An Iconological Approach to the Films of Aleksandr Sokurov
Cinema not only constitutes a way of preserving the expressive language of the gesture in motion; it is also an agent of gesture creation and transmission. To borrow an insight from the criticism of Serge Daney, it could be argued that the real history of cinema is expressed in the depiction of bodies and in actors’ gestures.1 As Giorgio Agamben has suggested in Note sul gesto (1996), gestures constitute the real substance matter of cinema, and cinema itself is, to use Oksana Bulgakova’s words, a veritable “factory of gestures” (2005, 2013: 251).
This idea can be, however, found throughout the history of cinema, in particular in critical reflections on slapstick, comic movies and the invention of gestures in the context of the Hollywood star system (cf. Morin 2005). In the realm of theatre, Antonin Artaud has emphasised the contaminating power of the gesture by comparing the transmission of performed gestures with the spread of the plague in Marseille in 1720 (1958:15). Conversely, such authors, writers and playwrights as Maurice Maeterlinck, Fernando Pessoa, and Gao XingJian imagined a theatre of the inhibition of gestures, sometimes even substituting actors for mannequins (see McGuinness 2000; Maeterlinck 2002, Crespo 1995: 261, Łabędzka 2008, Xingjian 2008: 301-323).
The grand project developed by the art historian Aby Warburg – the creation of an alternative method of approaching the historicity of images through a study of the visual art of the Renaissance – offers a framework for a figurative and historical study of cinema based on the analysis of gesture. Whether referred to as iconology, or, as Warburg himself wanted to call it (1995, 1999), “cultural sciences”, the essential aspect of his legacy2 lies in the priority it gives to transmission, historicity, and artistic empathy (“Einfühlung”). Central to Warburg’s project was an understanding of art history that is less attentive to periods and authors than to the observer’s energetic, emotive response to the repertoires and afterlife (“Nachleben”) of gestures, i.e., their transmission through time, as well as to the pathos formulae (“Pathosformeln”, the singular gestural formulas of expressing emotions and feelings) that are transmitted over the course of history – evading names, schools, and trends.3
In Aleksandr Sokurov’s filmography, with its attention to a redefinition of the relationship between the sacred, history, and politics, gestures occupy a central place. In Sokurov’s films, the gesture is a point of suspension, a pause inviting a “contemporary” perspective, an occasion to examine history and reflect upon its transmission.4 The biographical spirit of Sokurov’s films is equally capable of transcribing the last moments in the lives of such historical figures as Lenin, Hitler, and Hirohito as veritable choreographies of gestures, as well as of conveying the mystery that lies behind the fixed expressions of great political figures of the Soviet Union, of writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, of musicians like Dmitrii Shostakovich and Mstislav Rostropovich, or of a humble Russian peasant woman on a collective farm. Sokurov’s films seek to recreate a type of relationship between the spectator and history in which gesture acquires the value of an almost teleological opening-up of the image, which is why Warburg’s iconology offers a fruitful platform for analysing and understanding them in a context that combines Russian history and literary imagery with the European pictorial tradition.
Based on Warburg’s “iconology of the interval” (“Zwischenraum”), this article outlines a broader investigation of gesture construction and historicity in Sokurov’s films, with the aim of shedding light on two central aspects of his work: the gesture of silence, on the one hand, and, on the other, the modelling of a spatial and temporal landscape based on the symbolic figures of fog, storm, and tempest. I will clarify the interrelations between these two aspects through Warburg’s iconology as conceived in his project Mnemosyne (1924-1929), an atlas of images (“Bilderatlas”), conceived as a moving archive. Similar in form to Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk (1927-1940) and George Bataille’s Documents (1929-1930), Mnemosyne consists of large panels on which Warburg arranged images from different eras in order to demonstrate the figurative and gestural relationships among them. The atlas was meant to be an instrument for provoking meaningful collisions between the images which could reveal secret connections, “impurities” (Didi-Huberman 2002),5 and afterlives, or a reassembly machine to stimulate thought in boundary regions, in historical fractures. Read against each other, the reproductions of paintings, photographs, and drawings patched together on Mnemosyne’s nearly 80 extant panels aim, through the interval between one panel and another, to introduce a tension in their distance from the observer, to invoke what gazes at us in each image, and to situate this constellation against the greatest of all possible mysteries: time.
Movement, the historical spectrality of the image, is not only the object but also the method in Warburg’s research (cf. Didi-Huberman 1998). As early as in 1893, in his first essay, Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring, Warburg formulated a preliminary hypothesis that I wish to adopt in my approach to Sokurov, namely: that ancient gestural expressions have survived in the visual arts – mainly paintings – from more recent eras, situated between cultural, visual, and pictorial artifice on one side, and social conventions, on the other, functioning as a formulae of pathos, expressing passion, and often illustrating a dialectical relationship with the word. However, with the birth of photography and cinema, gestures became situated in time; they became a way of fixating memory and of copying unrepeatable singularity. Sokurov’s films, in their attention to painting, give an ongoing testimony to this tension between implicit movement in images and motion picture. It is in montage, a reassembly of different times, that certain resistance-images emerge, triggering memory through gesture. In the following pages, I will attempt to outline the possible conditions with which knowledge achieved through montage, as proposed by Warburg in his atlas Mnemosyne, can reveal the importance of gestuality and the specific gesture of silence in Sokurov’s films as a boundary space, a space of rupture and resistance.
