A Humble Life
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Most or all of Sokurov’s work since has been made in either Germany or Japan. (To the best of my knowledge, Japan is the only country where several of Sokurov’s films are available on video.) The language of this work is usually Russian–with the exception of Moloch (1999), which chronicles a day in the life of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun–and the English translations are often so slipshod that they only confuse matters. Take for example the distributor’s press handout for A Humble Life (1997)–a feature-length video being shown this Friday at Columbia College by Chicago Filmmakers–which states, “Sokurov invites us on a journey through time and space. A journey through space first. At the beginning of the 21st century he takes us to a Japan divorced from time: we meet a woman embroiderer of kimonos perpetuating an age-old art. In a sturdy building in the heart of the country at the foot of a range of mountains bathed in winter fog, the filmmaker shows us a day in the life of this woman. Exchanges are reduced to a minimum: a few haikus read in the evening.”
All of Sokurov’s films and videos that I’ve seen aim for a 19th-century mood and setting, tend to make spaces flat and foreshortened (though densely textured), have minimal narratives and restricted subject matter, and are at least as slow as molasses in January. (It’s often the triumph of his works that all these traits seem interdependent.) Most of his films are shot in 35-millimeter and are usually fictional or semifictional narratives; the videos are mainly documentaries, though Sokurov aptly calls a good many of them “elegies.” But such descriptions oversimplify matters. The films, by virtue of their slowness, ultimately resemble documentaries of their actors and their settings, and at least some of the videos, including A Humble Life, by virtue of their poetic and personal offscreen narrations, resemble fictional narratives.
As support for Stockhausen’s hypothesis, I would cite much of the action in Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, where the main characters are fairly old and usually seated, as extremely slow. Yet there are some pretty fast actions and reactions in his silent films, where the characters are relatively young and are usually seen standing or walking. And in Good Morning, where standing kids and seated adults are equally prominent, we get intricate mixtures of fast and slow tempi. (For extremely fast action, check out Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo or The Seven Samurai.) By these standards, A Humble Life, whose subject is fairly old and most often seated, is closest to Tokyo Story–though it’s considerably slower.
