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Whispering Pages
(Tikhiye stranitsy)

Screening on Film
Directed by Alexander Sokurov.
With Alexander Cherednik, Sergei Barkovsky.
Germany/Russia, 1993, 35mm, color and b&w, 77 min.
Russian with English subtitles.

The pages that whisper through this brooding, beautiful tone poem are from nineteenth-century Russian literature, primarily Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. An anonymous man wanders through decomposing, fog-enshrouded catacombs and encounters a series of “the degraded and the humiliated,” including a holy prostitute and a Kafkaesque bureaucrat. Shot partly in Sokurov’s dreamlike black and white with a dense sound track of eerie, echoing voices and bursts of mournful Mahler, Whispering Pages serves as what critic Gavin Smith has called “an epitaph for a civilization in the throes of slow death.”

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