Russkii kovcheg / Russian Ark (2002, Russia, Germany, Japan, Canada, Finland, Denmark), one of Sokurov’s most celebrated films due to its technical feat of having been filmed in a single sequence-shot, deploys a series of narrative, visual, and iconographic-gestural strategies based on the figure of the witness. In a 96-minute movement with no cuts, the camera travels through the Hermitage Museum accompanied by an aristocratic crowd. The story alludes to a key moment in Russian history: the end of Tsarist Russia and the beginning of the Revolution of 1917. During the first minutes, the screen remains black while a male voice-over addresses the spectator in a confessional tone: “I open my eyes and I see nothing. I only remember there was some accident. Everyone ran for safety as best they could. As for what happened to me I just can’t remember” (00:01:42). After a brief pause, when the first image appears, a distinguished-looking woman emerges from a carriage in front of a group of gentlemen, and the voice resumes: “How strange. Where am I? Judging by the clothes, this must be the 1800s. Where are they rushing off to?” (00:02:16).
While the camera, mounted on a steadicam, enters the Winter Palace, the official residence of the former Tsars and one of the buildings that constitutes the Hermitage Museum complex, the voice is constantly asking himself questions amid the crowd of dignitaries:
Those officers don’t know the way. Can it be that I’m invisible? Or do they just not notice me? Interesting. Has all this been staged for me? Am I expected to play a role? What kind of play is this? Let’s hope it’s not a tragedy. (00:03:54).
After this, the camera comes upon a man dressed in black whom the voice-over believes to be another man lost in time, exactly like him. “He nods to me, but goes away,” he says, and he calls to him, but now he is even more disoriented, as he thinks he is in Chambord during the period of the Directory and is not even aware that he is speaking Russian.6 According to the 6th of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History,
Between the voice and the man in black, i.e., the Marquis, a field of tension opens up. The figure of the witness (often single and distant in other works of Sokurov’s) thus doubles and establishes a dialectic that also allows room for anachronism, for the coexistence of the nobility of old with the visitors to the museum in the 21st century within one shot. Through its splitting of the figure of the witness, Russkii kovcheg reflects the mechanisms of the image as a “dialectics at a standstill” (“Dialektik im Stillstand”), that is to say, as a dialectic, visual, and thinking movement suspended in history, from which to think events. According to Benjamin, the dialectic image allows an interruptive stasis of the image over the continuity of time: “The concept of historical time forms an antithesis to the idea of a temporal continuum” (Benjamin 1991-1999: 407). Indeed, Sokurov’s cinematic explorations are often closely oriented toward Benjamin’s thought, especially as it appears in Über den Begriff der Geschichte / Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), in which Benjamin refutes the academic historicism that turns the past into an inalterable substance.
In the dialogue between the two witnesses and in the sequence wherein the man in black enters the throne room, the film is orchestrated around a gesture performed by the man in black: this is a gesture of silence that he directs at the camera (Fig.1) – and, consequently, at the voice-over and the spectator (while Nicholas I receives some Persian emissaries who apologise for the assassination of the Russian diplomatic delegation to Tehran). This gesture of calling for silence constitutes the man in black’s only decisive action, the only turning point in his wanderings through the Hermitage Museum. The nuance of difference between the two words used in Latin to refer to a witness, “testis” and “superstes”, is illuminating when we consider the space of representation where the gesture occurs: while “testis” comes from “terstis” and means the person who constitutes the third party in a litigation, “superstes” refers to the one who has experienced certain events in the first person and can give a full account of them, or otherwise is left mute and powerless due to the extreme nature of what he or she has seen. In the juxtaposition of the two figures time travellers – the man in black and the voice-over – there is an expression of the separation between “testis” and “superstes”.
The gesture of silence, which connects them and establishes a triangle with the spectator, is, however, not unique to this film; it is a recurrent bodily movement in Sokurov’s work. This gesture appears in Tikhie stranitsy / Whispering Pages (1993, Russia, Germany) (Fig. 2), which is a synthesis of some of the most significant Russian novels of the 19th century, particularly Dostoevskii’s, as well as in the adaptation of Goethe’s Faust (2011, Russia) (Fig. 3-4), and in Elegiia dorogi / Elegy of a Voyage (2001, Russia, France, Netherlands), a film commissioned by the Bojimans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. The gesture of silence is a way of signaling an entrance into an enigma, the threshold that the viewer is required to acknowledge as Sokurov stages his or her encounter with something unattainable, imaginary or potentially sacred. The fog, the tempest, or the blizzard emerges as a counter-shot to the silence admonition, reverting the spectator’s gaze inward, insisting on the existence of thresholds and opacities in relating experience.
