Whispering Pages (1994)
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.
Genre: Drama
Director: Aleksandr Sokurov
Actors: Aleksandr Cherednik, Galina Nikulina, Olga Onishchenko, S. Shurygin, S. Toropov, Sergey Barkovsky, V. Maslachkov, Valery Kozinets, Yelizaveta Korolyova