TemporaryOne-1
Joined Feb 2003
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In the beginning there was a tree, an autumn tree. It had lost its leaves. But there was fruit on it left for the birds.
Snow fell already. Strange clouds appeared, as if it were summer, not autumn. The sky was dark and deep. Thunder could be heard. There was movement over the water. There were birds. Birds who flew for no other reason than beauty alone. Then the clouds changed. The sky became flat. The light shone upon G-d's command.
I was afraid of falling. Someone left me. I started to feel better. I breathed deeply. Then movement started. I realized it was winter. I was cold. I could almost touch the road. So smooth and transparent. Houses appeared, like an abandoned village under a cold sun. Windows, roofs. And the people? It must be noon, but where are the people? Grey buildings, like prisons. Then came the fog. (confusion).
I found myself on a clearing.
The world created out of darkness and winter and fear, child born, movement, then abandoned, G-dless, fatherless, nationless, but grateful for the freedom of free will. Fragile berry fruit tree, its branches, stiffened and frozen into place like burnt nerves (Plath), a wintry tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with "fruit on it left for the birds". The fruit of this tree teaching the cycle of life and nourishment and struggle and survival and death and rebirth and beauty.
Spectacular scenery of leaden winter clouds in heavens in the darkest dark of the night overlooking black wintry landscapes. Lunar ambiance and lunar silence and lunar seclusion. Voyager the satellite of history, trying to understand his inborn orbit to a G-d, to a father, to a nation, to a life that cut him off and abandoned him at birth.
A wall of snow soundlessly wheeling and reeling in a steady downriver current like a river current frothing forward in a storm, an apt metaphor for the many nations and peoples that drifted without a base after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and an apt metaphor for the transitory nature of existence. A wall of snow drift reeling forward like one gigantic moving mass of migratory disintegration.
Sokurov, our narrator, our voyager, noctivagant. Going back in time to the place of his birth and voyaging through his past and the past of his country and the past of history itself. Travelling across across frontiers of nations and borders, traveling through monastic, nautical, museologic spaces. Dark strokes of Classical music and the distantiated echoes of ambient sound, haunting musical haiku conveying Sokurov's existential turmoil.
Voyager, guided by a monk enters a monastery in Valdai (Old Russia), a journey to find G-d, to understand G-d, to understand Jesus' sacrifice, to study the spirit of a man in the throes of death and an empire in the throes of death and a history in the throes of death, Voyager like Abraham of the Bible, Abram heeding G-d's call of Lech Lecha, and, after passing G-d's tests of faith and accepting G-d's promises to multiply his seed, evolving into Abraham, officially setting up the shop of Judaism which later forged Christianity, but Voyager is beginning at the end of that, faithless and spiritually decayed and identityless. Sokurov asking the monk, why did Christ pray that his Father not send him to his sacrificial cross? Why did Christ, want to avoid crucifixion? If he so loathed being crucified, then how can I accept his sacrifice? Why did I speak about this? His monk keeps silent, G-d fails to answer, the Christ (in Sokurov's view) nothing more than a mere mortal on an equal plane with all of humanity in his resistance to death, the implication being Why is Humankind invested in Christ's sacrifice if He was unwilling to make it, a Baptism occurring in the background ends, a soldier on a pew jars the moment, war invoked and Voyager perhaps remembering himself as a soldier, a fleeting flashback of soldiers crosses the screen, Voyager coalesces back into uninhabited nocturnal landscapes and his own interiorized private world of exilic and religious and spiritual alienation and despair.
Voyager is eternity's hostage and prisoner of time, he's exilic and unhomed and displaced theologically, nationalistically, culturally, and historically.
