In one of my favorite jokes connecting Russian pessimism with a failure of imagination, two Russian fishermen catch a golden fish. It offers them three wishes if they’ll spare its life. The first fisherman says, “I wish that the hold of the boat be filled with cases of vodka,” and his wish is granted. The second says, “I wish that the entire ocean be turned into vodka,” and they lower a bucket and start drinking. Then the fish reminds them that they have a third wish. They look at each other, scratch their heads, and the first says, “I guess we’ll just take another case.”
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Originally made in 1998 in five parts of 52 minutes each for television, the video was cut to its current length (by Sokurov) a year later. The title for each part has the same subhead—”From the Commander’s Diary”—and is followed by a disclaimer calling the plot and characters “a fantasy of the author.” And in some ways the video is structured as a diary: the commander is heard in voice-over, and most of the shots represent his point of view, even those in which he appears.
In some cases the commander has set an activity in motion: sailor after sailor is asked to disrobe during a medical exam he’s ordered. In his pseudophilosophical narration, the commander appears to speculate—insofar as one can infer from subtitles—about whether he could have a relationship with any of his men, but then acknowledges that it couldn’t last because the sailors come and go: “I am beach and they are water.” Though he spends a great deal of time viewing his subordinates shirtless, the ship’s tight interiors and the glacial pace of the men’s labors seem to drain them of vitality. Not especially lively and rarely playful, they appear a fantasy of male flesh divorced from any inner life.
The video portrays a dullness of mind so opposed to change that it finds only copies of itself in the world outside. The shower scene, for example, shows a clothed sailor looking lasciviously at his nude comrades, smiling. But he’s less a separate character than a projection of the commander’s desires. Ultimately Sokurov explores the way human consciousness can become a prison, walling off the self from visual, emotional, or physical contact. When the sailors watch TV, it seems to reflect their life rather than offer an alternative: they see only a few snippets of divers in bathing suits, a joke on their own alienated relationship to water.
Directed by Alexander Sokurov
