Russia. Let us not forget that even England in the early days looked on Hitler with sympathy. And Churchill had wanted to meet Hitler when he had already published Mein Kampf. Being an enlightened and educated man, Churchill could not have failed to realise who was in front of him. No doubt he was playing his role as a politician. The first time politicians were truly punished for their crimes was the Nuremberg trials. The Americans for the Iraq war were untouched by the courts, but we all realised that they destroyed the world of Islam, the Islamic East, which was already on the brink. The war between Europe and Russia can still be avoided, it is not a hopeless situation'.
