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From Hitler To Faust Alexander Sokurovs
From Hitler To Faust Alexander Sokurovs
from my belief that theatre and theatre studies gain a lot from works of art produced
in other genres. This is particularly the case, I believe, when it comes to classical
texts, that is, plays written centuries ago that to become relavant in the present ask for
a different kind of light to be shed on them. In that sense, my mentality is very close
to the Russian director’s view that as an artist he has mostly been influenced not by
historical figures like Hitler, Lenin and the Japanese emperor Hirohito. As he
explains, his first degree was in history, thus the influence and interest in it is lifelong.
Consequently, he cannot see Russian life as an aesthetic phenomenon per se. As for
Faust, the legendary man who sold his soul to the devil to obtain ultimate power over
things known and unknown in life, Sokurov’s attraction seems only natural for a man
who is so concerned with what is good and what is evil in human nature. This is a
motif often expressed in his interviews but I would rather quote from his documentary
The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn where he admits: “I’d like to understand why the
1
Alexander Prokhorov informs us that by the mid-1990s Russian cinema had started reconsidering
perestroika and the first post-Soviet years. The result of this reevaluation was two different ideological
trends. One is the cinema that distills from the tradition of Russian classical humanist literature
(Pushkin, Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, and Leo Tolstoi) and its dissidents (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for
example). They offered their version of humanism as an alternative to Soviet humanism, driven by the
values of Enlightenment and its belief in the inherent goodness and rationality of human nature, and
hope for a perfect community in the distant or immediate future. Still, Prokhorov suggests that the
cinema of the major auteur filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s, Aleksei German, Kira Muratova, and
Alexander Sokurov, belongs to the anti-Enlightenment trend of Russian culture. See, Alexander
Prokhorov, “From Family Reintegration to Carnivalistic Degradation: Dismantling Soviet Communal
Myths in Russian Cinema of the Mid-1990s”, The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 51, No. 2,
Special Forum Issue: Resent, Reassess, and Reinvent: The Three R's of Post-Soviet Cinema (Summer,
2007), pp. 272-294.
1
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
The man he confesses his concern about good and evil to is not just anyone.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the Russian Nobel laurate novelist and historian, the first to
reveal the horrors of the gulag, the Soviet Union’s Siberian forced labour camps in his
novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, written in 1962, and The Gulag
Archipelago, published between 1973 and 1975. For his criticism against Stalin, he
spent eight years in prisons and labour camps, three years in enforced exile whilst
upon the publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago in the West, he was
arrrested and charged with treason (in 1974). He was immediately exiled from the
Soviet Union and settled down in the United States to return to Russia twenty years
later, in 1994, thanks to the introduction of glasnost in the country in the late 1980s.
In that sense, it is really interesting that Sokurov seeks an answer from a man
whose entire life has been marked by human evil and cruelty, embodied mainly in the
face of the Soviet authoritarian regime. Equally interesting for the purposes of our
discussion is Solzhenitsyn’s response that cruelty and kindness are the two extreme
poles and that the whole spectrum of human nature should not be reduced to these. 2
Even the most infamous of Shakespeare’s villains, I would add, Richard III, finds
ways to justify himself and thus be justified, at least partly. However, as Solzhenitsyn
writes in the opening chapter of The Gulag Archipelago “The imagination and
had no ideology… It is thanks to ideology that it fell to the lot of the twentieth century
two Russians, is not pure ontological and metaphysical reflection but reveals a
2
In The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn. directed by Alexander Sokurov, 1998.
3
A. Solshenitsyn, in Malia Martin, “Review: A World on Two Fronts: Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag
Archipelago”, The Russian Review, Vol.36, No.1 (Jan., 1977), 46-63.
2
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
historicized concern about “ubiquitous power”,4 set against the backdrop of 20th
century history.
