Oriental Elegy 1996, 45 min., colour, Betacam SP, PAL, Stereo North Foundation NHK Lenfilm SONY Corporation scenario: A. Sokurov camera: A. Fedorov, Y.Kawabata sound: S. Moshkov art director: V. Zelinskaya Special thanks to Hiroko Kodjima. “…What a strange dream; the outlines of the houses ooze through the mist. They huddle together, rocking with the light wave — and it begins to seem that all this town is a small island, drifting in the space of the immense Ocean…” Alexander Sokurov (from the author's annotation) “…Weeks, spent in Japan, when we worked at our “Oriental Elegy,” seem today something improbable and unreal. When I remember those days now, I am afraid, understanding how great the risk was — the risk to fall down and break… The mountain which I decided to climb was too high. Besides, the ascend was made at the most unfavourable time and along the steepest slope. How much was it my merit, that the ascent was performed — and more or less successfully? It is mine, concerning only the reckless resolution with which I started. But it is mostly the success of my good friends from Japan, who believed me, helped me selflessly and directed me. My Japanese friends were kind, affectionate, disinterested, patient, tolerant — the very Japanese, whom I love dearly; and luckily, I cannot even imagine the Japanese otherwise. When the picture of a small Japanese town on a misty island was being created wonderfully by a human hand, I did not bother myself asking, what town it was, where, in what country it was situated. I tried to reconstruct the Feeling of Sorrow on the screen. “Oriental Elegy” is an attempt to find the sources of the very Image itself, an attempt to find them beyond the Painting, beyond the Literature. By this attempt the Image is being born inside the practical experience of Image.” Alexander Sokurov (from a letter to Hideki Mayeda) “Oriental Elegy” is the first piece of the Japanese video cycle, the creation of which is still going on. The genre of this cycle can hardly be considered as documentary; perhaps only because the real people are represented there in their normal conditions and surroundings. They are simple people, but you could not call them neither ordinary or typical for modern Japan. Their marginality lies not in the adherence to same old–fashioned patterns, routine and couleur local, but in a special tune of soul, where poetry and mythology — national and all–human — mean more than tokens of contemporary reality. In fact, the filmmaker, shooting the old people in the neglected interiors of the Japanese national lodgings, creates of the alien dead. Routine an unending poetical myth, especially keenly perceived by a European. Sokurov dips his characters into it like into some other space, where any “beyond the things” question is appropriate and intelligible much more than ordinary reality's details. Sokurov mythologises everything: those people themselves, their particular, always tragic fates and his mission of a modern Virgil. The film–maker opposes to the wide–spread TV–genre with his own unique experience of plunging into a culture, where East and West are only different facets of something united and single. Alexandra Tuchinskaya