Days of Darkness (1988)

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Movie
German title Days of darkness
Original title Dni satmenija
Country of production USSR
original language Russian
Publishing year 1988
length 133 minutes
Rod
Director Alexander Sokurov
script Juri Arabow ,
Piotr Kadochnikow,
Arkadi and Boris Strugazki ;
after Arkadi and Boris Strugazki
production Lenfilm
music Yuri Khanon
camera Sergei Jurisditsky
cut Leda Semyonova
occupation

Most of the roles are played by amateur actors.

  • Aleksey Ananischnow: Malianow
  • Eskender Umarow: Wecherowski
  • Irina Sokolowa : Malianov's sister
  • Vladimir Samansky : Snegovoy
  • Kirill Dudkin: Gluchow
  • Alexej Jankowski: Snegowois father
  • Viktor Belovolski: Gubar
  • Sergei Krylov: little boy

Days of Darkness ( Russian Дни затмения , transcribed Dni satmenija ; or Days of Eclipse, ) is an award-winning Soviet feature film from 1988 by director Alexander Sokurov . The script was written by Yuri Arabov and Piotr Kadochnikow based on the novel Billions of Years Before the End of the World by Arkady and Boris Strugatski ( Russian: “За миллиард лет до конца света” ).

Days of Darkness is Alexander Sokurow's third long feature film , again a film adaptation and yet again none - just like the two previous ones , after Platonow ( The Lonely Voice of Man ) and Shaw ( Sorrowful Callousness ) . The story is fragile, with no beginning or end, its segments have little to do with each other dramatically. Figures appear, disappear. Details and symbols do not lighten up the event, but have their own meaning and are directed outwards, invoking the viewer's literary, historical, aesthetic and social experience.

content

Dmitry Malianov, a doctor who recently graduated, has accepted a post in the city of Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan (now Turkmenbaşy ), a remote and very poor region of the Soviet Union. He cares for patients both in the city and in the steppes of Turkmenistan as well as in a psychiatric clinic.

In addition to his daily work as a pediatrician, Malianow researches the effects of religious customs on human health. In his research, he concludes that religion and belief can actually improve the health of believers. A series of strange, bizarre events occurs in trying to write his thesis, and Malianov believes that an unknown force is preventing him from completing his research.

Fredric Jameson judges the film that numerous science fiction characters have disappeared or been toned down. Mysterious events are not considered from the standpoint of fiction. All that remains of the presence of other worlds is the beam of a huge spotlight that illuminates the sleeping village at night, or an ominous shadow that blocks the sun for a second. The only cosmic element in the picture is of no importance for the book , a long flight of the camera at the beginning of the film, as if someone were landing from a flying saucer onto the burned-out ground. This could be compared with the air traffic in the prologue of " Andrei Rublev " by Tarkowski . The meaning of these scenes, however, is diametrically opposed. In Tarkowski it symbolizes escape from the cruelty of human beings and the horror of life on earth, in days of darkness the striving to come closer to the suffering of humanity.

After 12 years, the screenwriter Yuri Arabov spoke about working on the film:

“… A strange story about a handful of Europeans who were abandoned in a Muslim country. They don't understand this country, don't understand this people, and this people don't understand them. And these last Europeans are gradually disappearing from this strange city that has drowned in the sand. 'Days of Darkness' and 'The Second Circle' - the best of our collaboration with Sokurow. In any case, I love these films more than others ... "

- Yuri Arabov , “Mechanics of the Fate of Cinema”, 2000.

Biographical background

Sokurow , Ananischnow and Jurisditsky during a break in filming ( Krasnowodsk , summer 1987)

The director Alexander Sokurov spent his childhood in this city. The director's father served as an officer in the Krasnovodsk garrison. The officer's family moved from place to place many times. Alexander Sokurow began his studies at a Polish school and completed his studies in Turkmenistan.

When Sokurov read the story of the Strugazkis , it brought him to the city of his childhood, "aroused subconsciously the memory of a special world in which people of different nationalities lived, but actually existed in a total cultural vacuum that even the most undemanding of people could find could bring to despair ».

