Natalya Sirivlya. Lenin's Moo

Lenin's Moo
Natalya Sirivlya

Publication date: April 6, 2001

"Taurus" is probably one of Sokurov's most perfect creations . With its rounded completeness and simplicity of form combined with the infinity of meaning, the film resembles a glass ball - an ideal device for meditation. Looking closely, you can come up with anything, although skeptics are certainly disappointed - well, ball and ball, glass and glass...

Well, just think, on the screen is Lenin , who has fallen into a state of pathological insanity. We have known for a long time that the leader of the world proletariat in the last years of his life was not able to control either the state or his own speech. Yes, the clinically accurate picture of the disease is impressive, as is the authenticity of the most complex makeup that turned the artist Mozgovoy into a living copy of the leader. Yes, the setting of the estate in Gorki was reconstructed on the screen with incredible production scope and scrupulous fidelity to detail. Yes, nature - all these fogs, a park drowning in dampness and greenery, umbrellas of meadow dreaminess, the slow running of clouds in the evening sky - fascinates with its beauty. All components of the film, from the script ( Yu. Arabov ) to the picture (the cameraman is A. Sokurov himself), from the scenery to the sound and editing, are marked by the degree of impeccability that is a sign of a true masterpiece. But why all this?

Just so that Lenin, who for some was an idol, for others a villain and character in political jokes, appears before us as a man and, due to his tragic helplessness, evokes sympathy and compassion? The illness and death of any person can evoke sympathy. This is a platitude. True, in Sokurov such banality strangely unfolds into a magical string of meanings.

The visual drama of the film is based on the fact that the well-known image constantly appears from unexpected angles and situations. Here is Ilyich, naked, dragging his leg, wandering around the room, wrapped in a holey blanket. Here he is bathed and swaddled like a baby. Here the burly guard hits the leader on the hand, taking away the “wrong” newspaper. Here, in a familiar cap, he poses for a photograph, and in the ensuing scuffle between the guards and the photographer, he is unceremoniously pushed away and shoved like an unnecessary thing. So, after a meeting with Stalin , he - dressed, in boots - collapses absurdly on the bed. A wide-angle camera standing at the foot of the bed captures a motionless leg in close-up and somewhere in the depths of the frame, out of focus, a distorted, although recognizable face... A face replicated in millions and millions of images; the face of a man who had a titanic capacity for work and an unbridled will to power; the face of a helpless paralytic who huntedly asks the party for poison, because he is unable to live without having power even over his own body.

In essence, everything that happens in the film is the conflictual interaction of these three principles: political myth, personality and natural elements, in this case - the elements of disease. The action is structured as a series of instantaneous breakthroughs of degrading consciousness through an increasingly uncontrollable, dying bodily shell. As soon as his “I” takes control of his physical body to some extent, Lenin begins to crawl somewhere, demand connection with the outside world, irritably command or destroy everything around him. He craves only one thing - power. The organic course of life evokes in him rejection, anger, and a desire to spur history again and again with a revolutionary whip. But illness, a destructive element that has settled within him, takes over. In the finale, when Lenin, having already completely lost his mind, bellows, looking with dim eyes at the evening sky, his titanic personality completely disappears, his soul either dissolves in nature, or reconciles with Heaven...

At the same time, the Lenin myth, present in the minds of every viewer (except, perhaps, very young ones), forces us to constantly and automatically correlate what is happening on the screen with the official iconography and the official version of the life and death of the leader. We, who lived our lives surrounded by his portraits and statues, know what kind of legacy this man left. We still exist on the ruins of the system he created. So on one side of the scale in the film there is a picture of the absolute defeat of the tyrant who encroached on the course of history, on the other there is an awareness of how bloody, effective and long-lasting the historical experiment he conceived turned out to be.

The Lenin myth is nothing more than a primitive, Soviet variation of the myth of absolute power over history and nature. In the eternal conflict between "I" and "not-I", man invariably strives to impose his will on the world. Sokurov is not alien to these power claims, although he implements them on a purely aesthetic plane. His cinema, which imposes on the viewer a special type of perception, its relentless desire to look into the abyss, to know the unknown and to capture on the screen the mystery of non-existence, are in line with the titanic intentions of modernist culture. That is why, both in the previous film about Hitler and in the film about Lenin, he does not distance himself entirely from his characters. Their drama for him is the embodiment of the universal historical drama, their guilt is an expression of the collective guilt of humanity, which dared to conquer the world, their torment is a particular manifestation of the general tragedy of fallen man. It is for him that Sokurov calls us to feel sorrowful and sad sympathy. And the extremely local, limited by place and time, picture of the extinction of a leader broken by a stroke, like an ideal sphere, absorbs an infinite number of semantic connotations - from intimate and private to universal-cosmic.