Elegiia dorogi begins with images of fog and sleet enveloping a fruit tree and introducing a journey that fluctuates with the weather and concludes in front of a Pieter Saenredam’s painting, where the camera fades to black, while the voice-over says: “No going back. But the canvas remains warm”. Conversely, Russkii kovcheg begins with darkness and culminates in fog. Towards the end of the film, the crowd of aristocrats leave the palace while the clamour of the Revolution is unleashed. Then, the camera pans to the threshold of a door hanging over the sea, that in turn evokes an eternity noted by the voice-over: “Sir, Sir. A pity you’re not here with me. You would understand everything. Look. The sea is all around. And we are destined to sail forever, to live forever.” (01:32:47) (Fig. 5).
Although it is difficult to speak of a shared identity in Russian cinema, there are certain historical constants that make it possible to locate Sokurov’s work within Russian cinematic gestural and figurative tradition. In a special issue of Cahiers du Cinéma from 1990, dedicated to the cinema of perestroika, Serge Daney, after conducting a brief review of the major movements in Soviet film history, stressed in particular that the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to a series of films which revealed a crisis: a rarefaction of space and a crack in the time-image. Daney refers to filmmakers as diverse as Konstantin Lopushanskii, Aleksandr Rogozkhin, Vasilii Pichul, Pavel Lungin, Sergei Bodrov-senior, and Aleksei German-senior, in whom he identifies – between extreme intimacy and wandering in the vastness of expansive horizons – the expression of an attempt to secure a system of transparency based on action and a causally oriented narrative. Against these directors Daney posits Andrei Tarkovskii and Aleksandr Sokurov as “filmmakers of the invention of distances” (Daney 1990: 11; my translation). But to what distances is Daney referring? Does he mean those which crystallise in the articulation of the montage and express human relationality with the surrounding world? Or, perhaps, it is the distance that triggers the journey? Or the distance that requires the creation of a certain model of spectatorship?
When the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian (2005) reveals the need to “drill” cracks between the images to distance them from the mode of narrative transparency, he invokes two kinds of distance: geographical and a distance related to the construction of meaning. When dealing with filmmakers associated with the heritage of the former sphere of Soviet influence and as diverse as Herz Frank, Kira Muratova, Aleksei German, Viktor Kosakovskii, Sergei Loznitsa, Sharunas Bartas, Darezhan Omirbaev, and Sergei Dvortsevoi, it is possible to recognise a shared attention paid to the dual-sided question of distance.7 Its common source originates from the films of Aleksandr Dovzhenko, capable, through montage, of exploring the fracture between intimate pain and the emergence of history. Dovzhenko demonstrated this in one of his last films, Michurin (1949, USSR), co-directed with his wife, Iulia Solntseva. There, Dovzhenko shows the disconnect between the lyrically depicted death of the protagonist’s wife and the epic ardour with which the protagonist, after the historical interval introduced by Lenin’s death, pursues his scientific enterprise: develops new, resistant varieties of fruit trees to blanket Soviet land. The motif of the land and its swelling up with the storm, with the fierce whirl of wind and sleet, acts as a primordial image and evokes the representations of the Russian steppe, the Siberian taiga, and the solitude of the forests so often found in great Russian literature. Following Dovzhenko’s model, not only do Dvortsevoi in Chlebnyi den’ / Bread Day (1998, Russia) and Kosakovskii in Belovy / The Belovs (1992, Russia) discover the shift of drama towards remote gusty outposts, but Sokurov, recognising Dovzhenko as his direct influence, gathers the legacy of a visuality previously elaborated in literature by Alexandr Pushkin, Lev Tolstoi, and Anton Chekhov.
In some of the best stories in Russian literature, the tempest at first draws out clay scents from the earth and conjures up the pleasure of the primordial mud of the trails. Ultimately it cleanses and dries up the air, and it casts a blanket of snow over the ground on which borders are marked; in short, it suspends the image of movement, and thus the sequential continuity of time. In the motif of the tempest, there is a tradition that can be traced back at least to Pushkin, who, in his short story Metel’ / The Blizzard (1830), creates a love story, that of Mar’ia Gavrilovna vanishing in the whirlwind of a storm changing her destiny. The fate of Mar’ia Gavrilovna, her fiance, and Burmin, whom the young woman marries by mistake in the middle of the snowstorm, is interwoven with a metaphorical “shipwreck” – a notion that Hans Blumenberg (1996) has identified as a cipher of European culture. In the face of this disaster, the depiction of the landscape enables the reader to appropriate the view of the storm, i.e., to construct a “haptic” gaze founded on the turbulence, the loss of vision, and the disturbance of movement caused by the weather.
