Film: Russian relations

Chris Darke finds Aleksandr Sokurov's film Mother and Son refreshingly devoid of all the usual commercial trappings

In a cinematic landscape dominated by digitally-enhanced ocean liners and studio-busting budgets, Mother and Son is an absolute anomaly, the unlikeliest of 'event films'. But 'event' it has become, thanks in part to the rhapsodic welcome that Aleksandr Sokurov's film has garnered from an array of supporters, Susan Sontag, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese and Nick Cave.

Schrader set the tone in a lengthy interview with the director for the American journal, Film Comment, extolling the film as "73 heart-aching, luminescent minutes of pure cinema. Sokurov is a master." Pure cinema? It's an appreciation that's loaded with the implication that, when set against Sokurov's film, so much else appears compromised by commerce, leached of artistic aspiration, impure. But then, Mother and Son wears its purity with obdurate pride. It's an 'event film' minus the events; a son (Alexei Ananishov) cares for his dying mother (Gudrun Geyer), seeing out her last day against the magisterial depths of the Russian countryside. A film about first and last things, life given and taken away, Mother and Son moves and confronts because it is clearly searching for a cinematic language to communicate fundamentals of human experience.

Almost entirely shorn of dialogue, but with a richly economical use of sound - rustlings, whisperings, slight gusts of music - Mother and Son focuses unremittingly on the time it takes for the mother to die and is visually extraordinary; it feels like a poem, looks like a painting and has an attention to visual texture that almost places it in the realms of abstract or experimental film. But Sokurov disagrees strongly with the word 'experimental' when applied to his film. Small, compact and serious, be conducts our interview accompanied by his cinematographer, Alexei Fyodorov. His answers are reflecting and opinionated in the best sense.

His is an unapologetically theological view of art as 'the hard work of the soul'. "Art prepares man for death," he asserts "In the area of culture, everything is based on the fact of death." One can understand why, for some, such an attitude can be cleaved to as a profession of faith, a brave and heady balm in a global culture supposedly dominated by post- modern irony and cinema-as-commodity. For others, no doubt, it must seem an unredeemably antiquated and suspicious position. "From the beginning, we knew where we were going," Sokurov says of his work with his cinematographer on Mother and Son. "I don't think that art and experimentation are compatible. Art deals with the flow of life, it cannot afford the patient that dies during the operation."

On one hand Mother and Son can be seen as cinema-as-landscape-painting. "Alexei and I agreed that we were creating a flat picture," the director explains. "For us the screen was a canvas. And nothing that would be put on this canvas could be created without a certain struggle with what the lenses create. We had to create some of the images with paint brushes, so we put several layers of glass in front of the camera, all the images were worked on in a special way. Often it wasn't like creating a film image but a picture on canvas that exists in time and space."

Perspectives flatten, warp and distort; the human figures run and melt into a wash of colour and forms. And if you're thinking 'digital post production', forget it. Sokurov is adamant on the subject of treating the film image digitally. "It's quite acceptable but it's a very fine matter to what extent modern technology should be allowed to enter the realm of art. Rembrandt and Velasquez were creating their works without any programming or digital technology, nevertheless, the results of their efforts remain a mystery.

"It's only when cinema stops this race of trying to catch up with modern technology that it will decide whether it's art or not. If cinema is to serve Man, however strange it may sound, it should be more conservative and try and shake off the influence of modern technologies."

This comes from a man who started out entranced by radio as a child, worked as a television director in the 1980s and whose epic five-hour video work Spiritual Voices, a study of Russian border guards, is showing at a West End gallery.

"It's a fairy tale" Sokhurov says of his attitude to the characters. "In reality, the relationship between mothers and sons is so complex that no art can reflect it. In the West, for example, the solution for the son is to distance himself from the mother. In Russia, the tradition is one of a much softer, more soulful relationship."

The emotional force of Mother and Son rests on its being about waiting. Not only that of the son for his mother's death, but also, agonisingly, for the afterlife to begin. For the son, the time after is what settled most terribly upon him, the landscape of loss into which he is moving as the film progresses. Mother and Son is cinema that's as serious as your life.

'Mother and Son' opens on Friday 27 March at the Renoir Cinema. 'Spiritual Voices' shows at Frith Street Gallery, London W1, 19 March-1 May.