For both Sokurov and Solzhenitsyn evil is not an abstract notion but always
has a face; it is personal, found in a man and caused by a man. In that sense, evil
becomes a choice.5 Each of Sokurov’s protagonists makes a choice. “At what price
does a man choose to sell—or on the contrary, not to sell—his soul? That’s what these
films talk about, most of all. And the consequences that ensue, of course”. 6 Thus, in
the “idiosyncratic biographies” of Hitler (in Moloch, 1999), Lenin (in Taurus, 2001)
and Japanese Emperor Hirohito (in The Sun, 2005), the director turns his lens on their
“shadowy inner lives”,7 indifferent to the myth that surrounds these emblematic
tyrannical figures. Like the Shakespearean villains, Sokurov’s villains are humans
stripped off their myth: the arrogant hypochondriac Hitler, the bedridden dying Lenin,
and the disillusioned Hirohito are portrayed in grotesgue realism, which lacks any
tragic overtones. Sokurov sees them as mere humans, places them in specific
physical locations, narrow time spans and shoots crucial private moments of transition
3
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
death, empire and culture in these films; they form the “conudrum” that “the political
leader has been powerful but not immortal”, following the course of “acme, decline
and transformation”.9 By contrast, art, which may be vulnerable and weak within the
milieu produced, typically asserts its immortal nature in the long run.
Turning from history to art in his attempt to tackle the question of good and
evil, Sokurov does not resort to Marx, Engel and Lenin’s favourite Shakespeare, and
plays like Richard III or Macbeth, to complete his tetralogy, but to another pre-
revolutionary classic of the Western canon and favourite of Pushkin and Dostoevsky,
Goethe’s Faust. The final film of the tetralogy of power, Faust, sheds a different light
on the historical villains of the 20th century, proving that the Enlightenment Everyman
in his quest for absolute knowledge and power transformed the 20 th century world
history into a course of traumatic events. Ever since Shakespeare, literature has been
attracted to such amoral creatures who have turned their back to God, rejecting thus
the very axiomatic existence of good and evil. As Dostoevsky asserted “If there is no
and deification of man instead paved the way to a century of mass killings.
face and monstrous body, Margarete’s angelic face and body and a faceless corpse.
His adventure in knowledge and power actually starts from the dead faceless body.
rituals in the bunkers of his compound. He tries to ignore the victorious Americans and the firebombing
of the city of Tokyo but in the end he will publically renounce his divine status. All three are seen in
mundane actions that reveal the ‘small’ man behind the ‘big’ myth: Andy, that is Hitler, is a scatological
hypohondriac; he cannot bear unpleasant smells, cannot bear the sight of puppies, that is, life, and is
afraid of illness and death. Hirohito is depicted as grown up child ignorant of the real world he is about
to enter.
9
Nancy Condee, The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema, New York: Oxford UP, 2009, 167
10
M.D. Aeschliman, “Solzhenitsyn and Modern Literature”, August 1990,
https://www.firstthings.com/article/1990/08/007-solzhenitsyn-and-modern-literature
[12/9/2016]
4
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
After descending from heavens to a filthy German town, the camera focuses on the
penis of this cadaver, being dissected by Faust. Faust, that is, is depicted as one that
perpetuates this fascination with anatomy that had started to systematically develop in
early modern times. The Cartesian separation of the body from the soul, and the
consequent view of the body as a machine seem to befit Sokurov’s Faust who equally
Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Joan Deyman, Faust searches for the seat of the soul in the
interiority of a dead body: is soul to be found in the extracted heart, the long, dark,
filthy entrails or the syphilitic inert penis?11 Together with his assistant Wagner, they
discuss the possible location of the soul. A little later, Wagner will say: "Good doesn't
The juxtaposition of their living bodies vs a dead body, of life vs death, of the
eloquence of life vs the silence that accompanies death, of the penis as a locus of
desire and fertlity and the cancellation of both at the sight of the impotent member of
a deceased man, all these encapsulate what Sokurov’s Faust is about: death, culture
and as we will immediatley see empire. For Faust is not only a restless seeker of
answers but peniless and starving. Yes, he is seeking for knowledge but he is equally
communist Russia. For soon enough he will be transformed into “a grotesgue, reptile-
the Satan being ugly, thus bearing God’s stigma and making his immorality visible. In
11
See Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance
Culture, NY: Routledge, 1995.