In his short story Metel’ / The Snow Storm (1856), Tolstoi, foreshadowing Franz Kafka’s narrative techniques, narrates a loss of any visual reference through the blizzard in which the narrator’s troika becomes lost. The narrator’s gaze tries desperately to fix on a solid landmark, but the fog makes it difficult. Tolstoi’s story creates, thanks to the storm, an interregnum in time, in the formation of the image itself. He establishes a visuality of going astray, introducing what Kafka, in his Die Acht Oktavhefte / Blue Octavo Notebooks (1917-1918), refers to as a “nibbling at our own limits” (1991: 14). In a similar way, Sokurov’s films attempt to explore the threshold of death in order to rescue something from the past.8
In Sokurov’s first feature film, Odinokii golos cheloveka / The Lonely Voice of Man (1987, USSR), a film inspired by Andrei Platonov’s prose, the agony of the suicidal youth who leaps into the freezing water is the first in the row of death rites repeated throughout his cinematography. Thus, the young Malianov confronts his father’s corpse and the ghost of Chekhov in Krug vtoroi / The Second Circle (1990, USSR); a similar situation is shown in Kamen’ / The Stone (1992, Russia); the fleeting loves of Emma (Bovary) reverberate over the extraordinary scene of the funeral in Spasi i sokhrani / Save and Protect (1989, USSR, Federal Republic of Germany); a voice-over explores the ruins painted on the canvases of the artist in Rober. Schastlivaia zhizn’ / Hubert Robert, a Fortunate Life (1996, Russia); and in Mat’ i syn / Mother and Son (1997, Russia, Germany), the son, lonely and without further help carries his dying mother in the arms (Fig. 6).9 By means of anamorphic deformations that flatten the paths traced in Mat’ i syn, Sokurov dissolves temporal development and blurs the lines of space. If to live is, as Hölderlin suggests, to dwell upon the earth (2000: 189), in the absence of a path and of movement, only death remains, welcomed by a hazy twilight , evoking – as it often happens in Sokurov’s cinema – the nebulous light of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting. Shrouded in fog, the idyllic setting that surrounds this inverted pietà, at the same time inverts the locus amoenus that opened Tarkovskii’s Ivanovo detstvo / Ivan’s Childhood (1962, USSR), imbuing it with the abysmal melancholy that Gérard de Nerval called “the black sun”.10
The image of the murky background, through which the spectator witnesses the duration of time itself, an agent of a Gadamerian rescue11 of the single experience inscribed in history, is the driving force behind the visual construction in both Mat’ i syn and the documentary Elegy-series about such figures as Andrei Tarkovskii, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Boris El’tsin. But the fog in Sokurov’s films completely transcends its metaphorical dimension and becomes a genuine non-place. There, the idols are devoured by the voraciousness of the land, as in the Tetralogy of Power series and in the long documentary ode Dukhovnye golosa / Spiritual Voices (1995, Russia), which portrays the life of a Russian battalion in a fort at the Tadzhik-Afghan frontier.
The cadence of the words describing Mozart’s death in the long opening shot to Dukhovnye golosa (Fig. 7) is intermingled with the music Olivier Messiaen, of Gustav Mahler’s (Kindertotenlieder), and of Mozart himself, and thus moves from the tonality of elegy to that of requiem. It is indeed the liturgy of the requiem that gives shape to the images in Dukhovnye golosa and, later, in Molokh / Moloch (1999, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy, France), Telets / Taurus (2000, Russia), and Solntse / The Sun (2005, Russia, Italy, Switzerland, France). These films bear witness to everyday routine in the lives of key persons of the twentieth century (Hitler, Lenin, and Hirohito) in proximity to moments of dramatic historical disruption: the Battle of Stalingrad, Lenin’s death, and the capitulation of Japan after the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hypercontinuity of the sequence-shots in the so-called Tetralogy of Power – following Eva Braun through the murky hallways of the Führer’s alpine retreat (Molokh) (Fig. 8), converting Lenin’s “dacha” (Telets) into a replica of Arnold Böcklin’s painting Die Toteninsel / Isle of the Dead (1880) (Fig. 9), or enclosing Hirohito in the semi-darkness of a bunker (Solntse) (Fig. 10) – reproduces the reverse in the semi-darkness of the external storm, the slow world of “marvels and magical forces” referred to by Chekhov in another iconic Slavic literary representation of the motif of the tempest, Na puti / On the Road (1886). Indeed, this text appears to presage all of Sokurov’s work, in its depiction of isolated interior settings, of storm, and shipwreck far from any possible theodicy – a gnostic universe of the fall.12
In Francofonia (2016 France, Germany, Netherlands), a film essay about the Louvre under the Nazi occupation and about the function of the museum today, the idea of a historical tempest overlaps with an actual storm. Already during the opening credits, we hear a phone conversation between the filmmaker and Captain Dirk, whose cargo freighter, somewhere in the Atlantic, is transporting a huge quantity of boxes containing artworks from the Louvre (Fig. 11). Later, during a video conference with Dirk, while the vessel is rocked in the storm, Sokurov makes use of Théodore Géricault’s painting Le Radeau de La Méduse / The Raft of the Medusa (1819) (Fig. 12) to underscore the threat of a shipwreck.13 It is at this moment that Sokurov cites Chekhov – “The sea swelled, over each wave another would break, and there was neither sense nor pity in them. The force of the sea and of history are like this: without sense or pity” (00:07:21) – while the waves rush towards the screen of Captain Dirk’s smartphone or computer.
