"Days of Eclipse" (Alexander Sokurov, 1988)

"Dni zatmeniya" ("Days of Eclipse", 1988)
Director: Aleksandr Sokurov
coposer: Yuri Khanon
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095040/

From Harvard Film Archive: Based on a novel by famous Russian science-fiction writers the Strugatski brothers, Days of the Eclipse is the account of a young doctor who travels to a barren, unnamed provincial town in Central Asia. Mysterious forces interfere with his research, however: unbearable heat, strange people, mysterious omens, a conversation with a dead friend, alien intervention. The film is structured on contradiction: sound tracks that don’t match images (as in the concatenation of a Moslem woman praying and a Looney Tunes–style song); color and texture that change drastically and randomly; images that are yellowed as though from heat or time or decay. In this poetic narrative, time is suspended and bent and causal relationships disintegrate at will.

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A young Russian doctor Malyanov, who has been sent to the Central Asia, is working on a academic research, in his free time. But his work somehow causes unpleasantness with the Order, so it disturbs him to get him give up the research. The surroundings, natives of the land, and supernatural forces are standing in his way. After the runaway of his best friend Vecherovsky,Mayranov is left in complete solitude. In short, this is a tragic fable of a intelligent young man in a dull, decayed society(not necessarily Soviet Union).

This simple story is told through marvelous cinematography and intriguing multi-layered soundtrack,which is worth remembering as a best achievement of contemporary film art. There is no movie star,no Dolby surround, no big budget, but this film will be remembered for a long time for its humanistic implications and cinematographic beauty.

imdb

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composer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Khanon

" ..Yuri Khanin, a young composer, this year a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory managed to do everything about the orchestration, arrangement and choice of instruments in a very precise way. It was done with an ideal exactitude. Never before had I worked with composers so much, and I was really struck by his understanding. … I think that sound, no less than the image, should produce not only emotional impact, but is to have an altogether independent semantic meaning. The spirituality of the film as if finds its expression through the sound. And spirituality would not emerge by itself. If you might sometimes fail to keep alive the memory of a visual image in your mind and in your heart the soul would never forget sounds…"
- ( Alexander Sokurov, from press-conference on September 26, 1988)

The film “Days of Eclipse” won the “Euro-Oscar” ("Felix Award") of the European Film Academy in November 1988 in West Berlin in the “Best Music” special nomination. In spite of his great success, after 1991 Yuri Khanon never returned to writing music for the cinema.

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Karl-Kristjan Nagel -
https://nagelid.ee/
http://erztria.blogspot.com/

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