The filmmaker as rueckenfigur, documentary as painting: Alexandr Sokurov in 'Elegy of a Voyage'
Panse, Silke (2006) The filmmaker as rueckenfigur, documentary as painting: Alexandr Sokurov in 'Elegy of a Voyage'. Third Text: Critical perspectives on contemporary art & culture, 20 (1). pp. 9-25. ISSN 0952-8822
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Alexandr Sokurov’s video installation Elegy of a Voyage (2001) was commissioned as part of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum’s exhibition Unpacking Europe (2001) that featured artists’ responses to the theme of revisiting Europe’s past, and it charts Sokurov’s voyage as the film‐maker and protagonist from Siberia into the museum in Rotterdam itself. He presented the video like a painting on canvas alongside Dutch paintings from the eighteenth century. The journey to Europe ends with close‐ups of St Mary’s Square with St Mary’s Church in Utrecht (1765) by the Dutch painter Pieter Saenredam, thus ostensibly establishing continuity between ‘documentary realism’ and the realist tradition of painting. This relationship is complicated by refraction through the self‐reflexive aesthetic of German Romanticism, particularly as the figure of the film‐maker in the video functions as a Romantic Rückenfigur (back‐view figure) within which documentary subjectivity and self‐reflexivity are recast.
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