Fiona Björling

Quiet Voices: The Significance of Subdued Dialogue and Voice-Over in the Films of Aleksandr Sokurov

Many of Sokurovs films, features as well as documentaries, are characterised by scant or subdued dialogue and/or voice-over narration. This aesthetic style of the predominance of visual over verbal expression is understood as a direct expression of Sokurovs concern with mortality and death. The argument proceeds from a semiotic distinction between language as basically discrete and moving pictures as basically indiscrete. By subduing the discrete semantics of language, Sokurov gives precedence to the potential of moving images to pursue the indiscrete flow of human life as it moves inevitably towards the moment of death, to the vanishing point of human existence. Six films are examined: The Lonely Voice of Man (Odinokij golos čeloveka); Whispering Pages (Tichie stranicy) and Spiritual Voices (Duchovnye golosa); Moloch, Taurus (Telec) and The Sun. The first three films reveal quietness as a mode of contemplation in the face of death, while the last three feature the three despots, Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito, in political retreat.

When the Film Is Better Than the Book : Elem Klimov's Farewell and Valentin Rasputin's Farewell to Matyora

64 Fiona Björling is professor of Slavic languages and literature at the Department of Eastern and Central European Studies, Lund University (Sweden). Her recent publications include “Blind Leaps of Passion and Other Strategies to Outwit Inevitability: On Pasternak and the Legacy from the Turn of the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century,” in her edited volume On the Verge: Russian Thought Between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries (Lund: Lunds universitet, 2001), pp. 131– 49; “Language, Poetry, and Ideology: Bucharin, Pasternak, and Bachtin in 1934– 35,” presented at a conference on “Cultural Semiotics: Cultural Mechanisms, Boundaries, Identities,” Tartu, February 26–March 2, 2002, and now scheduled for publication; and “As Time Goes By: Present Tense Narration in the Contemporary Novel,” forthcoming in a festschrift for Professor Peter Alberg Jensens. Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 40, no. 3, Summer 2004, pp. 64–78.