The Polish film maestro Krzysztof Zanussi converses with Jugu Abraham on 14 Dec 2023 on the occasion of receiving his lifetime achievement award at IFFK, Trivandrum

Krzysztof Zanussi (84) has won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival for his film A Year of the Quiet Sun (1984), the Jury prize at the Cannes film festival for The Constant Factor (1980)., the Golden Leopard at Locarno film festival for Illumination (1973), among 69 international awards. The latest is his Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed by the International Film Festival of Kerala, India. He spoke to the author of this blog, Jugu Abraham. 

Mr Zanussi addressing the media at IFFK
on 14 Dec 2023 at Trivandrum, Kerala

Mr Zanussi listening to his interviewer, Mr Abraham

Jugu Abraham: Mr Zanussi, You have been always considered as one of the three major Polish film directors..The others being Wajda and Kieslowski. But there's a distinct difference between you and the other two that I have noticed. Almost all your screenplays are your own and not adapted from other sources, unlike Wajda or Kieslowski. 

 

Krzysztof Zanussi: Wajda, no. Kieslowski, yes. 

Abraham: Yes, Kieslowski, did one (Blind Chance) that was entirely his own.

Zanussi: Even though Kieslowski wrote all the screenplays with his personal friends as co-scriptwriters, he was responsible for the stories. He was the leading writer. We were very close friends.

Abraham: In your case, most of the scripts are your own. 

Zanussi: Yes. 

Abraham:  That makes you the main person in spite of the characters in the film. Your mind comes through to us who are viewing your films because your mind is represented through those characters you have created. I see a lot of your interest in science, your interest in the books that you have read, those philosophies come through in the leading characters you have created in your films. Is that right?

 
Zanussi: I hope it is. It's up to you to judge. 

Abraham: One of your films that really made me your admirer was your early work made in collaboration with Germany, a film called Ways in the Night  (1979).

Zanussi: Wege in der Nacht  

Abraham: Yes, The way you structured it was fascinating for me, because your script split it into three parts. One on the love affair between a good Nazi and a Polish aristocratic lady; another on the past history of the Nazi officer, and the final segment of the Nazi’s daughter and her strange comments on the affair concluding the film, a segment that would force viewers to reassess the film altogether.  Several decades later, Russian director  Konchalovsky has done the same with his film  Paradise. Not many other directors have employed this radical structure.

Zanussi: Glad to hear that. And as this film is forgotten, I am very happy that you are one of my viewers.  I was inspired by some situation in my own family. So it is a very personal film. Of course, everything is remodeled. But the whole idea of a good German, a good enemy, is something very intriguing to me. And at the time, when I was writing this film, it was in the 70s . I  was very much afraid that being the subject, a citizen of a country in the Soviet bloc, I will be forced to take part in the war that they were announcing all the time. And we knew in Poland, the Polish army was supposed to go against Denmark. And that I could be some day, probably be an interpreter in the army, I will be soon be facing my acquaintances, my friends in Denmark, telling them get out of their house, because some Soviet officer would be staying there This was a frightening prospect. So I did identify with the German as much as with the Polish character. I thought each of them is in a tragic position. Culture is not enough to make peace between two people who are on opposite sides of a war.

Abraham: Probably you're aware of it that subconsciously you had created two well-educated personalities as the two lovers, and that they have read a lot more than the others.

Zanussi: Right.

Abraham: And that made the difference to the entire story. And this resurfaces in the rest of your work as well. It's the people who are well read, who are often good people listening to their conscience and making the right decisions..

Zanussi: I am not in a position to judge. That is my intention. You read my intention according to my expectation. I am very grateful.

Abraham:. And also, you are able to do something special with Maja Komorowska, one of your favorite actresses who has been with you.in so many later films of yours.  In this particular film, she stole my heart. I mean, even though later on, she has done so many works (A Year of the Quiet Sun; In Full Gallop), which were equally good. But this early work was remarkable.

