Russian director Alexander Sokurov, whose films are primarily about power and its loss, has a special relationship with President Putin.

Sokurov's film adaptation of Goethe's “Faust” only became possible in 2011 when Putin, then Russia's Prime Minister, provided the funds for it.

At his audience, the artist was impressed by the former secret service agent's deep connection with German culture.

Putin also accepted him on his human rights council, despite his advocacy for Ukrainian political prisoners and Russian critics of the regime.

Kerstin Holm

Editor in the features section.

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    Probably because of this, Sokurov decided at the end of 2019, after many young people had been sentenced in Moscow who had peacefully protested against falsifications in the city parliament elections, to give an imploring speech to the council, in which he was a film college lecturer for young people and their ideals asked the rulers to take an interest in them.

    Whereupon Putin defended as a precautionary measure the exaggeration of certain repressions that he himself admitted.

    Putin may horrify Sokurov's view of his heroes. Its tetralogy about power shows a Hitler who in the war year 1942 at a weekend get-together with Bormann and Goebbels on the Obersalzberg, instead of talking about politics, primarily talks about nettle soup and does not get close to his lover Eva Braun (Moloch, 1999). He brings to mind Lenin, deprived of power through his stroke, who can only perceive the world as though through a glass wall, but can no longer communicate anything to it (Taurus, 2001). It depicts the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, who after the surrender in August 1945 awaits the American occupation troops in the eerie quiet of the bunker vaults under his palace (Sonne, 2005). And in the first conceived,but he diagnosed the most recently created “Faust” as the source of energy for all these figures, their misfortune transformed into projects of power, which, as Sokurow knows, makes people dangerous.

    Sokurov's "Faust" transports the dawn of that departure whose fire will burn the world. The Russian relocates it to the time of old Goethe, in which the devil has become a sex-indifferent moneylender. The camera eye looks through the glasses of painting by the old masters, but with washed-out colors and tilting, distorted shots, which also illustrate Sokurov's metaphysical view of things from another world, as it were, in other films. Born in a Siberian village, Sokurow, who has Caucasian roots but emphatically identifies with his place of residence, Petersburg, portrays people as fundamentally impotent. His “Soviet Elegy” shows Boris Yeltsin, who was (for the time being) disempowered by Gorbachev. In the "Elegy from Russia" one experienceshow simple people seek support in mystical ideas on their deathbeds. In “Mother and Son” he depicts the son's love for the mother as a companion for the dying, and even the happy love of father and son in the film of the same name appears in the sign of the impending separation.

    From this perspective of eternity, the preservation of culture comes to the fore. This can be seen in Sokurov's “Alexandra” (2007), where he lets the very old opera diva Galina Vishnevskaya visit her Filmenkel, who is stationed as a soldier in the Caucasus, and ask the troop leader what his men learn besides killing and destroying.

    His best-known work, “Russian Ark” (2002), pays homage to the St. Petersburg Hermitage and also to the city as a place of immortality for European culture with a one-and-a-half hour tracking shot through the art spaces and centuries. His last film for the time being, “Francofonia” (2016), contrasts the mild fate of the Louvre under the Vichy government - also thanks to the head of the German art protection department - with the German art theft in Russia, but above all with the risk of the loss of cultural assets in a collapsing Europe . Alexander Sokurov celebrates his seventieth birthday this Monday.