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Soviet Elegy

Directed by Alexander Sokurov

An Example of Intonation

Directed by Alexander Sokurov
Screening on Film
  • Soviet Elegy (Sovetskaya elegiya)

    Directed by Alexander Sokurov.
    USSR, 1989, 35mm, color, 40 min.
    Russian with English subtitles.

This is a devastating, almost cruel portrait of Boris Yeltsin, in which the leader is removed from the public arena of speeches and propaganda and placed in the quintessential Sokurovian space: one of silence, stillness, inaction. The result is an ambiguous vision of immobility verging on paralysis and death.

  • An Example of Intonation (Primer intonacil)

    Directed by Alexander Sokurov.
    Russia, 1991, 35mm, color, 48 min.
    Russian with English subtitles.

Just weeks before he became Russia’s first democratically elected president, Sokurov engaged a deeply fatigued, mumbling Boris Yeltsin in a provocative discussion of his personal beliefs. Set in and around Yeltsin’s family home in an informal atmosphere of tea and blinis, the film asks the urgent question: “Who is this man?” Sokurov inflects his portrait with a sound track that obscures Yeltsin’s voice often to the point of incomprehensibility.

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