Sokurov: Early Masterworks

Whispering Pages (Blu-ray) - The pages that whisper through this brooding, beautiful tone poem are from nineteenth-century Russian literature, primarily Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. An anonymous man wanders through decomposing, fog-enshrouded catacombs and encounters a series of "the degraded and the humiliated," including a holy prostitute and a Kafkaesque bureaucrat. Shot partly in Sokurov's dreamlike black and white with a dense sound track of eerie, echoing voices and bursts of mournful Mahler.

Stone (DVD) - "If ever a film replicated the state of dreaming, Stone does. Which is not to say it is, in the classical sense, surreal; but it has the flow and fugitive feeling of a half-remembered reverie, full of mysteries, portents, inexplicable happenings, and chimerical objects. Set in (and filmed in the actual) Chekhov museum, Stone centers on the relationship between a young museum guard and an older visitor who seems at different times to be a lover, a doctor, or a surrogate father. Shot in evanescent black and white with a sound track of silences, breathing, natural sounds, and fragments of classical music, Stone is haunting and enigmatic" (James Quandt)

Save and Protect (DVD) - A retelling of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary as a surreal story of universal suffering, the film emphasizes the heroine's internal transformation as she slowly loses her grip on reality. Her erotic fascination with rich clothing and her almost childish desire to seduce and to be lost in passion is brilliantly contrasted with the small-town life that leaves Emma tragically isolated in her passionate attempt to bridge the gap between spirituality and sensuality.