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Among the films I watched over recent days, Sokurov’s Confession/ Povinnost (1998) impressed me the most. Not so much the film itself, as I admit to not be particularly fond of films that run over 200 minutes at a slow pace. My fascination came more from the two realizations which I made while seeing it, and immediately thereafter. First, Confession (more accurately translated as Service of Duty) is one of the most intensely homoerotc films I have ever seen, yet it does not seem to be a film that is recognized in the context of gay cinema. Secondly, the few reviews of the film downplay the intense homoeroticism or interpret it as a minor feature while foregrounding other aspects, thus raising questions about the underlying reasons of such critical myopia.

The first dimension: Homoerotic motives, have been present in Sokurov’s work from early on, at least since the feature Dni zatmeniya/ Days of Eclipse (1988, pictured) and the five-hour long documentary Spiritual Voices/Dukhovnie golosa (1995), both films evolving around Caucasian and Asian men cast away in some remote Asian locations, Turkmenistan in the first case and Afghanistan in the second. In Confession, which is set on a military ship in Russia’s far north, nothing much happens by way of action. There is a voice-over which reads excerpts from the ship captain’s diary, passages that are not directly linked to what one sees on screen, mostly evolving around matters of commitment, dedication, or endurance. In contrast to the voice-over, the visuals of this meditative film mostly consist of gentle and yet unrelentless scrutiny of the semi-naked bodies of the sailors. The camera endlessly dances around their daily routines on board in Murmansk. In most instances the young men are shown sleeping, scrubbing floors, sorting out their clothes or beds. Usually, they are naked from the waste up, but they occasionally wear horizontally striped T-shirts, as if having come out from a gay comic strip. Their bodies are lean rather than muscular, and nothing explicitly sexual is taking place. Yet, the innuendo is so intense that the constant mutual avoidance of bodies makes the attraction much more convincing than one could have achieved though the display of actual sexual acts.

What is more curious to me is the second aspect, which concerns the critical reviews of the film. In the overall, the reviews that I was able to find, generally evade discussing the homoeroticism of Confession (while I believe this to be the uniquely defining feature of the film). True, reviewers cannot help it but mentioning this aspect, but they usually do it only in passing. The reviewer at PopMatters, for example, talks about ’suppressed desires’ and is quick to veer away from discussing this aspect of the film by warning that ‘Sokurov has repeatedly warned against any homoerotic interpretation of his films, but speculation remains as to whether such conviction is a necessary concession to a homophobic Russian public.’ He opts to honor the warning of the director and interprets the film in the categories of despair, monotony and oppression (all these supposedly being inherent features of military life — something I would tend to agree with). The reviewer at The Village Voice describes the film as a ‘fictionalized meditation on life aboard an Arctic naval ship, pensively decked out with some of the oddest visions of edge-of-the-map industrialization ever captured’. The reviewer in The Chicago Reader sees it as an exploration of ‘the way human consciousness can become a prison, walling off the self from visual, emotional, or physical contact’. Most reviews declare the film profoundly Russian in its concerns and representation, some mention the references to Chekhov made during a conversation between the Commander and his friend. Yes, all these aspects could be found in the film if one watches it carefully. Yet if one engages in such careful and patient viewing, it would be impossible to not be overwhelmed by the intense homo-eroticism which dominates nearly every shot. There is a deep gap between the voice-over commentary in this film and the imagery. The pensive voice-over commentary based on the Commander’s philosophical diary is in such a drastic contrast with the image on the screen that one could not possibly overlook it.

Had this film been made in Soviet times, I am sure it would have been interpreted along the lines of censorship and the director would have been praised for using smart smokescreen techniques that attach a benign text to a radically subversive imagery. Well, we are now well beyond the times of Soviet censorship, and critics have had to abandon the interpretative tools that the regime’s censorship practices was supplying them with. But then, why would one avoid naming the things one sees on screen, and acknowledging the divergence between commentary and visual representation? Isn’t it more a matter of which one of our (apparently split) critical abilities we would choose to follow — one’s instinct, linked more to what is on display to see and experience through the eyes, or one’s mind trusting mostly what one hears in the commentary, in the spoken or written word. The second, verbal dimension of the film, is rational and meditative, and invited for a Brechtian distant-type reception (and this was the way critics have apparently felt they would or should interpret the film). But then, the first aspect is so overwhelmingly present and yet so unrelated to the verbal commentary (clearly an intentional effect), that the disparity becomes drastic at moments. If I trusted my eyes, this was a film that was speaking of desire and physical attraction, and doing it so powerfully through the use of visuals that everything else just came across as a mockery. The series of images of the film were erotic art of high order, with skinny Russian sailors putting their precious bodies on display — snuggling in their bunk beds, fidgeting with gadgets, looking at books, discussing if they should sleep naked or on their clothes. The monotony was just another opportunity to revisit the view of someone’s torso. The despair, the repetitiveness of military life — an excuse to linger around and gaze more at these amazingly beautiful male species. Why is it that the critics had rejected it to pick up on the discrepancy between the two possible aspects of interpreting the film, when, I believe, it was simply shouting out at the viewer? Not that they would not have seen it. I wonder if this is not more about the way in which one canonizes the interpretation of certain auteurs. Bergman, Tarkovsky, Sokurov…

I see a short piece on the matter of the gay dimension in Sokurov’s work at CinePassion, but the writer only mentions other films and mostly focuses on Father and Son (2003) (pictured). If he were to see Confession, much of his uncertainty would be dispelled.

