1989, 38 min., colour
LSDF, Centre of Creative Initiative LO SFK

scenario: A. Sokurov, T. Smorodinskaya
camera: A. Burov
sound: V. Persov
editor: L. Semenova
consultant: A. Tuchinskaya

“The film is a part of documentary series planned as a story about the past and the modern life of Russia, its culture and history. “The Petersburg Elegy” consists of two parts: the story about the life of Shaliapin’s family, and an emotional generalization of the life of people in modern Leningrad. In any sense this film widens our knowledge of private life of the great compatriot and follows the first film of the “Elegies” series. The film is built in a narrative manner: the author comments the archive photos and film footage, he proposes to look attentively and without hurry at the face of one of the main characters of the film — Fiodor Fiodorovitch Shaliapin, an old Hollywood actor living in Italy who came to visit Leningrad 60 years after he left it. In the face of the son we recognize his great father’s features and at the same time we note that he is an ordinary man…”

Alexander Sokurov (from the author’s notes to the film)

This looking at our contemporary world from some outside point of view becomes even more intense, even more estranged in “The Petersburg Elegy.” Here we can see the world that lost support, faces of dismayed people and eyes that don’t see any future. It is the world that doesn’t have a genius, the world without an artist. That’s why it is so important to show the Brown’s movement of fluctuating, unsteady mass of contemporary people concentrated in the same place (a shop, a square) with an immovable camera. The present–day views of St. Petersburg, the former capital of the Russian empire, are uninhabited and cold. Only steam from sewerage hatches is warm.

And again a visit of one of the Shaliapins to Leningrad became the pretext for the film. This time it was Fiodor Fiodorovitch, a son of Shaliapin’s second marriage. He spent most of his life in Italy. For him St. Petersburg, the city that his father left forever in the beginning of the 1920th, is a long–awaited aim of a traveller. Private life, family problems of an artist are things that connect him to the society; and it is the personality of the artist that in many ways anticipates the future of this society, sets its “genetic code.” The care for the human qualities of the family, of the nation, of the human race, the care for such people as Shaliapin, should be the main aim of any society. This is the inner purpose of Sokurov’s films about his famous compatriots.

Alexandra Tuchinskaya

Translated by Olga Abramenko