12
Abraham Jugum. “128. Russian Director Alexander Sokurov’s German Film ‘Faust’ (2011):
Reflecting on the Faust Syndrome in our Lives”, in Movies that Make you Think, May 07, 2012.
[23/5/2017]
13
ibid.
5
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
Sokurov does not even follow the example of Thomas Mann’s Mephistopheles, who
is totally secular.14 His Mephistopheles is a beast in the post Renaissance sense of the
wondrous beings that are physically deformed. They are not treated with horror (and
this is how the inhabitants of the town in which Mephistopheles lives react), they are
not considered to be repulsive but they are approached with physica curiosa, that is
On the contrary, Margarete, the young woman that fascinates Faust is not just
the typical idea of Beauty in Western art, which identifies Beauty with Goodness and
sustains the doxa that God is light. Thomas Aquinas proposed that Beauty requires
three things: proportion, integrity and claritas, i.e. clarity and luminosity, 16 and
amorous passion that will never, however, be transformed into Dante’s Beatrice, that
Faust is a latently cruel male: he mistreats his servant, murders, stones, takes a
woman mainly out of lust; this is a totally demystified, desecrecated Faust, unlike
maleness: male strengths and weaknesses, male sentiments and rivalries, male
sensitivity and violence”. As mentioned beforehand, Faust “starts with a big close-up
14
Ουμπέρτο Έκο, Ιστορία της Ασχήμιας, μτφρ. Δήμητρα Δότση και Ανταίος Χρυσοστομίδης, Αθήνα,
Καστανιώτη, 2007, 179-183.
15
ibid., 241-243.
16
ibid, 100.
17
ibid, 171.
6
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
of a penis and scrotum […] and wades through a fragmentary, dispersed narrative in
which a man ultimately discovers his inner Ubermensch”, the Nietzschean Superman,
“trampling on other men and women along the way”. 18 Faust will even stone
Mephistopheles to death.
The end of the film finds the two away from the narrow streets and tiny rooms
Breaking his deal with the devil, Faust becomes the true absolute evil, ready now to
be reborn as a “tyrant”, “a political leader”, “an oligarch”. 19 This is the tyrant of the
future and unlike the typical pattern of “acme, decline and trnsformation” encountered
in Moloch, Taurus and The Sun, Sokurov here depicts the way to “acme”. Faust is the
opposite of the divine Hirohito, who had to learn to be a common mortal. In that
sense, the harsh, volcanic landscape of the finale is the new territory to be conquered
The finale was shot in Iceland, revealing Sokurov’s interest in “border zones”,
that is, “marginal spaces and liminal states”, which involve geographical and
historical settings, plots and the life experiences of many of his protagonists. Thus
Hitler in Moloch is not in Berlin but in his mountain retreat, Lenin in Taurus spends
the last days of his life away from Kremlin in an estate at Gorki, Hirohito in The Sun
prepares his speech of the renunciation of his imperial divinity in the final days of the
Second World War,21 and Faust is about to start his new life as a Nietzschean
7
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
Faust reveals the director’s skepticism over a century of mass killing and violence
that turned Enlightenment’s trust and hope in reason and man into despair, and
transformed the world’s modern historic course into a chain of cultural traumas such
8
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
Moloch (1999)
9
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
Taurus (2001)
10
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
11
Dr. Penelope Chatzidimitriou | “From Hitler to Faust: Alexander Sokurov’s
Tetralogy of Power” | Film Adaptation Conference, Thessaloniki, May 2017
Faust (2011)
12