06. September 2013

RETROSPECTIVE A. SOKUROV

Alexander Sokurov, one of the most famed representatives of Russian avant-garde and the independent film scene in general, will be honouring Vienna with his very first visit to the city, to which he will also bring his extraordinary films. Sokurov was born as an officer’s son in 1951 in Siberia. He spent his youth in many different cities of the Eastern Bloc – he went to school in Poland and Turkmenistan, studied history at the Gorki University in Nizhny Novgorod in Russia. During his time as a student he gathered initial experience working for Gorky TV, first as technical assistant, then as an assistant to the producer. He carried responsibility for various TV formats over a period of six years, using that time to get acquainted with different techniques of film and television. One year after he got his degree in history Sokurov started a new course of study at the All-Russian State University of Cinematography, today’s Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, in 1975. That was where he met famous Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky. Many of his early films, among them a number of documentaries as well as his first feature film The Lonely Voice of Man (1978), were classified as being anti-Soviet by the authorities and therefore banned. That is why the majority of Sokurov’s films became available to a broader audience only after the fall of the Soviet Union, albeit Mournful Unconcern earned him a nomination for a Golden Bear as early as 1987. In 1995, Sokurov was already named and awarded as one of Europe’s top 100 film directors by the European Film Academy. In 2002, the 90-minute-long, uncut documentary Russian Ark, in which Sokurov processes 300 years of Russian history, brought him international acclaim and success as an artist outside of the feature film genre. Sokurov is not only an extraordinary director – who, by the way, prefers to work with lay actors instead of professionals – also made a name for himself as a scriptwriter. By now, his films have accumulated more than 30 awards from the greatest international film festivals – from the Bronze Leopard of Locarno to the Golden Lion of Venice in 2011. The retrospective on Alexander Sokurov will bring not only all four parts of his tatralogy about power – namely Moloch (1999), Taurus (2001), The Sun (2005) and Faust (2011) – to Vienna, but also Stone (1992), one of his earlier works.