Tichije stranicy

Film communicates with the visual art of its time as intensively as with literary sources - black and white photography, image, and graphics. Sokurov's classic long shots sometimes transform into complete pauses in the film flow, and at that moment, in my opinion, the status of the film changes as well. It's as if, instead of connecting to the narrative tradition of literature, he tries to join the visual tradition of the aforementioned genres (this tendency is stronger in the first half than in the second, where the dialogue of J. Arabov and A. Černik slightly begins to prevail). In the context of the inspiration from 19th-century literature, this means one thing - the film transforms into a book illustration. Indeed, some sequences (freezing into a still image) seem to call out after being torn out from the movie screen and pasted into some sort of Dostoevsky. However, this does not change the fact that Sokurov boldly chose the less known, even seemingly minor (yet important for the period atmosphere) scenes and locations from critically realist literature and transformed them into a unique source of inspiration. (25.07.2015)