Zanussi: I will definitely will tell her, Yes, because we're still friends, and still in touch. She's still active, even though she's even older than myself. And she is still active on stage, occasionally she does some some roles in films.

Abraham: We see her later on in your film A Year of the Quiet Sun, portraying a different character. There again, her character is almost similar to her character in Ways in the Night underscoring that people who have a good conscience, do the right thing. And I think that comes as a recurring theme that goes through all your films, that taking the right moral action is very important, in spite of everything else.

Zanussi: While trying to be right, there are some tragic situations where there is no good way out as in my film Camouflage. When if you don't quit, you're guilty, even if you have good intentions. That's a tragic situation that we know from Greek drama. Right. But that's what we try to avoid. In fact, whenever I'm confronted with India, I wonder how you manage to avoid tragic aspects because you have Sanskrit drama and I try to read some of them. But there is no tragedy but there is drama and conflicts but there is always a way out. And there is always an original order original harmony yes, that you can restore at the end. Right? I think there's a very big cultural difference between Europe and India.

Abraham: Contemporary playwrights have taken up the aspect of tragedy in contrast to, as you point out, the original ancient ones. You might have heard of the late Girish Karnad as a playwright and filmmaker. He wrote Tughlaq, which is a very interesting tragic play,  I always wondered why nobody has picked up that play to make a film. And it's a historical character, which is a tragedy and a beautiful one. I've happened to have acted in that play when I was in college.

So, apart from that, I noticed that you have often reverted to casting some of the actors whom you worked with earlier on. An example is Scott Wilson.

Zanussi: Oh, yes. How do you go back as a human being? As a married man  I have only married once! Yes. So I have a natural tendency to be faithful and faithful to my friends, right. So when I have a good experience with an actor, I always invite these actors to my future works, like Leslie Caron, who worked three times with me, and really many others like Maja Komorowska  and Zbigniew Zapasiewiecz.. He is such a good example when we talk about well-educated and passionate people. Right. Sometimes education kills your passion. Then the education is not the right education. What it means is that it is the wrong education.

Abraham: Now, let me get back to your physics. Because that's interests me because I too studied physics initially in college. When you started your films career as a director and original screenplay-writer, you dealt with inorganic subjects, and then gradually moved on to organic subjects in films and used them as allegories, For instance, from Structure of Crystals, to mathematics and statistics (Imperative), to physics (Illumination) to even linguistics (Camouflage), and then you go on to inorganic examples in science as in the film Life as a Sexually Transmitted Disease.

Zanussi: One thing is stable, that all material world is interconnected.

Abraham: That’s true,

Zanussi: And there was a movement, the first half of the past century was half century of physics. The second is half a century of biology. So I travel with the development of the problems. Now the future of humanity depends very much on biology and genetic engineering, right? Are we going to improve our species or kill it? What’s going to happen?

Abraham: I was surprised that not many people in the US, UK and Latin America are aware of your films except when the early film Ways in the Night came out. The famous US film critic Roger Ebert gave it very high ratings and in his review and stated that you are “one of the best filmmakers in the world..“ Apart from that recognition, not many people are aware of your films in those parts of the world.

Zanussi: I still must be happy that somebody is aware like yourself. 

(The exclusive interview was curtailed by the IFFK organizers and I had to join the press conference where I could ask more questions to Zanussi)    My questions at the press conference follow:

Abraham: My question relates to my earlier conversation with you.  Were there chances for you to collaborate with some other co-scriptwriters on your films and what was the outcome?

Zanussi: Yes, at the beginning, with a colleague of mine from the film school, who was a writer. He was more advanced than I was. He joined me and we were writing scripts for television, which I made into films later. But once the scripts became more of a story for my first film, we could not agree, I had my vision and he had his. We had a friendly parting of ways. We remained friends for the rest of his life.

Abraham: So you felt that by doing things your own, you probably had a more rounded structure for your screenplays?

Zanussi: No. A different structure. The message was different.  My friend was far more negative than I was. So there was no compromise. Either there was hope or no hope.