The choice of means of expression follows from the feelings of the children. In the acoustic atmosphere, the director uses not only Russian, but also Turkmen , Armenian , Azerbaijani and Buryat language fragments - when Malianov is haunted by the angel, a Catholic mass from Rome is heard on the radio , and when Vecherovsky talks about the Crimean Tatars , a Russian folk song can be heard When he leafed through a book with photos of Hitler in the apartment of the Volga Germans exiled here, Breshnev gave a speech in front of the Komsomol and said “ Wandering is the miller's pleasure ”. Images of decay and degeneration fill the two parts of the film: a Central Asian bazaar and a psychiatric institution, a folk music and empty streets competition, a wedding and military training ... Almost delusional sensations, hallucinations, on the borderline between morning and night the Occident. On the border between childhood and death.

Alexander Sokurow dedicated the film to the Leningrad doctor Lyudmila Yakovlevna Rusinova.

production

The script differs in large parts from the novel; apparently this was done with the consent of the authors named in the credits. The film, in which documentary and feature film elements are mixed, was shot alternately in black and white and in color in 35 mm format . For the cameraman Sergeij Jurisditsky it was one of five films that he shot with Sukorov. Sukorow had already worked with Juri Khanon in 1978 for his exam film for the Gerasimov Institute for Cinematography , but the film was rejected as a thesis. In 1988 a restored version was created, for which Krzysztof Penderecki wrote the music and which was awarded a bronze leopard at the Locarno Festival .

Opinions and versions

The director himself said this about his work: “The film was shot in the city of Krasnovodsk in Western Turkmenia. West Turkmenistan is one of the most complicated areas in our country from a political, economic and humanitarian point of view. There is no established, ancestral culture here - everything is mixed up. The Russian does not understand that he is a Russian. The Turkmen that he is a Turkmen. None of the national groups has the chance to realize their spiritual identity. Everything exists in parallel under the conditions of senseless interaction and mutual suppression. We tried to reproduce that in the film. "

The film critic Timofejewski looked a little different: “ Days of Darkness sees itself as an apocalyptic film and a cultural-political phenomenon at the same time. Its clear messianic note aroused contrary reactions from the Soviet public: Days of Darkness is a message to astonished humanity. A man, maybe a doctor, maybe also a writer, arrives in Central Asia, where he has to go through a series of abstract tests: against fear, hatred, death, loneliness, friendship, a child plus Asia as a metaphor for the strange world in the course of this peculiar educational novel the hero talks about the fate of the Crimean Tatars and demonstrates his powerful, bared body. In the end it unites with the universe, to Schumann's music. It could have been a remarkable film about the unspoken (homo) sexual yearnings of a young man, if the whole thing hadn't been raised so much on missionary shit ... Sokurov took up much of Tarkovsky . What he fortunately avoided were his tragic doubts. Without question, he is convinced of his mission as a prophet and sends messages to humanity. In the process, some of Tarkovsky's stylistic methods inevitably congeal into self-parody, and the auteur film becomes a new genre ...

This view contradicts another expressed by the film critic Shmyrow: “The shadow of the apocalypse has long hung over our cinematography . I'm not talking about the cyclical letters of a dead person, but the last films by Tarkowski , Rechwiaschwilis , Abdraschitov's Parade of Planets , in which the fatalistic sense of the present and history condensed into an expectation of the apocalypse - as retribution and tragic liberation. It would be naive to explain Sokurov's own missionary note from his inability to ironic self-reflection. In days of darkness Sokurov found a dense metaphor for the atavistic stagnation consciousness. So you can see the life of the hero who fled from everyday life in the Turkmen desert with its self-immersion, where existence is only possible on a narrow surface - between the hypocritical pomp of the Breshnew era and the tragedy of the war in Afghanistan . "

The film director formulates this point even more precisely: “Every now and then I have the most severe disappointments that I am Russian . The complicated thing about the current situation is that the (Soviet) state is collapsing in front of us all, including the Russian one, which we loved and dear to our romantic ideas about Russian history. The situation today reminds me of a theater in which the actors on the stage and the audience in the hall are equally tortured. This is how the Russians, the Estonians, the Azerbaijanis, the Armenians and the Turkmen torture themselves. Modern political practice has treated the spiritual culture of nationalities with such arrogance that it has presented a tragic choice to all of us who have to exist under one roof. That sounds cruel, but no one in the world can solve national problems, or so it seems to me. Unfortunately, the solution is dragging on and taking too much time. In addition, with its totalitarian efforts, the state has destroyed the religions and churches which today are unable to come to the aid of their believers or the state. "

