Kamen

Cinema suspends the past by materialising the light that touches celluloid, and is in this way always a kind of audiovisual museum. At the same time, what is captured is first bent through one lens or another, not only suspending the relation of cinema’s moving images to the world but dislocating the world as such. In this double sense, film is always a kind of phenomenological epokhé, at least in potential. This dual suspension seems to define the contours of Sokurov’s aesthetic exploration.

Seems beamed it in from another time and dimension: hermetic doesn't even begin to describe its aura of self containment and inherent strangeness. It's a ghostly, muted meditation on time, death and cultural obsolescence. The stark, dreamlike B+W imagery is truly haunting and deeply affecting, recalling silent era film makers, particularly Dreyer, yet infused with an indefinable, inexplicable sense of otherness. Sokurov was laying the groundwork for the future with this film. Essential.