Abraham: Would you like to say something about your work with Polish music composer  Wojciech Kilar, and the music of the composer with whom you have worked on so many of your films? Why did you pick him? And stay with him?

 
Zanussi:  We became friends. The beginning of the friendship was a disaster. And I was guilty of it. I had a crazy idea as young filmmakers have, when you're young, you have ideas that are totally insane. Because I have a good musical ear, no education, I thought I will make a revolution and I will ask music to be written before I make a film, not after. Two composers said it is impossible. And the third one said, I don't say that is reasonable. He wrote the music, I used his music as a playback. Everything was right. Once the film was edited, it looked ridiculous. It was really, really ludicrous. Because when you had a shadow, you had to have something that corresponded to it. So it was like animation. It was a very bad idea. Kilar said that now I will write the real appropriate music for your Structure of Crystals. He wrote it. And since then, I felt I had such depth from his music for my films. From my next film onwards, I wouldn't say a word to him to avoid confrontation. And since then, he wrote music for all my films with no exception. And I was never disappointed. Sometimes  I spoke with his wife, as an intermediary but never directly. Sometimes it was my wife who was speaking with his wife. That was the way how we survived without confronting each other.  But we were talking about theology, physics, and everything else but music. Well, unfortunately, he was working with other bigger directors than myself like Francis Ford Coppola (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), like Kiesolwski and Polansky and many others. And I reproached him and said you are my good friend. Why do you write such good music for my competitors? He simply answered “Makes good films as they do” and I will write you good music. So even this terrible answer didn't discourage me and our friendship survived. 

Abraham: A question on cinematographer Edward Klosinsky and his actress wife Krystyna Janda, both of whom collaborated who with you on several films.

Zanussi: You know so much about Polish cinema… 

Abraham: How did you find working with Klosinsky (Camouflage; Persona non grata)? 

Zanussi: Well, Janda is now a widow. Klosinsky, my friend and cameraman passed away. We had a good understanding as he was extremely intelligent and became famous making films abroad (Three Colors: White and Red; Europa) as well.  His wife Janda, now in her 70s, became famous in the films of Wajda (Man of Iron; Man of Marble; The Conductor) with Klosinski as the cinematographer. She is now very popular with feminists. 

Abraham: When you worked with Klosinski, was he giving you ideas or were you giving him ideas? What was the creative process between the two of you? 

Zanussi: As an intelligent man, he found it easy to tune into somebody’s tastes. When he was working with me he would bring me suggestions, and they were in my style of filmmaking. When he was working with Wajda, he would suggest to Wajda according to Wajda’s style. He understood the script; he understood the director.,

Abraham: When you made your film Imperative, you had named the main character as Augustine. What percentage of the audiences you feel recognized the connection? 

Zanussi: I didn’t make a survey to check. The name of the main character is not just coincidental. When we have children we choose their names according to our desire. We sometimes name them after saints to protect them later in life. St Augustine was the first writer of psychological perspective of one’s inner life. And he was a terrible character, a difficult man to deal with and yet a genius.. 

Abraham: Thank you, Mr Zanussi.   

****

Some interesting Zanussi quotes from the Press Conference in response to other media persons' questions: 

“I believe in reason, but reason has its limits. We think, everything is already explained. And now we see mysteries are back. That's a great discovery of the 21st century, with the new modern physics, where everything is surprising and paradoxical. Because they use different logics. And I meet many scientists who say, we work but we don't have a step. That's a very humble approach.” 

“I have to refer to something that you all remember from school and maybe not yet. It is the Gauss curve (Gaussian distribution). You know, Gauss has made this camel-like curve  which shows that majority in every case is mediocre. because majority is always off as a mathematical principle, a statistical principle. And excellence is always in minority. So, in the past, when your maharajahs and our princes and kings and emperors were giving subsidies to support art, they were supporting great artists who were not popular with a large audience at all.”

P.S. The author's review of  Zanussi's Persona non grata, written in 2006, on this blog can be accessed  by clicking on the name of the film in this postscript.  

