Documentary About Shostakovich
Article date: 30/11/08 | Last edited: 30/11/08
“Dmitri Shostakovich - Sonata For Viola”: The deeply moving story about the life and fate of Dmitri Shostakovich goes far beyond a mere biography. This is the first and only film created by Alexander Sokurov, co-authored with another director, a great master of Soviet cinema, Semen Aranovich. The film’s main material has been artistically selected by 29-year-old Sokurov from news reels dating throughout the whole period of the composer’s life (1906 - 1975). This visual, terrible and unforgettable historical background of the Viola Sonata shows how the joy of creativity becomes a higher social disaster of historical turmoil and fragility of the individual. The film captures the composer in unique pictures of domestic war and postwar years that have been preserved in the archives. There are excerpts of his operas The Nose and Katerina Ismailova, songs, and fragments of the first, fifth, seventh, eighth and eleventh symphonies. The film includes a telephone conversation between Dmitry Shostakovich and David Oystrah, as well as unique footage of the funeral of Anna Akhmatova… Immediately after the creation of the film in 1981, it was seized by the KGB and lost. Alexander Sokurov was able to save a copy of the film, and returned it to the public in 1987.
In Russian, [Running Time: 75min.; 221.18MB]
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