This most recent film by Sokurov and his team is based on a continuous and fluent structure. The film has been made with the aid of documentary archive material, but the object was not to provide factual information. It is a film poem built up of fragments of reality. Within the language of film, the documentary and the lyrical are regarded as opposites, but in the work of Alexandr Sokurov they are one and the same. Both in his feature films and his documentaries, everyday life now or in the past is incorporated in a poetic way. In this cinematographic lamentation, very different images are woven together; a song about the suffering of Russia. The country which, despite everything that has happened to it this century, is not completely lost. But whether it has really been found remains a question mark for Sokurov. The film looks in a new way at a phenomenon such as war; not as a masculine game with weapons, but as a phenomenon which parallels the destruction of nature. It would appear that an explosion on a battlefield long ago, makes a leaf fall off a tree in another era. Yet maybe it is a human being after all. The different images are all conceived of as phenomena of our age and our life. We can identify with them without ever coming across them in our everyday life. The film touches the emotional historical memory of all of us.