The late Hungarian film director Zoltan Fabri speaks to the Indian film critic Jugu Abraham in Budapest, Hungary, in 1982

Zoltan Fabri, 1917-94 (Courtesy: MUBI)

Transcript of the interview published in the daily newspaper The Telegraph, (Kolkata, India) on 15 August 1982 

Zoltan Fabri is not an unknown name in India. His films have been widely shown in screenings in India, courtesy NFDC, and he holds the distinction of winning two awards at the Delhi International Film Festival of India (IFFI). In 1979, Hungarians won the Golden Peacock for the Best Film and in 1981 his film Balint Fabian meets God was awarded the Silver Peacock for the Best Actor. Fabri is one of three great Hungarian filmmakers—Miklos Jancso and Istvan Szabo completing the trio. Jugu Abraham, who interviewed him in Hungary, found him to be ‘a lovely old man’ with impeccable manners and forthright views. The interview: 

Q. In India, we see a lot of your films but we hardly know anything of the person behind the camera. I would like to ask you something of your personal life. Your films have shown the protagonists playing very tragic and sombre roles, full of strife and sadness, in Hungary of the Second World War and before. Was your personal life as tragic, as difficult and as sombre as the heroes of your films?

A. My parents were relatively poor. My father worked in a bank as a clerk. In the summer, I lived with the peasants. And the reason peasants recur in my films is that I learned very much about their lifestyles. I went to school in town. I went to the College of Fine Arts. I wanted to be a painter. At that time film was not taught in college. I was born a weak child. I had problems with my tonsils which were removed, and I was beset by recurring illness of a weak heart.

Q. How much of your life was affected by the World Wars?

A.I was born during the First World War I have very few memories of that World War. We lived in misery. I was living in a big house with lots of people living in it. During the Second World War, I was in college, on a scholarship. In college, I would win at poetry recitals and wonder what I would do later in life. I had to choose between painting and directing plays. In my sixth form, I put up Julius Caesar and played Antony. But am I boring you?

Q. No, please continue.

A. So I joined the School of Fine Arts. At the end of the third year my father tried to find a job for me. He found me a job as a drawing teacher in one of the plush schools. But I decided to leave college.

One afternoon, I went to my father, who was shaving, and told him I am going to quit the School of Fine Arts and I intended to join the Theatre College. My father chased me like a mad man with a razor in his hand for 10 minutes. But after a lot of pleading, he agreed to let me try out theatre studies for a year at college. At the end of the year, my father went to the school to find out how I was doing. I was allowed to stay on. I need not elaborate why.

I finished the school in 3 years, making it clear that I did not want to be an actor but a director. I wrote scripts for an Ibsen play and even made sets for it. And the play was a great success. The production went through all the Budapest theatres in one year.

Two days after getting my degree, I got a letter from the National Theatre that I should go and discuss my contract. In my first play at the National Theatre, there were actors who had been my teachers at the college.

Q. Was your private life greatly affected during the Second World War?

A. In 1943, I was taken prisoner till 1945. I had no contact with my family at that time. I was single then. I wasn’t married. I returned to find Budapest totally bombed. As I approached my house, I found all our neighbouring houses were bombed but my parents’ flat had survived.  I found them safe. It was a horrible memory to reconstruct things.  I went back to theatre and worked in all Budapest theatres as a director, as a set director and sometimes as an actor.

Q. Today if you were to choose between film and theatre which would you choose?

A. I would choose film.

Q. Which films have been close to your personal life?

A. Twenty hours perhaps was one. Unfinished Sentence was almost as if it was written for me. I didn’t come from an aristocratic family but what happens in the family almost happened to me.

Q. Do you feel the characters in your films are reflections of your trials?

A. in my films, I am speaking about people who somehow have to get to the battlefield of history and they have to pass a trial of human conduct, a probe, a search.

Q. What do you feel about your black and white films like Merry Go Round visually?

A. In spite of the fact that I never became a painter, one cannot totally bring oneself to reconcile to making films in colour after making films in black and white.

Q. Why is it that you delve in the past? Doesn’t speculation of the recent past of your country or its future interest you? Science fiction, for instance.