Voyager not knowing what location he's leaving and where he's going, destabilized location, Guideless, he doesn't know where he came from or where he's going to, he doesn't know who he was or who he will become, he doesn't know where G-d is or where his father is or where his nation is or who or what will guide him, the ship, perhaps Noah's Arc, carrying him beyond the flood of threatening-but-indifferent waves that fill every corner of the earth, transporting him away from his barren abandoned provincial rural Eastern locality and relocating him Westward in cosmopolitan Germany (the trajectory from East to West invoking a reversal of Germany's wartime West-East invasion of Russia), a Germany blanketed beneath a continual falling powdery wall of migratory disintegrating downriver streams of snow.
Voyager whispering, the canvas remains warm, the body remains warm yet must it still die, the spirit remains warm yet must the spirit also die? All the paintings except Van Gogh's include rivers and most appear to also include boats, the boats the body and the water the soul and the spirit and the boats on the water representing the journey into the great unknown, towards death. The camera also passes over two empty frames, spiritless man, coincidence or prophetic.
Last painting, the camera literally enters Bruegel's Tower of Babel, a glorious surface exploration of a crumbling arcesque Ur-text Torah-text, covenant between humanity and G-d shattered, humankind scattered and abandoned, hammering in the theme of humanity's disconnect with its Creator (G-d, father, Nation) and humanity's destructive impulses and apocalypse, the screen turns black.
Snow fell already. Strange clouds appeared, as if it were summer, not autumn. The sky was dark and deep. Thunder could be heard. There was movement over the water. There were birds. Birds who flew for no other reason than beauty alone. Then the clouds changed. The sky became flat. The light shone upon G-d's command.
I was afraid of falling. Someone left me. I started to feel better. I breathed deeply. Then movement started. I realized it was winter. I was cold. I could almost touch the road. So smooth and transparent. Houses appeared, like an abandoned village under a cold sun. Windows, roofs. And the people? It must be noon, but where are the people? Grey buildings, like prisons. Then came the fog. (confusion).
I found myself on a clearing.
The world created out of darkness and winter and fear, child born, movement, then abandoned, G-dless, fatherless, nationless, but grateful for the freedom of free will. Fragile berry fruit tree, its branches, stiffened and frozen into place like burnt nerves (Plath), a wintry tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with "fruit on it left for the birds". The fruit of this tree teaching the cycle of life and nourishment and struggle and survival and death and rebirth and beauty.
Spectacular scenery of leaden winter clouds in heavens in the darkest dark of the night overlooking black wintry landscapes. Lunar ambiance and lunar silence and lunar seclusion. Voyager the satellite of history, trying to understand his inborn orbit to a G-d, to a father, to a nation, to a life that cut him off and abandoned him at birth.
A wall of snow soundlessly wheeling and reeling in a steady downriver current like a river current frothing forward in a storm, an apt metaphor for the many nations and peoples that drifted without a base after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and an apt metaphor for the transitory nature of existence. A wall of snow drift reeling forward like one gigantic moving mass of migratory disintegration.
Sokurov, our narrator, our voyager, noctivagant. Going back in time to the place of his birth and voyaging through his past and the past of his country and the past of history itself. Travelling across across frontiers of nations and borders, traveling through monastic, nautical, museologic spaces. Dark strokes of Classical music and the distantiated echoes of ambient sound, haunting musical haiku conveying Sokurov's existential turmoil.
Voyager, guided by a monk enters a monastery in Valdai (Old Russia), a journey to find G-d, to understand G-d, to understand Jesus' sacrifice, to study the spirit of a man in the throes of death and an empire in the throes of death and a history in the throes of death, Voyager like Abraham of the Bible, Abram heeding G-d's call of Lech Lecha, and, after passing G-d's tests of faith and accepting G-d's promises to multiply his seed, evolving into Abraham, officially setting up the shop of Judaism which later forged Christianity, but Voyager is beginning at the end of that, faithless and spiritually decayed and identityless. Sokurov asking the monk, why did Christ pray that his Father not send him to his sacrificial cross? Why did Christ, want to avoid crucifixion? If he so loathed being crucified, then how can I accept his sacrifice? Why did I speak about this? His monk keeps silent, G-d fails to answer, the Christ (in Sokurov's view) nothing more than a mere mortal on an equal plane with all of humanity in his resistance to death, the implication being Why is Humankind invested in Christ's sacrifice if He was unwilling to make it, a Baptism occurring in the background ends, a soldier on a pew jars the moment, war invoked and Voyager perhaps remembering himself as a soldier, a fleeting flashback of soldiers crosses the screen, Voyager coalesces back into uninhabited nocturnal landscapes and his own interiorized private world of exilic and religious and spiritual alienation and despair.
