Arquivo / 49ª mostra

This fifth Elegy is a devastating picture, bordering on cruelty, of Boris Yeltsin, where the Russian leader is removed from the public arena of speeches and official propaganda to be inserted into the Sokúrov scene par excellence: in place of silence, continuous time and inaction. The spectator, in turn, will have before him one more spectacle of visual ambiguity, a contradictory stage of immobility, bordering on paralysis and death. “In spite of the fact that Yeltsin came to power by conventional means, his personality is extraordinary and bears with it high doses of the unpredictable, which I attribute to an uncommon human nature”, says Sokúrov. “Our hero is part of a tragic amalgam of the Soviet socialist civilization. He is the main character in a drama of which he is, also, one of the authors.”