In this film about war, there is no war
FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER SOKUROV
For me this story is not about the actual but about the eternal. Not about present-day Russia, its policies in the Caucasus, its army, but about the eternal life of Russia. War is always a terrible thing. In this film about war there is no war. Military operations have been taken out of the perimeters of the picture. I don’t like feature films about war. It was enough for me to be there just once and see it myself, for all these spectacular attacks, picturesque explosions, bodies falling in slomo, to become linked with concepts of “vulgar” and “fake”. There is no poetry in war, no beauty, and it should never be filmed poetically: it is a horror that cannot be expressed, human degradation that cannot be expressed. And in order to understand this it is enough to be present in these circumstances just once. “Alexandra” was the working title, but both producers, Russian and French, asked to leave the title as it was. There is a universal root to the name Alexandra. The name leads in a simple path directly to the character.
What we call contemporary is very relative. The time that we filmed is already the past in relation to today. We tried to formulate the clashes that were, are and will be. A sort of “present tense continued”. I am the son of a military man, I have lived in military barracks and for me there is no modernity there, and nothing exotic. Our film might seem modern to someone with a heightened sense of social feeling, but in “Aleksandra” there is no zeitgeist. There is not a single word there that couldn’t have been spoken forty years ago. And I am not sure that in the coming forty years anything will have changed. In this film we are talking about constants, and not only about Russian constants. The heroine could be an American woman who has come to see her grandson in Iraq, or an English woman who has gone to see her grandson in Afghanistan. I know about the terrible price the Chechen Republic paid for peace. I know about numerous crimes and I know that war hardens people. But the war is over and we must return to each other and mutually respect the sacrifices we made. Our film is a work of fiction, not a political act. In the film, we are looking for ways to bring people together, and we find them.
Metaphysician, lyrical poet, innovator, film devotee, passionate defender of humanitarian values. Alexander Sokurov was born 14 June 1951 in the village of Podorvikha in Irkutsk Region. In 1974 he graduated from the History Department of Gorky University, and in 1979 he finished in the Directing Department of VGIK, the national film institute. In 1978 he made his first full-length feature film “The Lonely Voice of Man”. From 1980 onwards he has been a producer at Lenfilm studios. He is the author of more than forty feature and documentary films. He has participated in and won prizes at festivals in Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Montreal, and Moscow. He lives and works in St Petersburg.