Music in the film

The musical dimension of the film “Days of Darkness” is, as in all of Sokurow's early films, extremely important and consists of several layers of different types, and is not intended as a sound background or sound design, but rather as a level that represents content and emotional abundance , which is indispensable for the perception of the visual. The music connects organically and sensibly with the visible and gives it its own additional (almost from the author's point of view) meaning. Soundless images immediately appear “earthly” in the film, like a banal chronicle from the life of a forgotten Soviet province.

Towards the middle of 1987, the director approached the young Petersburg composer Yuri Khanons , then still a student at the Leningrad Conservatory , with the offer to write music for the film "Day of Darkness" (working title). This was not the first attempt to work together. A year before that, Sokurow Khanon made the proposal to compose music for the film “ Sorrowful Calmness ”. However, the collaboration did not take place at the time because the composition student refused to work as a “film image designer”.

The description of Sokurov's musk, which he wanted in the "days of darkness", was rather vague: among other things, "something for the accordion ". He had a certain inner conception of music for this instrument as it should be. In the end, the result - Khanon's music - exceeded all expectations:

“… I have never worked so much with a composer before, and his (Yuri Khanon's) absolute understanding of the specific task astonished me, as did the incredibly precise results of his work, which always hit the target perfectly. Everything - orchestration , arrangement , choice of instruments - was created incredibly precisely and absolutely according to my concept. I believe that the sound in the film is not just there to influence the viewer emotionally, but rather for the sake of its own semantic level: the spiritual in the film is found in the sound. "

- A. Sokurov . September 26, 1988. - Magazine «Ars», № 12, 1988. Latvia .

The defining musical theme of the “Days of Darkness” is a floating, as it were supernatural, rolling melody with a strange title (A head taken individually) - led by an accordion - which forms a structuring arc: it sounds at the beginning (musical prologue of the film ), in the middle and in the finale of the film.

The emotional and content-related intensity of the music is so great that every visual is transformed into a quasi-independent " clip " when combined with this music . Vocal fragments were performed by the author himself (with a distorted head voice ), which intensified the effect of a glaringly expressionistic alienation of the apocalyptic images created by Sokurov .

“... His music for the 'Days of Darkness' also acts as a renewal ten years later and is - I'm not afraid to say it - brilliant. Yuri Khanons said that he wrote this music neither for the script , nor for the pictures, but - for Sokurov's face . That is why he called the first and most important fragment 'A single head' . The epic pathos of the film emerges from this fragment. The camera hovers in the air, a long scream asserts itself through the children's voices (it's not a woman's voice, but Y.Kh. herself) and becomes silent at the moment of collapse with the earth. And music begins ... "

- Irina Ljubarskaja , Recent History of the Patriotic Cinema .

All scenes with Khanon's music have a strong emotional effect, and it is difficult to say which element has the upper hand: the visual or the acoustic. One can compare Khanon's music in this film with a kind of filter or prism through which the viewer perceives Sokurov's images.

“... with excitement unknown to me before, I think of the future of the still very young but extraordinarily talented Leningrad composer Juri Khanon . A continuous melody - like the lonely voice that lives in people , and reminds of the great sadness with which one ponders the transience of life and the greatness of the spiritual gift - these are fragments of Khanon's Musk for the "days of darkness" . "

- A. Sokurov. Booklet of the record " Einsame Menschenstimme " .

In addition to the music composed by Juri Khanons, one hears fragments of pre-existing music in the film : Classical fragments ( barcarole from “ Hoffmanns Erzählungen ” by Offenbach , Romance for piano Op. 28 No. 2 in F sharp major by R. Schumann ), popular songs (Russian folk song "I'm going on the street", a version of the song by Three Piglets ) and Central Asian folk music. These quasi- complementary, additional numbers (as in opera or ballet) play their own role in the film: they serve to alienate , create a contrasting comparison and invite the viewer to have a little fun, the world with something superficial, general Look look.