Voyager is eternity's hostage and prisoner of time, he's exilic and unhomed and displaced theologically, nationalistically, culturally, and historically.
Voyager not knowing what location he's leaving and where he's going, destabilized location, Guideless, he doesn't know where he came from or where he's going to, he doesn't know who he was or who he will become, he doesn't know where G-d is or where his father is or where his nation is or who or what will guide him, the ship, perhaps Noah's Arc, carrying him beyond the flood of threatening-but-indifferent waves that fill every corner of the earth, transporting him away from his barren abandoned provincial rural Eastern locality and relocating him Westward in cosmopolitan Germany (the trajectory from East to West invoking a reversal of Germany's wartime West-East invasion of Russia), a Germany blanketed beneath a continual falling powdery wall of migratory disintegrating downriver streams of snow.
Voyager whispering, the canvas remains warm, the body remains warm yet must it still die, the spirit remains warm yet must the spirit also die? All the paintings except Van Gogh's include rivers and most appear to also include boats, the boats the body and the water the soul and the spirit and the boats on the water representing the journey into the great unknown, towards death. The camera also passes over two empty frames, spiritless man, coincidence or prophetic.
Last painting, the camera literally enters Bruegel's Tower of Babel, a glorious surface exploration of a crumbling arcesque Ur-text Torah-text, covenant between humanity and G-d shattered, humankind scattered and abandoned, hammering in the theme of humanity's disconnect with its Creator (G-d, father, Nation) and humanity's destructive impulses and apocalypse, the screen turns black.
This is a five and a half hour documentary and the below doesn't remotely come close to expressing all my thoughts reactions to it, but wow what another hypnotic piece of art by Sokurov.
A painting. Or a real landscape. Desolving into the vespertine hour. Translunary veneer. Snow blanketing the Russian earth. It might be Isaak Levitan's "Eternal Rest" filling up the screen. It might be a real Russian landscape. Tremulous Sokuvoran micro-undulations confuse the eye. Floating landscape. Delicate elegiac piano-sequined chauntacoustics of Mozart, Beethoven, Messiaen, three embattled lives, drift up from the snowy underworld, melancholic sounds, invocations of angels, evocations of demons. Susurrating narration punctuates sublimity of music and fantasy snows cape. Darkness deepens. Candles burn but briefly, stars outshine themselves. A figure transepts across the landscape. Disappears amidst trees. A flame. A glittering spangle of birds. This is a real place after all. A shift from dawn to dusk and the body and face of a soldier mistily emerges.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of unplumbed profundity in a martian-like sun-bleached spallated paleaceous rock-blasted scoured flayed ruddied ochred rufescent gizzard lifeless trackless Afghanistan-Tajikistan border-landscape alongside silent sunbleared Slavic Russian (and Central Asian) soldiers maundering through the torrid chaff-dusted waste-blasted land.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of dizzying vertical navigation giving way to melancholic horizontal quiescence.
The agony of sunlight the ontology of waiting the agony of restlessness the pointlessness of war the fantasia of night.
Nations and Men enslaved by sciamachic war. Invisible enemies. Alien world where soldiers do not belong.
Soldiers motionless and muted and scattered. A book of Russian fairy tales opened to "The Tale Of The One-Eyed Devil".
Atavistic bare-boned daily routine. A collapsed empire uncreating its own sons. Skin and bone and boots and guns. Uncreating and unlearned and inhumane.
