Russian luminary Alexander Sokurov delivers another curveball. Following Fairytale, his 2022 animated feature about notorious leaders of the 20th century languishing in purgatory, Sokurov offers a five-hour history lesson, slow, steady, and painstaking, taking the viewer from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Director’s Diary is very difficult to evaluate because in conventional terms it’s not really a film at all. It establishes one pattern and elaborates it at exorbitant length, and while it’s never exactly boring, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a project best served by a theatrical presentation. Poised somewhere between the text-heavy educational films of Alexander Kluge and Immemory, Chris Marker’s 1997 CD-ROM, it’s an idiosyncratic look back at the second half of the U.S.S.R.’s existence, from a kind of parallax angle.
Keep in mind, the entirety of Soviet history was elided by Sokurov in his best-known film, Russian Arc (2002), the director’s one-shot journey through the Hermitage. As the camera glides through hundreds of years of Russian culture, we peer only briefly into a private room that is said to contain the whole of the Soviet period. “Don’t bother looking in there,” the narrator cautions. But Director’s Diary is more than a peek into that dark chamber. It is a relentless gaze at a nation guided by propaganda and dedicated to isolation from the rest of the world. Throughout the Diary, Sokurov provides a nonstop presentation of Soviet news and documentary coverage: Khrushchev offering his blessing to a new concrete factory, the Politburo’s appointment of Brezhnev to the premiership, a lot of happy workers and a great deal of folk dancing from the various Republics. This footage tells one story, over and over again. Life is great in the Soviet Union and is only getting better.
But Sokurov augments this stream of official blather with an onscreen commentary track, marking year by year what is happening in history outside of this channel of propaganda. We learn about the space race, various revolutionary struggles in the developing world, who has been awarded the Nobel Prizes in Literature and Physics, which films won the Palme d’Or, and which major cultural figures have died. This includes composers like Sibelius and Hindemith, political figures like Kennedy and Martin Luther King, or authors such as Hemingway and Faulkner. Along the way, Sokurov also notes the births of people who will be notable later on in history. In case you thought Sokurov wasn’t aware of folks like J.K. Rowling or Whitney Houston, think again.
Director’s Diary does in fact have very brief interstitial moments where we see an elderly hand, writing in Russian, jotting down the dates, year by year. We hear Sokurov mutter something faint and gnomic, and then it’s on with the countdown. And the film never once attempts to quicken its pace. We see a Y-axis graph line on the right hand side of the screen, starting at 1917 and ending at 1991, and when the viewer realizes that, thirty minutes in, we have only moved from 1957 to 1958, it’s clear we’re in for a long night.
And why not? Sokurov is under no obligation to make this a sprightly, rapid-fire demonstration. This is the semester course, not the final review. Director’s Diary is compressed, of course, but seems devoted to making the viewer feel the slow process of historical accumulation, especially as compared with the smiling milkmaids and barrel-chested electricians of the Soviets’ official story. It’s compelling but dauntingly maximalist, and it also exhibits odd errors, like getting James Van Allen’s name wrong, or jumbling the English phrasing here and there. And again, like Kluge’s later TV essays, Diary is a torrent of weird, changing fonts and kitschy motion graphics. It’s charmingly lo-fi, professorial but weirdly personal as well. What possessed Sokurov to make this behemoth after Fairytale’s rich chiaroscuro and radical use of deepfake technology? Well, accessible as Fairytale was, Cannes rejected it, and it got very little traction following its Locarno premiere. So maybe Director’s Diary is our punishment, the stern instructor making us copy sentences out of the textbook onto the blackboard. Director’s Diary is a remarkable, audacious, eye-glazing piece of work, and we only brought it on ourselves.
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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