Awards

  • European Film Award ( special award for best music ) of the European Film Academy (EFA) from 1988 to the composer Juri Khanon ;
  • Nika Film Prize of the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR for the best sound work of 1989 to Vladimir Persov;
  • Juri Khanon was nominated in 1989 for the Nika film award for best music;
  • The annual prize of the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR (1989) for the best work as a cameraman - Sergey Jurisditsky;
  • In 2000 the film ″ Days of Darkness ″ was included in the list of the hundred best films in the history of Russian cinema (according to the Russian Film Critics' Guild);
  • The film was also included in the Top 100 Films of the Century selected by the European Film Academy (EFA).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fredric Jameson : Soviet magical realism (Soviet magical realism) . New York / London: Indiana University Press, 1996. pp. 88-89. ( Russian "Советский магический реализм" , Saint Petersburg, Seance-Magazin)
  2. ↑ Juri Arabow , “Mechanics of Cinema Fate”, an interview on Radio Free Europe with Sergej Jurinen. - Rubric Kinosaal Freiheit, 2000.
  3. ↑ D. Popow: Soviet Studies: Art and Literature (Magazin), 38, 1990, p. 305
  4. ↑ from: “Nedelja” newspaper, Moscow, 1988, No. 23
  5. ↑ Birgit Beumers, Nancy Conden: The Cinema of Alexander Sukorow. London: Tauris 2011. pp. 246-246.
  6. ^ The Lonely Voice of Man and Yuri Khanon.Retrieved February 14, 2019
  7. ↑ a b At a Sokurow press conference on the occasion of the screening in Riga at the International Film Forum “Arsenal”, September 1988. - An English version of this conversation was published in “Ars”, No. 12, Riga , Christmas 1988 ( Latvia , English).
  8. ↑ a b Alexander Timofejewski, Vjatscheslaw Schmyrow: Days of Darkness . “Sovetsky Ekran”, No. 23, 1988, Moscow (Russian).
  9. ↑ a b c Sergei Uvarow . «The music world of Alexander Sokurow». - «Klassiker XXI» Verlag, Moscow, 2011. - pp. 30–31 (Russian)
  10. ↑ Yuri Khanon . «Close the doors» or Anaestesia Dolorosa ( too redundant explanation ). - Saint Petersburg: Center for Medium Music, 2011. (Russian)
  11. ↑ L.Yusipova . «Guys, shoot for voice». - Moscow. Magazine «Satellite Film Viewer» № 9/1989. ISSN 0208-3140. Pp. 16-17. (Russian)
  12. ↑ Sergei Uvarow . «The music world of Alexander Sokurow». - «Klassiker XXI» publishing house, Moscow, 2011. - p. 28 (Russian)
  13. ↑ "... Yuri Khanin , a young composer, this year a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory managed to do everything about the orchestration, arrangement and choice of instruments in a very precise way. It was done with an ideal exactitude. Never before had I worked with composers so much, and I was really struck by his understanding. <...> I think that sound, no less than the image, should produce not only emotional impact, but is to have an altogether independent semantic meaning. The spirituality of the film as if finds its expression through the sound. And spirituality would not emerge by itself. If you might sometimes fail to keep alive the memory of a visual image in your mind and in your heart the soul would never forget sounds… ”- From Alexander Sokurov's press-conference on September 26, 1988. Journal“ Ars ”, № 12, 1988. Latvia .
  14. ^ Material from the press conference with A. Sokurow. September 26, 1988. - Riga : «Ars» magazine, № 12, 1988. ( Latvia , English).
  15. ↑ Dmitry Gubin . «Play on days of darkness» (interview). - « Ogonyok » (weekly magazine). 1990, № 26, pp. 26-27 (Russian)
  16. ↑ Irina Ljubarskaja , The Latest History of the Patriotic Cinema (1986–2000). Cinema and context . Volume III. - Saint Petersburg: « Meeting », 2001 (Russian).
  17. ↑ A.Sokurow , booklet of the record “The lonely voice of people”. - Leningrad: " Melodija ", 1988.