Spiritual Voices 1995, 327 min., colour, Betacam SP, Stereo ESKOMFILM Lenfilm Roskomkino North Foundation Pandora Co., Ltd (Japan) scenario: A. Sokurov camera: A. Burov sound: S. Moshkov “…We began to make our film in summer, then came again in winter. We worked in the places, where war is daily routine, where the state of war is not a sudden attack, but the normal life itself. Namely — fighting operations on the border between Tadjikistan and Afghanistan. Sometimes it were many days of troubled waiting. Sometimes battle: assault or repulse of it. But always there were victims, and always there was parting from the relatives and friends. And always anguish and abandonment. Proceeding from the idea of my home country, which I have formed, Russia is a land permanently waging war, and people here are formed always ready to go to war. Our national heroes are peoples who took part in war — not those who created something unusual, sitting and working peacefully. Russia is hardly imaginable for me without those convulsions of war, without this military trembling.” Alexander Sokurov (from the TV interview before the demonstration of the film) “From the military diaries” — that is the subheading of the film. That's how the author has marked its genre. War in the film has no chronological bounds, only seasonal stages are clearly defined. An artist's diary where the people at war are shown — and at the same time the intimate author's feelings are revealed; it is a form of narration traditional for the literature, Russian writers used it time and again, but it isn't traditional for TV. The jury of the film festival in Locarno marked this novelty, giving to the film a special prize of SONY with the words: “For penetration into the sources of the language of images, which helped to the filmmaker to master the Video, representing in the metaphorical form his alarm and these of a people, who lives constantly in the conditions of war.” The film develops as the author’s diary, where unbiased narration is dissolved in the lyrical intonation. You watch the real persons in the particular circumstances on the screen. They are Russian frontier–guards on the Tadjik–Afghani border. But it is also a piece of art, where aesthetic laws give the theme and arrange the facts taken from life. That is why the film begins with the story about Mozart, about death concealing under the poor cover of the daily routine, about music, breaking through this cover and absorbing spiritual voices of the Universe. And that's why the northern landscape is being shown during a long while, motionless and at the same time subtly changing. The border between life, which is far away, and death, which is always close, this is the environment of the people in the war. That's why they attract author’s attention — and ours as well. Sometimes the filmmaker identifies himself with these people. Sokurov grew up in the family of a military officer and he understands the boyish curiosity for the warfare, in which youths must be engaged. He follows the people in the soldiers’ boots, and we, spectators, follow him; but suddenly he separates himself from his personages, he looks at them tenderly, he is puzzled, he suffers and prays. Refined, manifold image of space, re­constructed on the screen, delicate sounding images are metaphorical, as well as human portraits, though the film was made in the real situation of the war, and the characters are not products of fantasy. You watch not the routine chronicle of the frontier post — it is the frontier situation of the human life: ignorance of the future, anguish, surrendering to fate, but at the same time — concentration of all the vital powers in the moment of danger, strain of will in the struggle for existence. Alexandra Tuchinskaya