In 2006, the British actress whose first appearance on
film was
in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, and whose first moment of fame was
as Sally Potter’s Orlando, Tilda Swinton (now known as the
Narnia witch), made this desperate plea at the San Francisco
International Film Festival: “Can I be alone in my longing for
inarticulacy, for a cinema that refuses to join all the dots? For an
arrhythmia in gesture, for a dissonance in shape?… The figurative
cinema’s awkward and rather unsavory relationship with its fruity old
aunt, the theater, to her vanities, her moues, her beautifully
constructed and perennially eloquent speechifying, her cast-iron,
corsetlike structures, her melodramatic texture, and her histrionic
rhythms. How tiresome it is; it always has been. How studied. The idea
of absolute articulacy, perfect timing, a vapid elegance of gesture, an
unblinking, unthinking face. What a blessed waste of a good clear
screen, a dark room, and the possibility of an unwatched profile, a
tree, a hill, a donkey….”
Much of what Swinton longs for can be found in Alexandra, the
latest film by the director of Russian Ark, Alexander Sokurov.
Here, the theatrical element of the film is subordinated to imperfect
timing, graceless gestures, and things—a dress, a pool of gun
oil, a bullet, a rusty rifle, black smoke, worn clothes, concrete
rubble, dusty boots.
The movie’s dots are, however, connected: A babushka visits her
grandson at his army base in Chechnya. Though battle weary, the
grandson is happy to see his grandmother. He shows her the camp, the
inside of a tank, and the men below and above his rank. The babushka is
confident, her face expresses a strong will, and her shapeless body is
a mother-magnet to young, motherless soldiers. While her grandson is on
patrol, she goes out of the camp for a walk. She visits a strange
market, meets a Chechen grandmother, and is invited to her apartment
for refreshments and a rest. The unification of the grandmothers is the
center of a sequence that is directly political. When the babushka
returns to the camp, guided by a Chechen boy, we reach the end of a
sequence that clearly transmits the movie’s antiwar message.
Those are Alexandra‘s connected dots. The movie also has a
frame that concerns the movement of art. The babushka happens to be, in
reality, one the greatest opera singers of the 20th century, Galina
Vishnevskaya. She and her husband, Mstislav Rostropovich (an
internationally recognized cellist), were not only close to the Russian
composer Dmitri Shostakovich but also to the novelist who rose to fame
during the post-Stalinist thaw, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The author’s
stay at Vishnevskaya/Rostropovich’s dacha (country home) cost
them their high position in the Soviet Union and resulted in a nearly
two-decade-long exile in the West (1970s and 1980s). As the Berlin Wall
fell, Rostropovich sat playing his cello next to it.
In sum, the babushka we see at the beginning of the
film—riding a rattling train through the moonless night, being
helped into a mean metal tank, dragging her banged-up roller bag toward
the army base—is in fact a living ark of Russian art. It is art
that is visiting the army, the young captain, the bomb-damaged city. It
is art (and not a mother) that soldiers admire and can’t stop looking
at. But art is no stranger here, in the miserable land of war. “There
is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of
barbarism,” wrote Walter Benjamin. In Alexandra, art must
confront this truth and be made sensitive to the suffering of
humankind.
After the connected dots and the frame of art, we are left with lots
of the magical stuff that Swinton longs to see in movies: “The long
shot, the space between, the gaps, the pause… The occasionally
dropped shoe off the heel, the jiggle to readjust, the occasionally
cracked egg, the mess of milk spilled. [The] loss for words….”
Because the acting plays a very small role in Alexandra, the
cinema is free to flourish. 