Against the notion of a magmatic, navigable history, threatened by oblivion (a threat which is itself the determining condition of memory), and sailed upon by vessels doomed to shipwreck, Francofonia foregrounds the power of imagination in art and literature, as does Tolstoi in his writing. (In fact, Sokurov shows a photograph of Tolstoi reclining in his bed; Fig. 13). The realisation of this gesture emerges as the only way of clinging onto memory. “A people is surrounded by the ocean. A human being has an ocean in himself,” says Sokurov’s voice-over, a few minutes before developing this idea:
Meanwhile, the camera runs in a smooth movement over Renaissance portraits from the Workshop of Corneille de Lyon to other French and Dutch painters (Fig. 14-16). “Who would I have been if I hadn’t been able to see the eyes of those who lived before me?” Sokurov wonders. Both the questions and the visual formulae expressed in these camera movements through the museum or within each canvas are very similar to those used by the Italian filmmaker Luciano Emmer in the “art documentaries” Racconto di un affresco (1938, Italy) and Leonardo da Vinci (1952, Italy), as well as in his film essays La sublime fatica (1966, Italy)14 and Bella di note: la villa Borghese (1997, Italy) with their power to present a thought in action – the most direct precursor to Francofonia. Like Emmer in Bella di notte or like Warburg, Sokurov weaves together a huge panel of faces to posit a question: what does it mean to be European? How does one represent a people?
Both Sokurov and Warburg (and, in a certain sense, Emmer) want to know how artists of the past visualised their own time and the time that preceded them. Moreover, Sokurov’s cinema seems to be close to Hannah Arendt’s notion of political space that conceives of politics not as a substance or a category but as a “thinking of appearance” (Arendt 1978) based on the “faces” reminding us that nations and communities are never abstractions but bodies that speak and act. Arendt understands politics as “multiplicity” entailing certain unique gestures, movements, and desires with which each community is identified. Besides, politics is theorised as “difference” that reminds us that the social fabric is an appearance of diversities; and, finally, as the intermediate spaces, the “intervals” entailed in thinking about the community and the reciprocity of individuals among others as a network of differences.15 It is in the attention to gesture and the always fog-filled interval between gestures and faces where, once again, we find a point of contact between Sokurov’s montage, Warburg’s “iconology of the interval”, and Benjamin’s creation of interstitial zones – folds for exploration, heuristic intervals.
If we were to construct a series of panels like those in Mnemosyne to represent the general principles of Sokurov’s films, we would have to include the fog, the face, the persistent gesture of silence, and numerous pages of 19th-century Russian literature, but above all we would have to highlight the logic of knowledge through montage, in the tradition of others who have pursued Warburgian reassembly in the cinematic sphere: Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giovannino Guareschi in their pioneering film essay La Rabbia (1963, Italy), as well as in the montage of archive footage by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi. Through the idea of exposure and representation of social collectivities based on a study of faces and the intervals between them, Sokurov reveals the importance of faciality as a basis for the exploration of the afterlives that give shape to cultural identity, and the power of gesture as a political space of both connection and disconnection between cultures.
Nearly all the films of the Elegy-series and the St. Petersburg Diary-series begin in the same way: before showing the characters’ faces, the filmmaker’s voice first explains who their parents were by showing old portraits and photographs: Andrei Tarkovskii, Dmitrii Shostakovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vytautas Landsbergis, Boris El’tsin. In Sovetskaia Elegiia / Soviet Elegy (1989, USSR), this development is extreme: out of its total duration of 35 minutes, twelve are made up of a sequence of faces of Soviet leaders with no explanation whatsoever. Beyond the Elegy-series, the gesture of gazing upwards in Spasi i sokhrani and Mat’ i syn, the closeness of the characters’ faces in Otets i syn / Father and Son (2003, Russia, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, France), and the long shot of the protagonist’s face at the end of Dni zatmeniia / Days of Eclipse (1988, USSR) – all underline the importance of the face and faciality as a way of exposing human relationality and Sokurov’s major theme: preparation for death.
