Arquivo

The eighth Elegy, a meditative journey towards an uncommon Japanese hamlet, where the landscape, the houses, objects and people are blurred, almost immaterial, carried away in the mist. Once more, Sokúrov turns his camera on simple people - that we can not readily describe as common people, nor as representative of modern Japan. The marginality of these souls resides in a certain adhering to the models of the past, to day-to-day life, to local color. Their spirits, however, vibrate on a frequency all their own, where poetry and mythology mean a great deal more than mere alms from contemporary reality. On the screen, west and east are merely different facets of an indivisible whole. In the personal annotations that precede each script, the film maker wrote: “What a strange dream... The contours of the houses slowly slip away through the white shadows, only to nestle together again, dancing with the mist... It would seem, then, that all of the city is one small island, floating in the space of a giant ocean”.