The Baptism Is Performed

Genesis. Cosmos. Creation. Birth. Life. Death. Narration:

In the beginning there was a tree, an autumn tree. It had lost its leaves. But there was fruit on it left for the birds.

Snow fell already. Strange clouds appeared, as if it were summer, not autumn. The sky was dark and deep. Thunder could be heard. There was movement over the water. There were birds. Birds who flew for no other reason than beauty alone. Then the clouds changed. The sky became flat. The light shone upon G-d's command.

A scent of lilacs...Then the flight over water, deep and dangerous.

I was afraid of falling. Someone left me. I started to feel better. I breathed deeply. Then movement started. I realized it was winter. I was cold. I could almost touch the road. So smooth and transparent. Houses appeared, like an abandoned village under a cold sun. Windows, roofs. And the people? It must be noon, but where are the people? Grey buildings, like prisons. Then came the fog.

I found myself on a clearing.

The world created out of darkness and winter and fear, child born, movement, then abandoned, G-dless, fatherless, nationless, but grateful for the freedom of free will. Fragile berry fruit tree, its branches, to borrow a Plath verselet, stiffened and frozen into place like burnt nerves, a wintry tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with "fruit on it left for the birds". The fruit of this tree teaching the cycle of life and nourishment and struggle and survival and death and rebirth and beauty.

Spectacular scenery of leaden winter clouds in heavens in the darkest dark of the night overlooking black wintry landscapes. Lunar ambiance and lunar silence and lunar seclusion. Voyager the satellite of history, trying to understand his inborn orbit to a G-d, to a father, to a nation, to a life that cut him off and abandoned him at birth.

A wall of snow soundlessly wheeling and reeling in a steady downriver current like a river current frothing forward in a storm, an apt metaphor for the many nations and peoples that drifted without a base after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and an apt metaphor for the transitory nature of existence. A wall of snow drift reeling forward like one gigantic moving mass of migratory disintegration.

Sokurov, our narrator, our voyager, noctivagant. Going back in time to the place of his birth and voyaging through his past and the past of his country and the past of history itself. Travelling across across frontiers of nations and borders, travelling through monastic, nautical, museologic spaces. Dark strokes of Classical music and the distantiated echoes of ambient sound, haunting musical haikus conveying Sokurov's existential turmoil.

Rows of empty bombed-out houses houses, a ghosting of dwellings that belong to an imaginary domain, Sokurov whispers, people once lived here. I knew them. I believe I lived among them, too, he's walking through his personal past and the past of Russia and the past of the world as a stranger, he's unlearned and exilic and trying to re-historize.

Darkness, sfumato visual sheen, fog, smoke, vapour, snow-blinded streets, gliding movements, Voyager, guided by a monk (guided by G-d, hearing the call of religion/faith/G-d/spirituality), enters a monastery in Valdai (Old Russia), a journey to find G-d, to understand G-d, to understand Jesus' sacrifice, to study the spirit of a man in the throes of death and an empire in the throes of death and a history in the throes of death, Voyager like Abraham of the Bible, Abram heeding G-d's call of Lech Lecha, and, after passing G-d's tests of faith and accepting G-d's promises to multiply his seed as numerous as the stars in the heavens and as the sand on the shore of the sea and make him a great nation, evolving into Abraham, officially setting up the shop of Judaism which later forged Christianity, but Voyager is beginning at the end of that, faithless and spiritually decayed and identityless. Sokurov asking the monk, why did Christ pray that his Father not send him to his sacrificial cross? Why did Christ, want to avoid crucifixion? If he so loathed being crucified, then how can I accept his sacrifice? Why did I speak about this? His monk keeps silent, G-d fails to answer, the Christ [in Sokurov's view] nothing more than a mere mortal on an equal plane with all of humanity in his resistance to death, the implication being Why is Humankind invested in Christ's sacrifice if He was unwilling to make it, a Baptism occurring in the background ends, a soldier on a pew jars the moment, war invoked and Voyager perhaps remembering himself as a soldier, a fleeting flashback of soldiers crosses the screen, Voyager coalesces back into uninhabited nocturnal landscapes and his own interiorized private world of exilic and religious and spiritual alienation and despair.