Perhaps one of distinguishing features of 19th-century Russian literature (from Aleksandr Pushkin to Leonid Andreev) can be defined as the need to make a choice, to transform power into action, sometimes at the expense of death. In Sokurov’s film poetics, the face and the hand constitute the field of tension that makes the execution of this choice possible. (The political and the historical tend always to materialise in particular gestures.) Among all these gestures, there is one that reflects the condition of mediality contained in every filmed gesture: the calling for silence.
In Sokurov, it is usually clear who is being asked to be silent, but the presence of this gesture in films like dolce… (1999, Russia, Japan) (Fig. 17) or Il Nous faut du bonheur / We Need Happiness (2011, Russia, France), co-directed with Aleksei Iankovskii, prompts the question: Where does the request for silence come from? What does this gesture aim to accomplish? With the index finger raised over the mouth, the request for silence is situated halfway between the gestures represented by ancient art, those that exist in everyday life, and those that are created in the encounter between the film screen and the spectator. It is not true that the material of cinema is the image, nor even the connection to reality; rather, it is gestures that turn the camera into the instrument closest to the way in which the human being performs his or her own identity. In the call for silence, it is the gesture itself that gazes, as pure power. There is no explanation for the gesture of silence, other than the “finality without purpose” of the suspension itself. Neither Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie nor the efforts of Duchenne de Boulogne, Charles Darwin,16 or Desmond Morris to bring cultural gestures into dialogue with patterns of behaviour are useful for explaining this space of suspension, a space which Nietzsche approached as a point of encounter for a humankind alienated from its own gestures: “I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched” (1978: 33).
There is always authority in the pause of the finger that seals a pair of lips. There is also a desire to attract someone towards a particular place. But, above all, there is evidence of a secret. If, in their mute eloquence, all gestures always suggest that they conceal more than they reveal, the gesture of silence is a motion that collapses the spheres of intimacy and of secrecy. Many of Sokurov’s films are conceived in terms of a single image or gesture: the pietà in Mat’ i syn, Lenin’s coffin and embalmed body in Telets, Eva Braun’s dances in Molokh, and, of course, the gesture of silence that marks many of his films and, in particular, stands out in Russkii kovcheg. The whole quest of the Russkii kovcheg seems to have been conceived around this gesture, which is located in the interval “between desire and fulfilment, perpetration and its remembrance”; in other words, in what Mallarmé calls a “pure medium”, understood as “the exhibition of a mediality, making a medium visible as a medium.” (Agamben 1996: 52). The poets of the thirteenth century gave the title of dwelling place, “stanza” (i.e., “fitting abode and receptacle”), to the essential core of their poetry. Underneath every particular gesture of the lady to whom the poem is dedicated, there is always a stanza wherein lies its object, the “joie d’amour” (Agamben, 1993: 17). Thus, what is the joy and the stanza, the dwelling place, that lies within the gesture of silence in Sokurov’s films?
As pure medium, the gesture of silence always involves an attempt at re-enchantment because it underlines and exposes something, and, at the same time, hides some secret. Perhaps because it embodies a request that is the very basis of gestuality – silence, Andrea Di Jorio, a pioneer in ethnographic studies of the gesture, dismisses the gesture of silence with a very brief note in his treatise La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (1832) (Fig. 18): “This gesture is one of the few so universally recognised that it is enough simply to indicate it. The same must be said of its nature and history” (De Jorio 1832: 293; my translation).
As Warburg in Mnemosyne never considers pure visual motifs but, rather, the intervals between them, the sites of the unthought, it is necessary to trace the intersection between different traditions in the origin of the gesture of silence: the passive sense of “I am summoned to silence” linked to Gnostic imagery and the fear of the devil entering the mouth; the active sense of calling for silence that dates back to Egypt via Ovid and his Metamorphosis (8 B.C.); and the figure of Harpocrates (Fig. 19), the Greek version of the Egyptian god Horus, whose most common pose is holding his finger in front of his mouth and whose expression oscillates somewhere between seriousness and a slight hint of a smile.17
The silence of Harpocrates is the source of the expression “signum harpocraticum”: while calling for silence, the finger at the same time points to the sky. “Yes, Da Vinci promises paradise; look at that raised finger,” commented Picasso (Ashton 1972: 168) on the most oft-repeated gesture in Leonardo’s painting, San Giovanni Battista / St. John the Baptist (1513-1516), which is cited explicitly in Francofonia (Fig. 16). With Leonardo, both the idea of enigma and the dynamic elaboration of the painting are orchestrated around a gesture that escapes the rhetorical codification of the cenni [signs] or signa membrorum [bodily sign] provided by the Renaissance.18 Through the canvases of Leonardo, the raised index finger is distanced from the mouth and ceases to be the threshold to a pious silence as in in Fra Angelico’s San Pietro (1428-29) (Fig. 20); even the saturnine melancholy of Michelangelo’s Lorenzo de’ Medici (1524-34) does not appear.19 And while in the Middle Ages Saint John generally pointed with his finger at a phylactery or at the baby Jesus, Leonardo’s Saint John points gloomily to the sky, as if merely inscribing himself in the visible. In the same way, in the gestures of silence and indigitation, Leonardo shows, it is the finger that speaks and the mouth that, in its silence, is able to open a fissure in time, something that the history of painting and cinema has developed powerfully, particularly in their combination of the signum harpocraticum with the female face.
