Silent spring
The PFA gets inside Sokurov's impenetrable, poetic oeuvre.

By Dennis Harvey

THERE SEEMS TO be no limit to the things unknowable about Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov. Anointed heir to the cinematic lotus position once held by Tarkovsky, he's baffled many and transfixed a loyal few during a career that still somehow seems incidental – as though it were a mere accident that anyone, save himself, ever got to see the actual films.

The difficulty in accessing those films remains, even if Sokurov no longer has a Soviet government to blame for banning, censuring, and delaying his works. These days he gets multinational funding for movies like Moloch (a film about Hitler that's more abstract than even Hans-Jurgen Syberberg dared to get) and Taurus (two days in the life of an ebbing Lenin), pixilated historical tableaux so internalized that they defy the sensationalism of their subjects. They also defy U.S. distribution – if you thought 1997's slightly more accessible dirge Mother and Son (which actually did play a few art-house dates, most notably a whole week at our Castro Theatre) would prove to be Sokurov's breakthrough, you were mistaken. Not least among the epic-ascetic-avant-gardist's many mysteries is just how he manages to attract production dough for such defiantly uncommercial movies. (Furthermore, how did someone so officially disliked by powerful USSR kulturniks rack up a substantial early filmography in the first place?)

Presumably the cult of Sokurov – those who admit membership, like myself, know it is a kind of quasi-religious thing – includes some actual moneyed folks, though his hobnobbing with such is hard to imagine. This is a filmmaker one cannot fathom holding court at festivals (still his major outlet) or even collaborating with the standard army of crew and cast on a shoot. Still, he risks going large yet with Russian Ark, a Cannes Film Festival premiere that – despite the experimental extremes of its single-take shot through the Russian State Hermitage Museum at feature length – is apparently so full of "dazzling opulence" that it "will win this difficult director festival kudos and much larger audiences." So said Variety just last week. Damn you, Variety.

The Sokurov of yore – private, near-impenetrable, intoxicating – gets an ultrarare local airing in the Pacific Film Archives' current "Elegies: The Visionary Videoworks" series. This orgy of videographic obscurity exposes works from 20 minutes to five hours long. Toward the latter extreme is 1995's Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of War, which spies Russian soldiers stationed at the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Its tranquillity and strangeness is ephemeral enough to have accommodated a prior local gig as a simultaneous five-reel, multimonitor art event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There are also docu-reveries about political figures (Boris Yeltsin in Soviet Elegy, Lithuanian president Vytautas Landsbergis in Simple Elegy), cinematic forebears (Tarkovsky in Moscow Elegy), classical musicians (singer Fyodor Chaliapin in Elegy, composer Dimitry Shostakovich in The Viola Sonata), literary footnotes (Japanese writer Toshio Shiman's widow in Dolce), and sea-dogging abandonati (to the Arctic in six-hour Confession: From the Captain's Diary).

Sokurov's purest explorations of id are right here, in featurettes so indescribably ethereal and deep they seem to funnel straight into your fragile inner ear. Oriental Elegy from 1996 finds an invisible voice-over personage floating through the images proffered by a Japanese isle populated only by cranes, beetles, and wizened humans whose insights (to questions like "What can one ask of God?," "What is happiness?") are crushingly direct. Last year's Elegy of a Voyage is a pastiche that goes even further into intimate/universal terror and poetry. The narrator (Sokurov himself, though he wouldn't want you to know) drifts from one nameless place to another, snowflakes providing opaque intermediacy throughout. Russian Orthodox monks at a rural church, sideswiping cars on the German autobahn, and confessional truck stop passerby all seem as equal in their reality as the paintings in a shuttered Rotterdam museum.

The Tower of Babel painting by Brueghel at the latter triggers Sokurov's most struck-still reaction. "What is it – a philosophy, or a play, or life itself? A dream of life in a cage?" His oeuvre tickles the eternity-questioning impulse. These subterranean movies have no idea where they are or what their "meaning" is. That those questions should linger so is Sokurov's gift.

'Elegies: The Visionary Videoworks of Aleksandr Sokurov' screens through June 30. And Nothing More (Wed/5, 7:30 p.m.), Oriental Elegy and Dolce (Sat/8, 7:30 p.m.), Dimitri Shostakovich: The Viola Sonata (Sun/9, 5:30 p.m.), Moscow Elegy (Wed/12, 7:30 p.m.), Elegy and Elegy of a Voyage (Wed/19, 7:30 p.m.), Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of War (Parts 1, 2, and 3) (Sat/22, 7 p.m.), Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of War (Parts 4 and 5) (Sun/23, 7 p.m.), Maria (Peasant Elegy) and Soviet Elegy (Wed/26, 7:30), Confession: From the Captain's Diary (Sat/29 and Sun/30, 4 p.m.), New PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berk. $4.50-$7. (510) 642-1412, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/pfa.