Pagine sommesse

I viewed this film in 1994, and feel like I can remember nearly every frame. It is a film I recommend with reservations: I was enthralled, but Cineplex film-goers weaned on THX and kinetic editing may find this Opus about as exciting as watching paint dry.

Sokurov has created an almost wordless visual poem ... compelling, watery dream-like images, with subliminal sounds of half-heard conversations and rushing water leaking in. Orthogonal camera distortion, murky still images, matted backgrounds and miniatures create a world that taps heavily from the universal race consciousness: a heavy dose of deja vu will set in as you "remember" images that nearly every citizen of the western world has experienced in universal dreams and nightmares.

WHISPERING PAGES is based on "images" from 19th Century Russian novels. A scrap of plot, with nameless characters, involves a Dostoyevski-esque tragic hero who's evidently murdered an old woman to collect on her estate. A waif-like heroine, reduced to prostitution, is so ethereal that you suspect she may be a figment of his imagination.

The 77 minutes pass quite slowly, with some camera pans (e.g. from the top to the bottom of a statue) taking nearly five minutes. It's not a bore, though. The alert viewer will catch occasional freezes into a still shot, and a watery drifting in and out of color. The film is a brilliant textbook on camera technique; required viewing for any serious students of world cinema. Your appreciation will increase if you're also a fan of German Silent films. Many of the overhead shots of murky urban miniatures bear a startling resemblance to the workers quarters in METROPOLIS. At times the camera lens is so distorted that the crooked alleyways resemble the twisted sets of CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI. A bureaucrat who administers red-tape surrounding the old woman's estate is identical to the police clerks in CALIGARI. All that's missing are the elevated desks and chairs. Long shots of the hero, in supplication in his cell-like apartment, chill the blood as much as the infamous camera shot receding from the tragic Emil Jannings in THE LAST LAUGH.

WHISPERING PAGES, though, is far from being a silent film; the use of sound is brilliant. Through the film, there is the constant sound of water; running through pipes, rushing by opaque windows, dripping. You can almost "hear" the omnipresent vapors. In a chalky image of birds hovering above the river's surface, we hear the heart-like beat of wings.

The lead actor, Alexander Cherednik, is lanky, and very Christ-like in appearance. Unless you notice that his fingers have mysteriously elongated, several encounters with a distortion lens during his scenes may escape your notice. This film has many searing visual images, that match the greatest moments of German Silent Cinema; for instance, when Cherednik awakens under the monstrous statue of a lioness and sucks on her teat. Camera pointed at ceiling, with severely distorted lenses makes a four-story stairwell appear like something from a medieval miniature; we see nameless characters climbing over the rail, and plunging, in slow motion, into an abyss. Doors open onto plunging shafts. Exterior shots of tenements on the river reveal ladders and stairs that end in mid-air. Much of the imagery is nightmarishly unforgettable.

Experiencing the film is a bit like being in a convincing seance, summoning up images from a the world of the dead. You feel like a time traveler, drifting, ghost-like, in the netherworlds of Russian poverty sometime around the 1830s or 1840s. You'll derive an almost voyeuristic thrill in picking up snatches of conversation that you weren't intended to hear.

If this type of film or subject matter interests you at all, I encourage you to alter your calendar to accommodate it's rare showings. Like the watery, ghost-like images it contains, sadly, this film won't see the light of day for long in our channel-surfing world. Ironically, unlike most current popular films, which evaporate from your memory by the time you get to the parking lot. WHISPERING PAGES leaves indelible images floating before you vision upon waking the next day.

As the title of the film suggests,the texture of "Tikhie stranitsy"(or "Silent Pages")is like that of scattered papers,on which you can see only some fragments of possible stories or episodes from them. And characters of the film also look like letters or figures on 2-dimensional space,gradually disappearing in time,in wind and in rain,silently whispering... ,she "dark" hero of the film reminds Raskolinikov from "Crime and Punishment" and in fact this young man has conversations about Murder,God and Repentance with the "white" girl,reminding Sonya in the novel of F.Dostoevsky.But one can also notice Gogol's tone in other "pages". The Prosecutor in "gray",with his melancholy little eyes,seems not having a will to accuse the hero and may be only a lower official who only wants to buy a new coat. In fact,the pages of the film are not monochrome,they change very delicately their nuances of color to show the underground world of characters as a Middle zone between Heaven and Hell,where they will continue to wander around until some Sign of the salvation,as white birds flew from upon the water in the first scene, suddenly comes to them.

At its lowest, most repetitive points, such as with Raskolnikov wandering the streets of Saint Petersburg for the upteenth time with no destination planned and not a coherent thought in his head, Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment" may, indeed, bare some similarities to Aleksandr Sokurov's arthouse twaddle, "Whispering Pages"--a picture of utter pretensions full of affected images incoherently and lethargically arranged. Sparsed in between the filmmaker's experiments with alternating between black-and-white photography and a color scheme that barely registers beyond the grayscale, stilted acting and awkward posturing, misty views and water reflections, slow motion, soft focus, stretched images, scenes of men lifting other men and a bizarre crescendo involving the molestation of a statue, the film highlights a few scenes from Dostoevsky's book.

The picture begins after its literary source, with the Raskolnikov type returning to the place where he committed murder. Thereafter, there are some fleeting moments regarding the cat-and-mouse game between him and the police and a reference to Sonya's dead father. The most complete sequence involves Raskolnikov's confession to Sonya. I doubt the narrative would make much sense to anyone unfamiliar with the novel, which would be fine if there were true art here in the imagery and structure instead of languid obfuscation.

I've been seeking out a few adaptations after reading Dostoevsky's story, and I did myself no favors by choosing this as the next film to view after "Norte, the End of History" (2013), which is another ponderous reworking of said material. At least, and this is an important benefit, "Whispering Pages" is significantly shorter than Lav Diaz's four-hours-plus, appropriately-labelled piece of "slow cinema." And, by the way, if you want to see an actual artistic film adaptation of "Crime and Punishment," seek the 1923 Expressionist silent film "Raskolnikow," or Robert Bresson's French New Wave classic "Pickpocket" (1959), or the actually painted animated short "Zbrodnia i kara" (2000).

a very unusual film yes, it is slow but such a simple idea : everybody knows Crime and Punishment, right? so let's just take the wanderings of Raskolnikov before and after the murder and leave out all the main scenes this is a film about the time between events and it is remarkable

A film made after a poem (or was it a book?). Distracting elements like a plot or oral conversation are omitted. You experience the film as a moving, impressionistic painting. It's poetic and dreamy. The sound track is fabulous. It's like being a full hour on the break of sleep and awareness. My favorite film.