The Real and the Intermedial in Alexander Sokurov’s Family Trilogy

Abstract

This chapter examines how Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son (Mat i syn, 1997), Father and Son (Otsets i syn, 2003) and Alexandra (2007) situate themselves at the intersection of the immediate and the constructed cinematic experience. The films under discussion emphasise the trace of physical presence on screen through haptic images conveying the multisensory dimension of the human experience, in particular touch and smell. Simultaneously, the Russian family trilogy consciously underscores the awareness of film as a medium carrying the story along with the mediation and remediation of painterly and medical images. Each section of the chapter focuses on a discrete part of the trilogy and investigates the oscillation between the material and artificial that is characteristic of these works.