A. I do not think I am suitable for science fiction or the like but I do think of the future. In Unfinished Sentence, I spoke about the future, in a way.  The future became the past in the film. The past and the present are in a very close relationship. You cannot for instance understand the present day Hungary without understanding the past. Consequently, when I make a film on the past, I want to communicate to the present viewer.

A still from the Golden Peacock (IFFI) winner "Hungarians"

Q. Would you like to comment on the fact that you made Balint Fabian meets God after you made Hungarians?  Hungarians chronologically should have come after Balint Fabian meets God.

A. It wasn’t my decision. Studios who wanted me to make Hungarians knew very well I wanted to make a film of Balint Fabian. I told them that chronologically it should be Balint Fabian meets God that should come first. But they considered Hungarians to have a more universal message. So they said “How do you know if you will ever get to finish Balint Fabian? So why not make Hungarians first? “ They were right in saying Hungarians contained the fate of a nation in a delicate and miserable situation, with a limited spectrum of thought and communication. At the same time, the characters in the film thought and expressed in a very universal way without being conscious of it.

A defining moment in The Fifth Seal; filming
"the most important question of our life" for Fabri

Q. Why did you pick up the book The Fifth Seal for a film?

A. I picked it up in 1965. But there were cultural-political reasons, which were against my plans to film it. First, they said it was an existentialist work.  I said that was not true at all. But they won. I could only make it in 1975-76. It was a great message for me to put on screen. First, I was challenged by the stage-like story—it is almost anti-film. The second part was more appropriate for cinema.

What basically attracted me were the four or five petty bourgeoisie characters talking of survival and the extent one can go to survive. As a counterpoint, there is a Fascist who is educating the younger person to emulate the other persons to achieve his own aims. The third part is how neither of the theories will work—neither of the petty bourgeoisie nor of the Fascist.

Q. What made you pick up the book? Did you like what was said in the story?

A. This thesis anti-thesis leading to synthesis formula I found most intriguing. And the most important question of our life is there.

Q. Are you religious?

A. I cannot make dogmatic religion acceptable for myself in spite of the fact that I went to a religious school when I was young. I believe in the moral content of religion; for me it is very significant to assess a person’s moral values. At the same time I am not bothered about a person’s religion or whether he practices it.  Morality is most important.

Crucial scene from Balint Fabian Meets God

Q. In India, after viewing your films, we get an idea that you are ambiguous in your treatment of religion. What is your personal attitude towards religion?

A. In Balint Fabian meets God, it is true that Balint Fabian’s relationship with religion is ambiguous. You can see it as self-sacrifice of a person deeply in love with his wife to meet God. Isn’t that true?

Q. Why are Russians kept out of your films?

A. I have no idea.

Q. Has any filmmaker influenced you other than Marcel Carne and Orson Welles?

A. The French directors, of course but Orson Welles influenced me most. Welles could not surpass what he did at 25—Citizen Kane—which can be appreciated and enjoyed even today.

Q. Children hardly occupy any place in your films. If they come in, they are only fringe characters. Is there any reason for it?

A. Basically, I don’t know why.

Q. Why have you specialized in tragedy? Is it something to do with your theatre experience?

A. Most probably because my view of life attracts me more to tragedy than to comedy. My mentality of daily life style is serious, not comic. However, in Two Half Times in Hell and in The Tot Family, I approach the tragicomic border.

Q. You have worked with Georgy Vukan as the music composer for the last five or six films. Would you like to tell us something about this man who has intrigued me with his music?

A. It is a personal relationship I have with him. He is an artist whom I like. He was a discovery of mine, you can say. I used his music when he was 21 years old. Now he is 30 or about that age.