The two DVD-set containing all five parts of the film has been released by Facets in the US, but it is in fact an import from France, and it is therefore produced to much higher standards than the usual Facets fare. The film is subtitled in all major European languages. The second DVD contains an interesting digital booklet which one can read through the computer and which provides background to the director and the film, once again avoiding the gay theme altogether.

© Dina Iordanova
25 November 2008

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Tarkovsky’s diploma film, a 43-minute long novella, is of interest to see from several points of view: first, it allows to trace the formation of Tarkovsky’s future cinematic style; secondly, it allows to see and contextualize the building blocs of the narrative approach in which the director was trained; and third, it reveals a certain degree of homoeroticism.

As far as style is concerned, in this color film one already stumbles upon some of the images that we know as Tarkovsky’s trademark, mostly the the interplay of light and shadow on walls (which can take a wide range of moods, from unsettling to playful) and the close up shots of static or moving water. Many of the stunning crisp black and white imagery of Tarkovsky’s next film, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), already appear here but have lesser impact in color (apples, metal rods, confined cellar-like spaces, shiny water surfaces, and so on). I could not help marveling to what extent one can see the direct influence of Mikhail Kalatozov’s work here. There are shots that appear as if directly borrowed from the image inventory of Cranes are Flying (1957) — shiny puddles of water, prolonged shots tracking the protagonists moving along an iron-cast fence, and so on. Of course, by now it is clear that this generation was vastly influenced by the camerawork of Sergei Urusevsky, the unsung hero of Soviet cinema of the period, so this should not be such an unusual discovery.

When it comes to the plot, I cannot help feeling somewhat cynical, as The Steamroller and Violin ticks all the right boxes for the required/approved narrative of the period. Co-scripted by future director Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovski, himself an offspring of the politically well-heeled Moscow elites, the film features a working class protagonist, an encounter of old and new, and a subtle class conflict which presents the bourgeoisie in critical light.

Seven year old Sasha is one of these tormented children that have to spend three hours a day practicing a musical instrument just to satisfy the sick ambition of their parents. Already alienated and withdrawn as a result of his peculiar routines, Sasha quickly regains his innocuous charm when he accidentally meets and befriends worker Sergei, who works on a steamroller in their upscale Moscow neighborhood. Sasha and Sergei hang out in the courtyard, and then make a date to go to the cinema in the evening to see ‘Chapayev’ (equivalent to an intention to go see Indiana Jones). Once Sasha’s mother returns, however, the plan meets with her disapproval; Sasha is to stay in their bourgeois-style apartment to welcome a set of approved guests. Thus, the meeting of the new generation (Sasha) with the exciting working class (Sergei) is prevented by the stuffy routines of the bourgeoisie (Sasha’s mother). But this status quo will not persist. Old and new are shown meeting and clashing in this film (through images of old buildings destroyed to reveal shiny new architectural gems of the Stalinist skyscrapers variety), and the new always prevails. Sasha may not be going to the cinema tonight and may remain confined to his high-brow violin routines for a while; but in his heart he is already irreversibly seduced by the bold life of proud socialist construction out there.

Watching this film in 2008, in an age when children are not left to walk alone on the street until they are teenagers and when media constantly warn us about pedophiles stalking from all over in real and cyber-space, this film contains scenes that would be every present-day mother’s nightmare. Sasha moves through the city unaccompanied and without any supervision (precisely as I did when I was a child in Sofia in the 1960s); he is free to meet unknown men and to hang out with them in isolated places. It is not possible to see this film today without shudder — which also allows us to judge the extent of moral panic on this particular topic.

But there is also the homoerotic dimension: even though there is a woman who hangs around clearly available and interested, the male protagonist, Sergei, prefers to be in the company of the boy. It is a matter of mutual attraction between superior human beings. When the boy does not materialize, Sergei succumbs going to the cinema with the woman. Similar subtle hints are present throughout Ivan’s Childhood, where, among other subplots tackling the relations between the sexes, the fragile teenager Ivan (who is every bit as attractive as Tadzio of Death in Venice) gains all the attention of the handsome Lt. Galtsev, with the lieutenant droping his pursuit of a female fellow-soldier for the sake of tending to the exhausted boy.

© Dina Iordanova
26 July 2008