Crossing border into Finland. Leaving the past. Leaving wintry eden. Voyager on boat. Thick swirls of snow like star tails, black indifferent waves, sea born and man torn and blood blest, the cold gizzard of the sea waves grinding round and round, Voayger looming at the loom of patient time, he's stricken with absolute fear and horror towards, and fascination with, the indifference of time and timelessness itself and humankind's mere instant on that evolutionary scale, fall in the waves and you're forever lost in time, Humankind is "eternity's hostage and prisoner of time" and Voyager feels this more deeply than the average person because he's exilic and unhomed and displaced theologically and nationalistically and culturally and historically, sequence of black seething treacly swells broiling over endlessly is horrifying because it's death and you can feel the iciness of the waves and the waves cover all of the earth and the waves move dangerously close to the camera and threaten to swallow you up, you're falling in the sea, the surface of the footage of the waves and the screen is one and the same (surface of waves and screen as one entity is one of many countless Sokurovan trademarks in this film; in Sokurov's films, the surface of paintings he uses in film and the surface of the film screen merge together and become one and the same). Voyager at the stage in life when he feels the presence of death, when he knows he's no longer immortal, when he knows time is sloughing off humankind's immortal carapace. Sokurov as always paying homage to Tarkovsky with scenes like that.

Voyager not knowing what location he's leaving and where he's going, destabilized location, Guideless, he doesn't know where he came from or where he's going to, he doesn't know who he was or who he will become, he doesn't know where G-d is or where his father is or where his nation is or who or what will guide him, the ship, perhaps Noah's Arc, carrying him beyond the flood of threatening-but-indifferent waves that fill every corner of the earth, transporting him away from his barren abandoned provincial rural Eastern locality and relocating him Westward in cosmopolitan Germany (the trajectory from East to West invoking a reversal of Germany's wartime West-East invasion of Russia), a Germany blanketed beneath a continual falling powdery wall of migratory disintegrating downriver streams of snow.

In Germany, out of Russia, out of Eden, torrents of snow snowing everything over, city, roads, driving through a womb-like tunnel (which echoes the driving scene in Tarkovsky's Solyaris), dark passage, trains, factory, let us bake bricks and burn them hard and use bitumen as mortar and build us a city reaching the heavens, what pollution, what arrogance, and the L-rd baffled them and scattered them over all the earth, a transition from Germany to Netherlands that viewers do not realize until a few minutes later, a town, a cafe, Voyager meets another confused, displaced, alienated, humbled traveller, a Dutchman, his heart circumcised with terrible irrevocable hurt after being arrested in America by mistake and treated like an inferiour for being a foreigner. Oh yes, babel.

Sokurov leaves cafe and finds himself once again in a smoky frosty sfumato nocturnal location, a courtyard with another blossoming tree with quivering thin branches and the moon in seclusion and the cold freezing everything over, and soon Sokurov has entered the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam, a New Russia, a stand-in for Petersberg's Hermitage. A heart of the West, bright colours, warmth, structure, form, civilization. The camera providing generous penetrating close-ups of about eight canvases, atlases without a key, unrecorded existences located in the paintings' histories, untranslatable history. As the camera eye sensually strokes the canvas, the colours and prints feel warm and the images within the paintings - people and cows and boats and water - shimmer and move, still warm and alive, Voyager whispering, the canvas remains warm., the body remains warm yet must it still die, the spirit remains warm yet must the spirit also die?

The paintings are listed in the credits but don't all match up to the paintings we see on screen. All the paintings except Van Gogh's include rivers and most appear to also include boats, the boats the body and the water the soul and the spirit and the boats on the water representing the journey into the great unknown, towards death. The camera also passes over two empty frames, coincidence or prophetic. Sokorov placing himself in the paintings, recalling that he when he was in the Winter canal painting [by Charles Henri Joseph Leickert] the window did not exist, re-enforcing the film's theme of Sokurov's feelings of estrangement from and disconnect with the past and present and future. Sequence of paintings appears to follow theme - boat coming home (birth), people toiling, cows (sustenance), houses, children, street life, then religion/church and death/destruction. Camera walking into Pieter Saenredam's St. Mary's Square And St. Mary's Church In Utrecht, camera honing in on bright nordic light and emptiness of Square. Last painting, the camera literally enters Bruegel's Tower of Babel, a glorious surface exploration of a crumbling arcesque Ur-text Torah-text, covenant between humanity and G-d shattered, humankind scattered and abandoned, hammering in the theme of humanity's disconnect with its Creator (G-d, father, Nation) and humanity's destructive impulses and apocalypse, the screen turns black.

Breathless. 10/10