Whispering Pages

Alexander Sokurov’s “Whispering Pages,” made in 1993 and financed with funds accumulated as if in a nightmare (Krupp Steel and Ruhr Coal are two companies credited), looks like no other film. This is characteristic of Sokurov’s film practice -- each of his pictures is sui generis; this is either an extraordinary feat of creativity or a curse, depending upon your perspective. “Whispering Pages” is subtitled as “derived from motifs in Russian literature of the XIXth century” and the movie looks like a daguerreotype or a mezzotint slowly dissolving in some kind of acrid, chemical fog -- indeed, one sequence of the film, literally indecipherable to my eyes, seems to show the interior of a blast furnace, an alchemical inferno with weird piston-shaped forms that appear to be generating hazes of sulfuric acid that are corroding either the surface of the viewer’s eyes or the film stock or both. (This is not merely a fantasy -- the film was, in fact, completely lost and thought to be irretrievable until a single 35 mm negative turned up somewhere in Germany; the strange, misty sepia tones of “Whispering Pages” may be attributable in part to the film’s troubled provenance.) Just about every image in the movie is astonishing and disturbing in equal measure: the opening shot depicts a colossal wall with curious appendages -- millwork or fire-escapes or ladders, who can tell? At the base of this huge, industrial wall, there is a canal full of dank water. Some birds with startling white plumage beat about in this vast cistern. A haggard young man is wandering around in subterranean galleries that seem to be bored into the base of the wall. Some thugs confront him and lift him in the air, remarking at how light he is -- “light as a feather,” someone exclaims. An old woman has been murdered and the young man seems to have something to do with the homicide. Perhaps, he fantasizes that he has killed the old woman. Everything is dull brown and grey, lightless, off-center -- there is some kind of deep well into which people plunge one after another, apparently drunkenly committing suicide. Cityscapes of desolate brick warehouses and piers shimmer in what seem to be drops of water, globular on other images of vacant brickyards and empty corridors. Things seem to be either enormous or curiously doll-like and miniature. People enter the frame from unexpected angles and there are various hellish stairwells rimmed with flimsy ascending and descending steps and filigree balustrade. A character will be filmed from a half-dozen yards behind his filthy shoulders -- then, a reverse shot will reveal the figure sitting in an alcove no more that 18 inches deep; where was the camera located? Various gloomy chambers, like niches in an underground cave, afford claustrophobic spaces where the young man confronts other characters: a bureaucrat like a figure from Gogol, a saintly young prostitute derived from Sonya in “Crime and Punishment”, poverty-stricken Jews and gypsies, a lumbering ghoulish ruffian who once again lifts the young man in his arms and, then, yanks viciously on his hair. A kind of seizure transfixes the bureaucrat and he freezes into a eerie tableaux like an image from an ancient, half-decayed newspaper and, then, the screen shows us more mist and fog, the image gradually clearing to reveal a painting by Hubert Robert that is, itself, surrealistically odd: it is another underground cavern made of towering Roman arches surrounding a lagoon where little gondolas are plying the dark waters. The prostitute tells the gaunt young man to go to the town square and pray. The young man mocks her as a whore. On the soundtrack, we hear distant snippets of Mahler, satanic laughter, fragments of quarrels and endlessly dripping and flowing water. In the city square, there is a vast forty-foot tall monument to a panther. Crowds stagger like zombies around the panther. At the end of the movie, the young man sits between the haunches of the house-high stone panther and idly tries to suck on the monument’s grape-shaped teats. More fog drifts across the image and the picture of the panther looks like an engraving by Dore. And, with this enigma, the film comes to an end.