ABSTRACT
What happens when a living deity renounces his divinity and acknowledges his true identity as a human being? Solntse/The Sun (2005), Aleksandr Sokurov’s mesmerizing portrait of the life of the Emperor Hirohito during the last days of World War II, focuses on the key turning point in international history when the Japanese monarch did precisely this. Hirohito’s decision taken, according to the film, not long after his first meeting with General Douglas MacArthur, set the terms of the American Occupation of its former enemy and in so doing posed explicit, and perhaps unanswered questions, about the exact relationship between myth and political necessity. In this chapter, I want to argue that although Sokurov’s film is firstly a truncated investigation into the reshaping of strategic power relations shot through the prism of one person’s life, it also draws our attention to the way that film may participate in the construction of knowledge about biographical identity, especially in relation to the porous boundaries between public and private, the past and the present, and, in this case particularly, between the national and the global. Importantly, too, the film seems only too aware of the intrinsic aesthetic boundaries between 198invented story and documentary history. There are at least two Hirohitos in The Sun and two ways of engaging with his historical presence. Sokurov’s blurred sonic and visual language helps shape our growing perception of the biographical subject’s dual, transnational dimensions. We hear, for instance, American and Japanese voices on the radio and rumblings of traditional Japanese music and Wagnerian motifs in the background audioscape. On the screen, we see an elderly and fragile man turning the pages of the Japanese Imperial Family album before gazing on a treasured collection of Hollywood studio portraits. Odd ellipses and strange perspectival shifts help to sustain the logic of a buried dream about to dissolve into a new postwar order. This is a film in which hardly anything, but then also everything, happens; when time itself seems to take on new dimensions. In short, The Sun thus provides a series of unique insights into the nature of the biopic as an especially liminal form of historical narrative.