Q. What do you feel about Boys on Paul Street made for Hollywood?

A. I liked the message of the book. It was not my best film. It was a “noble” film.

Q. What then was your best film?

A. You can pick between Prof Hannibal, Twenty Hours, The Fifth Seal and Hungarians.

P.S. The author's detailed review of Zoltan Fabri's film The Fifth Seal was published earlier on this blog. The Fifth Seal is one of the author's top 100  films ever made. (To access the review, click on the name of the film in this post-script.) The author, who was a staff film critic of the Hindustan Times group of publications in New Delhi, was invited to Budapest to interview Zoltan Fabri and Miklos Jancso in 1982. During the interactions, Fabri expressed his disappointment that US director John Huston's film Victory, in its credits, did not mention Fabri's earlier film Two Half Times In Hell, which was evidently a major source for the US director, a film personality who Fabri always admired.

The opening title sequence of Fabri's "The Fifth Seal" with the music of Georgy Vukan:

Russian maestro Aleksandr Sokurov speaks to Jugu Abraham on Grigori Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky, titans of Russian cinema

Background note on Russian filmmakers Sokurov and Kozintsev

Russian film director Aleksandr Sokurov (66) is famous for diverse reasons. Some recall his experimental feature film Russian Ark (2002) filmed in a single, unedited 90-minute shot with over 2000 actors in elaborate costumes and 3 live orchestras exploring several sections of the Hermitage museum in Saint Petersburg (Leningrad). Some recall his more recent feature film Faust (2011), honoured with the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The late film critic Susan Sontag, while including two Sokurov feature films among her 10 favorite films of the 1990s, stated “There is no director active today whose films I admire so much.” Musician Nick Cave, in an interview published in the British newspaper “The Independent,” revealed “I wept and wept from start to finish” on viewing Sokurov’s Mother and Son (1997), a poetic experimental feature film with minimal spoken lines.

In 1998, Sokurov made a documentary called Saint Petersburg Diary: Kozintsev’s Flat. It is indeed rare that a famous filmmaker makes a film on another filmmaker’s lodgings. Russian film maestro Grigori Kozintsev’s (1905-73) directorial career spanned both the silent and the sound era of film. Kozintsev is renowned for his two black-and-white Shakespeare films Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1971)--his last films--made in collaboration with friend and composer Dimitri Shostakovich and Nobel Prize winning novelist Boris Pasternak.  The silent 1929 Kozintsev film, The New Babylon, co-directed by Leonid Trauberg, had Soviet film directors Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Gerasimov as actors, and composer Shostakovich providing music. The film and the intended music for the silent film ran into problems with the Soviet censors who demanded over 20% cuts before its domestic release, as the film was an obvious avant garde, anti-war film.  A slightly longer version was released in 1983 in Russia without Shostakovich’s music. However, the restored “original length” version became available in 2010, long after the filmmakers and the composer  had died. This was because a nitrate print of the film’s uncut length was found intact with Cinematheque Suisse (Switzerland) to which the Shostakovich’s music was finally added as originally intended.  (Shostakovich had apparently refused to add his music to the earlier truncated versions of the film approved by the censors.)

The neglected and hungry soldier in Kozintsev's The New Babylon (1929)

Cordelia and Lear interact towards the end of Kozintsev's King Lear (1971)

Subsequent to his travails with The New Babylon, Kozintsev made his Maxim trilogy during Stalin’s regime. The police commissioner of Detroit, Michigan, USA acting as censor, banned Kozintsev's Youth of Maxim (1935)—the first part of the Maxim trilogy--in the Thirties as being "pure Soviet propaganda and likely to instil class hatred of the existing government and social order of the United States." That ban was short-lived.

The Sokurov interview with Jugu Abraham, author of the blog Movies that Make You Think,  Dec 2017

Sokurov was not merely an admirer of Kozintsev but equally of the later film maestro Andrei Tarkovsky. Intriguingly, Tarkovsky never discussed Kozintsev in his writings on filmmaking. Indian film critic Jugu Abraham interviewed Sokurov with the aid of an interpreter in Trivandrum, India, where Sokurov was being honoured in December 2017 with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Film Festival of Kerala. The resulting interview revealed a lot about Kozintsev, Sokurov and Tarkovsky, three major filmmakers, active in different decades of Russian film history, with unusual linkages.

