This month we are attending the 68th Venice Film Festival that takes place from August 31st to September 10th. Among the selection of films running for the main prize is Alexander Sokurov’s highly anticipated feature Faust, the last piece in Sokurov’s tetralogy on the spirit of power, following Moloch (1999), Taurus (2001) and The Sun (2005). It deals with the subject of Dr. Faustus – a famous literary character from Germany who sells his soul to the devil to acquire knowledge (the story of Dr. Faustus, or Faustus, was picked up in many literary adaptations, the most prominent one being Johann Wolfang von Goethe’s two-part play). In anticipation of Sokurov’s latest piece, we have dedicated our September issue to the Russian director…

After completing a degree in history, Alexander Sokurov was admitted to the prestigious Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow where he met Andrei Tarkovsky. Many of Sokurov’s early features were banned in the Soviet Union until the mid-80s, when the Perestroika developments under Gorbatschow generated a more liberal atmosphere for art (Mournful Unconcern was completed in 1983, but released only in 1986; in 1987 it screened in the competition of the Berlin International Film Festival). The breakthrough came in 1997 with Mother and Son that also screened at the Berlinale, in which a young man nurses his dying mother. In 2003, Sokurov reversed this mother-son constellation in Father and Son, which we reviewed for our May issue. For this month’s Retrospectives section, Moritz Pfeifer examines the notion of perspective in Mother and Son. Also, Stefania Marghitu approaches Sokurov’s well-known Russian Ark from 2002, challenging the question whether it can be seen as a revolutionary film.

For this month’s Perspectives section, we looked at The Sun from 2005, the most recent film in Sokurov’s series on power that portrays the 20th century Japanese emperor Hirohito, and, finally, Alexandra, Sokurov’s most recent feature, in which an old woman sets out on a journey to visit her grandson in the army…

EEFB editors
Moritz Pfeifer & Konstanty Kuzma