ABSTRACT
Alexander Sokurov made his first feature film Odinokiy golos cheloveka in 1978, but his work gained wider distribution in Russia after 1986, where it was well received by Perestroika-era audiences. After the Second World War the Soviet political police People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs exiled and targeted Muslim nationalities throughout the Soviet Union, sending them to rural areas such as Turkmenistan: ‘These brutal forced relocations to desolate areas with poor material conditions resulted in hundreds of deaths from disease and malnutrition’. Days of Eclipse makes emphatic reference to its many ethnic groups, giving voice to the Crimean Tartars and Volga Germans by way of geologist Vecherovsky, Malianov’s only true friend. Peripheral to his sustained analysis of Days of Eclipse, is Sergei Parajanov’s Tini zabutykh predkiv, which he mentions in passing as a further example of the ‘modernist’ tradition of filmmaking in the ‘minor key’ associated with magic realism.