From the famous image from Pompeii, which is believed to be a portrait of the poetess Sappho (1st century A.D.) (Fig. 21), to the films of David Lynch (Fig. 22), the occidental female portrait has often been constructed on the visual motif of silence, of a “visibile parlare” that has its axis in Dante and Petrarch20. From the female protagonist in José Luis Guerín’s En la ciudad de Sylvia / In the City of Sylvia (2007, Spain, France) (Fig. 23), to Federico Fellini’s Sylvia in La dolce vita (1960, Italy), and right up to Sokurov, a path can be traced back to the gesture of silence. Indeed, film history reveals a multitude of examples of this constellation across a remarkable diversity of cultural milieus. The images of the young soldier’s friend in Sokurov’s Otets i syn in the window, or, especially, the slow, hazy epiphany of Margarita’s face in Faust can all be linked to Bergman’s female faces: the statue in Fanny och Alexander / Fanny and Alexander (1982, Sweden, France, Federal Republic of Germany) (Fig. 24) and the clown-woman in Larmar och gör sig till / In the Presence of a Clown (1997, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Germany); they are also reminiscent of David Lynch’s strange ministers of the next world or, even more so, of Godard’s angels. In Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1998, France) (Fig. 25-26), different paintings of angels and fathers of the Church raising their fingers, composing the signum harpocraticum, reveal a notable similarity with Sokurov’s presentation of the historical, the political, and the gestural as forming a uniquely productive way of engaging in a dialectic of history.
All of Godard’s work since the mid-1990s is marked by the figure of the angel and by the Gnostic theological dilemma of confronting a God outside the world with a God that governs the world, i.e., the power of the celestial with the framework of the terrestrial. “The cinema, like Christianity, is not founded on a historical truth. It gives us a story and tells us to believe”, explains Godard’s own voice in Chapter 1B of the Histoire(s), and, through this idea, he relates the 20th century’s tide of images back to a point prior to all theology, to an encounter between the level of redemption and the level of historical events in the economy of the images. Godard is keenly aware that the figure of the angel is common in gestures of silence, and he includes this thematic in the Histoire(s) as a reflection on the mediating role of images in the organisation of the world. Like any image, the image of the angel calling for silence is turned at the same time towards history and towards the invisible, but it is in this image where the emblem of this duality is made fully manifest.
“The angel is that creature in which the metamorphosis from the visible into the invisible that we are undertaking is already completed”, wrote Rilke in a letter to Witold Hulewicz (cit. in Agamben 2009b: 20). It is in the distance between Godard’s angels and the indigitations of Sokurov’s characters that the pointing finger can, as Leon Battista Alberti already suggested in Della pittura (1435: II, 42), be an indication of the edge of history, as occurs in Caravaggio’s paintings (Fig. 27-29) or in Nicolas Poussin’s Le Martyre de Saint Erasme / Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus (1628) (Fig. 30).
Godard’s project can also shed light on the logic that governs gestuality in Sokurov’s films: not only are his films dominated by the angelology of the images – it is impossible not to think of the angelic traits of the protagonist’s face (Dni zatmeniia) or of the blind guide in the museum, called angel explicitly (Russkii kovcheg) – but they also give an answer to the questions raised previously by literature about the dual, teleological, and historical dimension of angels and images.21 It is in Kafka’s writings where the intimately consubstantial nature of the celestial and earthly hierarchies was effectively turned into a reflection on the loss of the gesture in the West, particularly, the loss of the gesture of admonition. In this sense, there is an undeniable connection between Kafka’s visual techniques and those used by Sokurov in Tikhiye stranitsy, based on Russian literature, and in his Faust (Fig. 31), perhaps because, as the director has often remarked, cinematic history was less important than literature for his development as a filmmaker, particularly the broadcasts of Russian and world classics on public radio.22
Not only do Kafka’s government officials, assistants, and messengers in Der Prozess / The Trial (1925) and Das Schloß / The Castle (1926) appear like archangels, often inviting Josef K. and K. respectively to keep silent, but passages like the parable “Before the Law” (Der Prozess) show how angelology and philosophy of history are inextricably linked in our culture. Even if it is not directly alluded to, the gesture of silence emerges in the gatekeeper’s foreboding stillness, when he neither prohibits nor admonishes, but only silences, revealing his role of mediator. Beyond any legal or rabbinic interpretation, the long line of gatekeepers, to which this gatekeeper alludes, carries the paradox of a gesture of silence, a moment of suspension – Stillstand – which refers to the same gesture of silence, all the way back to some primordial origin. This allegorical proto-gesture is like a god, functioning akin to law in Kafka: it reigns but does not govern. After Der Prozess Kafka (1919) occasionally returned to the parable “Before the Law” to recommend, in the incessant confrontation of human beings with the silence of the law, a “long study of the gatekeeper” (“Jahrelanges Studium des Türhüters”) (Agamben, 2009: 22)
This long study of the gatekeeper is, in reality, the position to which the filmed gesture of silence leads the spectator. Insofar as it is filmed, the gesture is always a “moto”, to use the term coined by Giorgio Vasari, which comprises not a mere characterisation but a dynamic confrontation with the opacity of the character’s thought, a visible speech to which also Leonardo alluded in his writings.23 It is hardly possible to make an image of a gap, of that intermediate space between the film and the spectator, where a gestural display is at stake. Sokurov repeatedly demonstrates how the gesture of silence, directed at a character and calling at the same time to the spectator, is always a dynamic appeal to its own visuality. Just as the visual art of the Italian Quattrocento – particularly paintings like Giotto’s Il Bacio di Giuda / Juda’s Kiss (1303-1305) (Fig. 32)24 – revealed the possibility of exploring the space where two faces interact, the filmed gesture of silence, placed in intermediate space, always constitutes a tension with the spectator and demands a long study of that gatekeeper which is cinema.
