All Quiet on an Eastern Front

by D.S. Black

One of the legacies of the Soviet Dis-Union is a bloody smattering of high and low intensity conflicts flaring on the peripheries of empire. Animosities are long-lived. The 1980s war with Afghanistan poisoned the soil with mines and a lingering lethality.

Waiting for the other boot to drop

In 1995, Russian director Alexandr Sokurov filmed for six months soldiers of the 11th border guard of the Moscow Army, stationed on the frontiers of the Tadjik/Afghan borders. He distilled this half-year into Spiritual Voices: from the diaries of war, a 5 1/2 hour show on "how people today survive in conditions of war."

This is no edge-of-the-seat, guns blazing, battleground spectacular. As Orwell and others have noted, war is 99% boredom, punctuated by flashes of incomprehensible terror.

Here one sees a bird perched on a wire, while on a neighboring screen, soldiers dig trenches. Five minutes later, the bird is still there and the men are still digging.

One of the wonders of this presentation (part of the "Out of Bounds" exhibition assembled by the Yerba Buena Center, and currently displayed through May 2nd at the M.H. De Young Musem) is all 5 plus hours of Spiritual Voices are screened complete in a little over an hour. This miracle of compression is achieved by playing the 5 episodes simultaneously on adjacent television monitors, among which the viewer can alternate by a slight tilt of the head.

One monitor shows soldiers being helicoptered to the border while another, the cautious planting of land mines, or a young soldier writing home, lighting a cigarette with a rock-hammered tracer round. The left-most monitor screens the first episode, which has nothing to do with the war or soldiers, but instead shows a darkening vista with subtitled narration discussing the life and music of Mozart, in melodic counterpoint to the banality of war.

Eventually, on one of the neighboring episodes, an unseen enemy attacks, causing a slight stir in the soldiers' torpor. The overall languour of Spiritual Voices is in line with the films of the director's mentor, Andrei Tarkovksy. Both Sokurov (Mother and Son, Days of the Eclipse) and Tarkovsky have been accused of pacing their films to resemble paint drying.

"I don't see them as professional warriors, but as people bearing arms" says the director in captions outside the screening room.

"Great. Mozart. Assassins. And smell of paint." wrote one viewer in the comment book.

Because of the museum setting, few viewers are likely to sit through a complete cycle of the film's 5 episodes. But those who do, will leave with a 5 thousand yard stare, behind which they can begin to sort out a wash of new memories.

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