Alexandr Sokurov (right) with Jugu Abraham,
after the interview (December 2017)

The interview:

Q.  I was intrigued that you made a documentary film on director Grigori Kozintsev’s flat. What made you pick up the subject?  Was it your interest in Kozintsev as a filmmaker? Did he have an influence on you? Did you like his way of filmmaking?

A. I was much, much younger than Kozintsev, so I never met him. But I was a very good friend of his widow. I visited her house many times.  When I used to visit her there, often there were routine problems in the flat like repairing a leaking pipe and I would help her with the repairs. So we had a very good heart-warming relationship. For the most part, all the Soviet directors liked Kozintsev because he was a truly honest person. He would never betray anyone. He was a moral authority for Soviet filmmakers. Kozintsev was the only person who truly defended Andrei Tarkovsky when he was under fire from the Soviet Government. Kozintsev’s film adaptations of Shakespeare were outstanding. Nobody in the world ever made films that way. 

Q.  You knew Andrei Tarkovsky very well.  I noted that Tarkovsky never mentions Kozintsev in his extensive writings on cinema. Do you know why?

A. That is too bad that Andrei forgot to mention this great director in his writings, a man who was always helping him. It happens with many great filmmakers. They forget to mention the most important person who helped them. It is very bad, that’s too bad.

Q. Did Kozintsev’s filmmaking influence you?

A. I can’t say he influenced me directly because he had his own style and I have my own style. But everyone appreciated his level of professionalism.  There were many directors in the world at that level at that time. What is important is that Kozintsev was able to adapt western and historical concepts in Soviet cinema, and in that sense, outstanding.  Unfortunately, he was in so many ways controlled by Soviet censors. It was a big obstacle for him and this prevented him from creating many films he wanted to make.

Q. Do you have any opinions about Kozintsev’s directorial partner on his early silent films, Leonid Trauberg?

A. Kozintsev worked with Trauberg when he was very young. For me, Kozintsev’s best films were made when he worked alone, when he was older. With Trauberg, we can only connect with the beginnings of his career. Kozintsev’s collaboration with Trauberg speaks a lot about the director; that he was able to cooperate with and be in continuous dialogue with another important director, film after film. Not many directors are able to do that.

Q. Just like Kozintsev, you have taken a lot of interest in literature and in photography. Do you see that as a commonality?

A. The difference is that Kozintsev’s interest in literature and photography was evident towards the end of his life, while for me literature and photography were important from the very beginning. Kozintsev started as a revolutionary. He believed in radical art connected with socialism. This affected his earlier career. When he got rid of his childish diseases, he started to think differently.

Q. He is the only Soviet director who had his films banned briefly both in Soviet Russia and in USA ...

A. No, his films were not banned in Soviet Russia.. I don’t know about USA.

Q. I am referring to his silent film The New Babylon (1929).

A. Ah, yes. But that film was allowed to be shown later. Kozintsev was always among the top five Soviet directors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin and others. He was always considered as a classic director during his life-time. As film students, we all knew about this great director who lived in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). He had a good salary and quite a big apartment. He was never forgotten.

Q.  You had once stated that cinema cannot achieve what a novel or a painting can achieve. Could you elaborate?

A. Cinema is too concerned, too worried about showing everything, every detail. Unlike literature where there is an element of absence of the author in the work, everything is never totally said; there is always a mystery until the very, very end. In cinema, even though we try to present details, we are never able to show a person in the way a writer can.

(Though Sokurov would have been happy to answer more questions, his accompanying Russian managers insisted he had other commitments.  For those interested, the restored uncut 2010 version of Kozintsev’s The New Babylon is available free to view on "Youtube.")

The unforgettable sequence from the restored
version of Kozintsev's  The New Babylon (1929)

P.S. The author's in-depth reviews of Kozintsev's King Lear (1971) and The New Babylon (1929), Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) and Mirror (1975), and Sokurov's Faust (2011) were posted on this blog earlier.. (Click on the name of the film in this postscript to access the specific review.)