“Some choices made by the director in the scraps and notes composing his diary are questionable, and the aesthetic of their collage is surprisingly subdued coming from an artist who made films as visually bold as Faust and Russian Ark“
Now spanning more than four decades, Aleksandr Sokurov’s career has always moved back and forth between fiction and documentary, even blending them into one another in his museum dramas Russian Ark and Francofonia, respectively set in the Heritage in Saint Petersburg and the Louvre in Paris. Hence, one should not be that surprised to see him follow up his previous film, a 78-minute experimental animated feature (Fairytale), with a five-hour-long documentary (Director’s Diary). While leaping from a fairytale to a diary, Sokurov nevertheless stays the course: he has kept his distance from traditional fiction film since his Golden Lion win for Faust in 2011, and he keeps adding new chapters to his three-part study (Moloch on Hitler, Taurus on Lenin, The Sun on Hirohito) on how the 20th century was shaped by the acts and beliefs of terrifying men.
To pursue this idea further, Fairytale imagined conversations in purgatory between Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Churchill, while Director’s Diary comes back down to Earth, in the literal sense. It compiles a massive amount of archive news footage and clippings to recount human history on a global scale, year after year, from 1957 until 1990 – just before the fall of the USSR (a word of warning to the people born in 1977 or 1979: these two years are absent without explanation). Sokurov’s homeland is naturally at the center of the film, with all the visual material coming from there, and more specifically from Leningrad – as it was then called – for the most part. What happens outside the city, the country, and above all outside the coverage of the state-controlled media, is added onscreen through textual annotations, which report events unrelated to what is shown in the newsreels and are so abundant that they make us feel swamped in information.
With these written notes, Sokurov browses through everything that, from his perspective, has a significant impact on the world (the space and nuclear programs of different countries), the history (politics and war on a global scale), or people’s lives (mainly by abruptly ending them: plane crashes, natural disasters). Cultural touchstones – songs, books, films, etc. – are also present, while there is almost no mention of sports, or ecology – even Chernobyl, whose name is barely evoked two years after the incident. Some choices made by the director in the scraps and notes composing his diary are questionable, and the aesthetic of their collage is surprisingly subdued coming from an artist who made films as visually bold as Faust and Russian Ark; but the effect created by editing and pacing is nonetheless powerful. The combination of the film’s length, the accumulation of facts, and the repetitiveness of tragedies, makes us feel like we are watching history unfold in fast forward and slow motion simultaneously. It charges like a rushing wave, while men and women seem to remain still, powerless, like in Jia Zhangke’s great melodrama Mountains May Depart.
The other accomplishment of Director’s Diary is that it finds a way to share with us, through the experience of watching a film, what it was like to endure the information and cultural blackout imposed upon its inhabitants by the USSR. As Sokurov puts it in a few words of commentary, it was “a 72-year-long nightmare” enforced by a regime “prone to genocide”, attaining “the perfection of evil” and committing “treason” against its citizens. The newsreels put together by the director are more correctly named as pure propaganda, spreading idyllic fairytales about a nonexistent country, never changing, as if trapped in amber. Year after year and even decade after decade, we see the same soothing stories and images of triumphant parades, unanimous congresses, official slogans, efficient policies, thriving factories and their blissful workers.
Like the latter, we have to wait for Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika to occur before something changes – and when it does, it happens so suddenly and so fast. Real journalists’ work appears on the news, showing real people speaking their true minds. And in the blink of an eye, the illusion vanishes and the whole country built on it crumbles. It is mesmerizing to witness, yet without stripping us or Sokurov of our critical thinking and ability to understand the complexity and ambiguity of the situation. There are no more feelings of triumph, deliverance or joy in the final minutes of Director’s Diary than in its previous hours. Because what comes next for the Russian people, in the nineties and after, is no less bleak or violent than before. It is more like a transition from one nightmare to another.