From the first segment:
She died without knowing it -- out like a candle
She was completely unaware of her surroundings
I pressed her hand and she started to talk, neither seeing nor hearing me, not conscious of anything
Exactly five hours went by in the same way until, at twenty-one minutes past eleven in the evening, she (Mozart's mother) passed away
Substitute the soldiers for Mozart's mother. Out like a candle, they neither see nor hear, they're not conscious of anything, they undergo a spiritual death, their voices snuffed out, the spirit of a collapsed empire snuffed out.
The Steppe. Nothing but steppe all round. Minefields. Cake. A New Year.
A bird. Looks like a baby bird. So tiny and delicate. Curious. Eager. Watchful. Takes flight. It's wingspan expansive, a much bigger bird than it seemed to be.
A gun battle with the invisible enemy. About an hour long. Nothing violent appears on screen but you can feel the fear of eminent battle and you can almost taste the metallic heat of the shrapnel mingled with dust and sweat.
Day turns to night, soldiers' limp bodies and sleeping faces seamlessly merging and disappearing into the crumbled landscape. Passing from the body into the earth, in the morning, passing from the earth into the body.
Leaden storm-clouds. A new musical palette. A ship horn. Ship horns and dissonant strings conjuring up icy churning waters. Icy churning waters juxtaposed against crumbled martian landscape. Clouds move to the menacing music of Takemitsu and Wagner. Roseate and ochre tints fade out. Landscape devoid of colour. Men devoid of colour. Men falling into a state of desuetude.
Humanity falling into a state of desuetude thanks to the Military-Industrial Complex.
A painting. Or a real landscape. Desolving into the vespertine hour. Translunary veneer. Snow blanketing the Russian earth. It might be Isaak Levitan's "Eternal Rest" filling up the screen. It might be a real Russian landscape. Tremulous Sokuvoran micro-undulations confuse the eye. Floating landscape. Delicate elegiac piano-sequined chauntacoustics of Mozart, Beethoven, Messiaen, three embattled lives, drift up from the snowy underworld, melancholic sounds, invocations of angels, evocations of demons. Susurrating narration punctuates sublimity of music and fantasy snows cape. Darkness deepens. Candles burn but briefly, stars outshine themselves. A figure transepts across the landscape. Disappears amidst trees. A flame. A glittering spangle of birds. This is a real place after all. A shift from dawn to dusk and the body and face of a soldier mistily emerges.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of unplumbed profundity in a martian-like sun-bleached spallated paleaceous rock-blasted scoured flayed ruddied ochred rufescent gizzard lifeless trackless Afghanistan-Tajikistan border-landscape alongside silent sunbleared Slavic Russian (and Central Asian) soldiers maundering through the torrid chaff-dusted waste-blasted land.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of dizzying vertical navigation giving way to melancholic horizontal quiescence.
The agony of sunlight the ontology of waiting the agony of restlessness the pointlessness of war the fantasia of night.
Nations and Men enslaved by sciamachic war. Invisible enemies. Alien world where soldiers do not belong.
Soldiers motionless and muted and scattered. A book of Russian fairy tales opened to "The Tale Of The One-Eyed Devil".
Atavistic bare-boned daily routine. A collapsed empire uncreating its own sons. Skin and bone and boots and guns. Uncreating and unlearned and inhumane.
From the first segment:
She died without knowing it -- out like a candle
She was completely unaware of her surroundings
I pressed her hand and she started to talk, neither seeing nor hearing me, not conscious of anything
Exactly five hours went by in the same way until, at twenty-one minutes past eleven in the evening, she (Mozart's mother) passed away
Substitute the soldiers for Mozart's mother. Out like a candle, they neither see nor hear, they're not conscious of anything, they undergo a spiritual death, their voices snuffed out, the spirit of a collapsed empire snuffed out.
The Steppe. Nothing but steppe all round. Minefields. Cake. A New Year.
A bird. Looks like a baby bird. So tiny and delicate. Curious. Eager. Watchful. Takes flight. It's wingspan expansive, a much bigger bird than it seemed to be.
