Column by Andrey Plakhov about the situation with the non-issuance of a distribution certificate for Alexander Sokurov’s film “Fairy Tale”

Last year, the premiere of Alexander Sokurov’s film “The Fairy Tale” took place at the Locarno festival. Over the sixteen months that have elapsed since then, it was shown several more times abroad, but was never released in its homeland, and was refused a distribution certificate. And now it’s finally available to everyone, posted on Ksenia Sobchak’s YouTube channel.

This situation, as if refracted in a distorting mirror, with adjustments for a while, repeats the one that the director experienced at the very beginning of his career. Several of his films remained on the shelf until the mid-1980s. Sokurov’s first major painting, “The Lonely Voice of a Man,” could, if you were lucky, be seen at “closed screenings,” which were sometimes held at VGIK for a narrow circle. Andrei Tarkovsky also found himself in this circle; he highly appreciated the talent of his young colleague and spoke enthusiastically about him in a conversation with Gleb Panfilov: “Look at the picture called “The Lonely Voice of a Man”… there are pieces there that I simply, openly, envy, because I have never take off…”

In 1986, these “shelf” works were released by the Conflict Commission of the Perestroika Union of Cinematographers – and this dramatically changed the fate of their author. Very soon everyone witnessed the rapid rise of Sokurov’s cinema. But he himself was not at all euphoric; on the contrary, it is full of gloomy forebodings and a feeling of uselessness. As time has shown, not entirely without reason.

From the very beginning, the new idol aroused not only admiration, but also jealousy of success, envy, and irritation. Many were disgusted by the complex, avant-garde form of his paintings. The older generation of directors, already offended by perestroika, which pushed them into the shadows, grumbled about the “cocurusization” of cinema. This terminological gem belonged to Tatyana Lioznova, director of the people’s favorite “Seventeen Moments of Spring.” There were also plenty of dissatisfied critics. In one of the articles at the time, Sokurov’s cinema was called “lame”; in another, the director was credited with the “seventh degree of self-affirmation.” They accused him of aesthetic extremism, of speculating on spirituality and gloomy eschatology, of having a “prophet complex”—one might add, “inherited from Tarkovsky.”

But Sokurov, with his phenomenal creative activity, silenced even his zealous enemies. More than once I have heard: “Actually, I don’t really like Sokurov… But I watched “Mother and Son” (or “Moloch”, “Taurus”, or “Russian Ark”) – and yes, it’s a strong thing.” The same critics who wrote lampoons about him eventually recognized his powerful talent. In addition to his talent, he was distinguished by his fanatical attitude towards the profession. He was ready to work day and night, shot several films a year, tirelessly experimented with filming technologies, and achieved perfect results. By the mid-1990s, he had earned recognition from the world’s leading intellectuals (among them Susan Sontag), film magazines and festivals. He never stopped there, setting himself ever more daring tasks and solving them. Russian cinema has not reached such a high standard since the times of Eisenstein and Tarkovsky.

The pinnacle of this active period was the “trilogy of tyrants” – about Hitler, Lenin and Emperor Hirohito. Then the trilogy turned into a tetralogy: Sokurov’s “Faust” provided a philosophical basis for the tyrannomania of the twentieth century. “The Fairy Tale” largely continues this line. At the same time, it is obvious that Sokurov has entered a completely different stage – begun by “Francophonie” and looped around his early documentary experiments. Then he made the film “Allies” (“And Nothing More”), where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were in the center; Hitler acted in the subordinate role of the defeated. The new film (with the addition of Mussolini) features the same characters, except Roosevelt; it is no longer needed, since Churchill does an excellent job of personifying the cunning “democratic West” – by no means sinless, but, it seems, the only alternative to despotism.

The theme of “And Nothing More” was the fragile peace won by the victors of World War II. The new film is about a postponed war and an inevitable reckoning, at least in the next world. If Allies was a bold concept but a traditional documentary in form, The Tale is a phantasmagoric spectacle with all the extremes of creative experimentation. The action takes place in the afterlife, in Dante’s Purgatory, where key figures of not so long-standing European history are tormented. They conduct conversations among themselves – as Sokurov insists, put into their mouths from actually documented meetings of world leaders. Everyone speaks their own language – German, English, Italian, and Stalin speaks the original Georgian. The actors only voice their lines and synchronize lip movements, but on the screen there are not actors at all, but genuine characters, these arbiters of human destinies, captured for eternity by newsreels, but mounted in a completely different background and context. And fabulous miracles happen, presented, according to the director himself, “with light humor and heavy sarcasm.” Stalin is tossing and turning in his grave; Hitler calls him a “Caucasian Jew”, Churchill constantly calls the Queen, causing the envy of the other leaders with his antediluvian mobile phone…

And there will even be a phrase addressed to one of the characters: “Don’t listen to Sokurov, go forward!” The climax of the film becomes a spatially stretched, deformed chronicle: masses of humanoids proceed in the ecstasy of idolatry, and then they suffer and die in the crucible of murderous wars. The accompaniment to this cacophony, to this formless biological magma, to this protoplasm becomes the “Song of the Decembrists” with the refrain “forward, friends, forward, forward, forward” – in the context of the “Fairy Tale” radically changing its original meaning. Sokurov allows himself more than ever a lot of madness – not only tragic, but also funny: for example, characters cut out from different pieces of chronicle double and triplicate – two Stalins bicker with three Hitlers at once.

Sokurov commented on the premiere of the new film: “A fairy tale always ends well, because when we wake up or close a book with a fairy tale, we find ourselves in real life and we still have the strength to overcome difficulties. A fairy tale is always optimistic, and our “Fairy Tale” is also optimistic.” The question is to wake up to that happy ending. At one time, Sokurov wrote a desperate letter to the USSR State Cinema Committee, talking about his closed projects and citing the example of Fassbinder, who managed to make several dozen films in his short life. He asked: “Why should our generation repeat Tarkovsky’s tragedy?” And at a press conference in Locarno, the author of “The Tale” admitted that this was his last film: “Why the last? Life is not endless, and strength is not endless. Our country is going through a very difficult period. It is possible that directors like me will not be able to continue working… I do not have a second or third citizenship, and I will live in Russia as long as I live at all.”

Andrey Plakhov