The one who raises the finger is also asking to be imitated in his or her silence. This gesture also denotes that he or she possesses a knowledge that can be transmitted through the field of interfacial tension, a knowledge that demands suspension of the word. By calling for this suspension, the link between the hand, the face, and the word is actualised in human expression. The attention to gestural code borrowed from painting – the legacy that such filmmakers as Sergei Paradzhanov25 and others left behind – has passed on to Sokurov. i While the idea of singularity of the face and its resistance to oblivion has been concurrent with the history of art and of human interactions (and this is Sokurov’s premise in the Elegies), the gesture is precisely that sensitive space where those who are gone retain solidarity with the present.
What lies behind the finger that seals a pair of lips, as shown in Russkii kovcheg, Tikhie stranitsy, Elegiia dorogi, dolce... and Il Nous faut du bonheur, is the ode to gesture as a meeting place between the individual and others, as a space of coagulations of time. Benjamin writes (1999: 481, N15, 2): “At any given time, the living see themselves in the midday of history. They are obliged to prepare a banquet for the past. The historian is the herald who invites the dead to the table.”
The task at hand – a task left unfinished in the work of Benjamin and Warburg – is precisely to construct a history and physiognomy of the gesture inscribed in history. Sokurov knows that this work, which has no possibility of ever being completed, always faces a danger. Beyond the silence of the signum harpocraticum, his films suggest, there is a deafening murmur of the dead – a moving reverse shot of the dead in history, kept at a safe distance. This is what Sokurov’s films tell, time and again, perhaps especially in the military series: Dukhovnye golosa, Povinnost / Confession (1998, Russia) and Soldatskii son / Soldier’s Dream (1995, Russia). The latter is a short film in which a young cadet’s dream leads to the figure of the angel, and of one angel in particular: the painting Haavoittunut enkeli / The Wounded Angel (1903) by Finnish painter Hugo Simberg, which shows an Angel of History with blindfolded eyes and wounded wings, mute and silent, transported in Sokurov’s film into mid-air, immersed into the fog (Fig. 33). The face and the silence, as questions posed to the spectator and dialectic images projected onto history, are presented once again, now linked to the threat of a hazy, tempestuous reverse shot, marked by the danger of forgetting26 and the tide of history.
Ivan Pintor Iranzo
Universidad Pompeu Fabra
ivan.pintor@upf.edu
I would like to express my gratitude to the editorial team of Apparatus, and in particular to Alisa Rethy. This article would not appear without their help and advice.
PhD in Communication Studies from Universidad Pompeu Fabra (UPF). Senior lecturer at UPF and member of the CINEMA Research Group. He currently teaches Contemporary Cinema and Evolution of Visual Languages in the Bachelor’s program in Audiovisual Communication at UPF, and Cinema, Television and Comic-book History in the UPF Master’s in Contemporary Film and Audiovisual Studies program. He has pursued research and teaching activities at different universities in Italy, Argentina, and Colombia. In recent years, he has published articles in journals and contributed to more than 40 books, including La estética televisiva en las series contemporáneas (2017), Regreso a Twin Peaks (2017), A History of Cinema Without Names/2 (2017), Motivos visuales del cine (2016), Cuerpos en fuga (2015), Werner Herzog (2015), Mad Men (2015), Endoapocalisse: The Walking Dead (2015), On the Edge of the Panel: Essays on Comics Criticism (2015) and Poéticas del gesto en el cine europeo contemporáneo (2013). His lines of research are: gestures in film, iconology and iconography, hermeneutics and myth criticism in film, comparative film studies, television series, sequential narrative, transmedia and intertextuality.
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URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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