A gun battle with the invisible enemy. About an hour long. Nothing violent appears on screen but you can feel the fear of eminent battle and you can almost taste the metallic heat of the shrapnel mingled with dust and sweat.
Day turns to night, soldiers' limp bodies and sleeping faces seamlessly merging and disappearing into the crumbled landscape. Passing from the body into the earth, in the morning, passing from the earth into the body.
Leaden storm-clouds. A new musical palette. A ship horn. Ship horns and dissonant strings conjuring up icy churning waters. Icy churning waters juxtaposed against crumbled martian landscape. Clouds move to the menacing music of Takemitsu and Wagner. Roseate and ochre tints fade out. Landscape devoid of colour. Men devoid of colour. Men falling into a state of desuetude.
Humanity falling into a state of desuetude thanks to the Military-Industrial Complex.
Oral history and storytelling enables the past, present, future, and mythical realms to exist simultaneously alongside light-cultivator Ningiuq, providing her the lessons and strength and wisdom she needs to carry her grandson Maniq through each and every moment of their existence
Faces are topological atlases mapping tundra
Infinitely boundless trackless isolated snowsplendant glacially-suncupped sastrugied panoramas magnify climatic extremity and timelessness and cosmic uncertainty
The Sun's caravel of light disconcernedly aureates their earth, our earth, in titian gold
A watery womb of emerald sunlight shimmers under the water, winking endlessly back onto itself
The point of a needle needles out of the fabric of existence an entire population of Inuit (except for Ningiuq and Maniq), a devastating history reduced to an exclamation point, its intensity viscerally experienced in sweeping panoramas of empty snowscapes
A woman lights the quilliq and a woman keeps the fire burning and another woman hundreds of years later turned on a camera light and keeps the fire burning
A raven flew over a beach. Suddenly a bowhead whale surfaced and swallowed it whole. Inside the whale it was very dark. Like a cave. In the distance the raven saw the flickering light of an oil lamp.
A girl was trying desperately to keep the light from dying.
The raven heard the girl's voice: "You must be faithful to me. Promise never to touch this light."
The raven promised, "I'll never touch it."
But when the girl returned to her work the raven forgot his promise and touched the lamp, and when the light went out, the girl fell over, dead. The raven realized his terrible mistake. The girl had taken possession of the raven's soul and when the light went out, so did the raven's heart.
I just had a dream. It was a beautiful dream. Of little children. I was pregnant. One was a human being, the other looked like a bear club. I loved them both. But I loved one more than the other, I don't know why. I took a harpoon and pierced the cub on its back. It died right away. The human child shrank until it vanished. And went back into my womb. I understand my dream. I really wanted to bear a child myself, but I adopted one. It felt like he was my own. I love him very much.
I have heard that they haven't always been ptarmigans. There was an old woman and her grandson who were all alone, maybe like us. When the grandson went to bed he asked his grandmother to tell a story. "Grandmother, please tell me a story." "I don't have any stories, get comfortable and go to sleep." But the child insisted and started to cry, "Grandmother tell me a story."
Finally, the grandmother started to tell: "Story, Story....Bay lemmings....having no fur....arms folded in.... start falling....feels ticklish."
The grandson was so startled, he shouted "teeook!" and flew off.
He turned into a snow bunting and flew away right out the air hole.
The grandmother looked all around and said, "Grandson, where did you go?" Again and again, "Where are you?"
Then she cried so much, and she wiped her eyes so much, that her eyes turned red, but she couldn't find him. Finally, she put her needles in her boots.
Then she took her oil lamp wick and hung it around her neck. That's the collar filled with seeds around the ptarmigan's neck.
And then she went, "Ap-ap-ap-ap-ap!" And flew off to join her grandson. He was so startled he turned into a snow bunting.
She went flying right out after him. Too bad! But it must have been all right as long as they were together again. That the end of that story.
We are meat, we are spirit
We have blood and we have grace
We have a will and we have muscle
A soul and a face
Why must we die
We have eyes and intuition
A DNA code and a name
Some tend to logic, some superstition
We have an aura and a frame
Why must we die
We are human, we are angel
We have feet and wish for wings
We are carbon, we are ether
We are saints, we are kings
Why must we die
Why must we die
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
We never found our Eldorado
Where we were born
We are meat, we are spirit
We have blood and we have grace
We have a will and we have muscle
A soul and a face
Why must we die
Why must we die
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
We never found our Eldorado
Where we were born
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
Faces are topological atlases mapping tundra
Infinitely boundless trackless isolated snowsplendant glacially-suncupped sastrugied panoramas magnify climatic extremity and timelessness and cosmic uncertainty
The Sun's caravel of light disconcernedly aureates their earth, our earth, in titian gold
A watery womb of emerald sunlight shimmers under the water, winking endlessly back onto itself
The point of a needle needles out of the fabric of existence an entire population of Inuit (except for Ningiuq and Maniq), a devastating history reduced to an exclamation point, its intensity viscerally experienced in sweeping panoramas of empty snowscapes
A woman lights the quilliq and a woman keeps the fire burning and another woman hundreds of years later turned on a camera light and keeps the fire burning
A raven flew over a beach. Suddenly a bowhead whale surfaced and swallowed it whole. Inside the whale it was very dark. Like a cave. In the distance the raven saw the flickering light of an oil lamp.
A girl was trying desperately to keep the light from dying.
The raven heard the girl's voice: "You must be faithful to me. Promise never to touch this light."
The raven promised, "I'll never touch it."
But when the girl returned to her work the raven forgot his promise and touched the lamp, and when the light went out, the girl fell over, dead. The raven realized his terrible mistake. The girl had taken possession of the raven's soul and when the light went out, so did the raven's heart.
I just had a dream. It was a beautiful dream. Of little children. I was pregnant. One was a human being, the other looked like a bear club. I loved them both. But I loved one more than the other, I don't know why. I took a harpoon and pierced the cub on its back. It died right away. The human child shrank until it vanished. And went back into my womb. I understand my dream. I really wanted to bear a child myself, but I adopted one. It felt like he was my own. I love him very much.
I have heard that they haven't always been ptarmigans. There was an old woman and her grandson who were all alone, maybe like us. When the grandson went to bed he asked his grandmother to tell a story. "Grandmother, please tell me a story." "I don't have any stories, get comfortable and go to sleep." But the child insisted and started to cry, "Grandmother tell me a story."
Finally, the grandmother started to tell: "Story, Story....Bay lemmings....having no fur....arms folded in.... start falling....feels ticklish."
The grandson was so startled, he shouted "teeook!" and flew off.
He turned into a snow bunting and flew away right out the air hole.
The grandmother looked all around and said, "Grandson, where did you go?" Again and again, "Where are you?"
Then she cried so much, and she wiped her eyes so much, that her eyes turned red, but she couldn't find him. Finally, she put her needles in her boots.
Then she took her oil lamp wick and hung it around her neck. That's the collar filled with seeds around the ptarmigan's neck.
And then she went, "Ap-ap-ap-ap-ap!" And flew off to join her grandson. He was so startled he turned into a snow bunting.
She went flying right out after him. Too bad! But it must have been all right as long as they were together again. That the end of that story.
We are meat, we are spirit
We have blood and we have grace
We have a will and we have muscle
A soul and a face
Why must we die
We have eyes and intuition
A DNA code and a name
Some tend to logic, some superstition
We have an aura and a frame
Why must we die
We are human, we are angel
We have feet and wish for wings
We are carbon, we are ether
We are saints, we are kings
Why must we die
Why must we die
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
We never found our Eldorado
Where we were born
We are meat, we are spirit
We have blood and we have grace
We have a will and we have muscle
A soul and a face
Why must we die
Why must we die
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
We never found our Eldorado
Where we were born
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
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