The State Film Committee of Russia
Nadezhda Productions St.Petersburg
Producer Svetlana Voloshina
with the participation of Lenfilm Studios
Alexander Sokurov CONFESSlON
from the diary of a ship Commander
A cinematographic narrative in five parts
Part Three
The plot and the characters of this film
are creations of the author's imagination.
Opposite the Commander his friend was sitting.
They understood each other.
His friend too commanded a ship.
In general,
I have achieved my aims.
If I think over my aspirations, practically all have been realised.
There are things to be proud of,
to be ashamed of.
If I had to give my life a mark,
it would be between "satisfactory" and "good".
But the question is what next?
Will I be able to manage it?
- Manage what? - This life.
Find an aim
and fulfil it.
A new life?
Yes, but...
Will my strength hold out? Today, I feel more and more certain
that it is somehow exhausted.
Enough for one more spurt, no more.
What have you spent it on?
On this hounded animal.
There's a relation with death.
Life's almost finished.
How old are you now?
I'm 30 this year. Only 30.
Before, 30 was something...
But that's half of one's life. Statistically.
My own reckoning, too,
tells me I won't go beyond 55-57 years.
Still less if I keep ruining my health like this.
When you're squeezed dry, they don't need you anymore.
They dump you.
Everyone forgets you.
That's it.
What have I done,
that's worthy...
There are people whom I've brought up, as it were.
I didn't treat my own tutors well,
and I became like them myself.
When people go, a year or 6 months later
they come to understand that those 2 years - or 3 as it used to be -
weren't wasted.
It forges one's character. The army is necessary.
Even such as it is now.
At least to produce people.
Not to brand them all alike.
Not in that sense. In the sense that it hardens them.
Without that hardness a man is incomplete.
Later something else may harden him.
But here is a standard machine
which hardens or breaks people down.
It all depends. If a person is strong enough
to handle it, he becomes a man.
Otherwise he breaks down.
But he will break down anyway, even without the army.
He'll break down
in civilian life.
Selection.
That's it.
Does it matter what it costs to be formed like this?
It does.
It's like this.
Yes... You know...
You have a very particular character.
The army is a theatre of characters.
Nowhere else do men reveal their characters so openly.
It's like a particular calibre of weapon.
Our openness of character makes us vulnerable.
Can you imagine an officer in prison?
I'd never go. It's not my way.
I'm not ready.
If your life becomes senseless, you must put an end to it.
Old commanders told me
they used to carry Makarov's bullet,
or rather a cartridge, in their pocket.
It was about 10 - 15 years ago.
A small cartridge
at hand...
for such occasions.
Pah! And that's it.
Anything but humiliation.
"lnsulted and lnjured".
Humiliated. This is a humiliation.
Before, there were educated people.
There have always been cruel officers.
He listened to his friend
and he recalled
how one evening
he heard some wonderful music on the radio.
He sat and listened for a long, long time.
To begin with he felt fine.
Then he came to hate both the ship
and his whole life,
everything, from his childhood up to the present minute.
Then he remembered his mother, his brother...
Where were they?
He thought of his town.
He remembered himself freezing in the Naval School hostel,
sleeping with his hat on,
never thinking about the future.
He didn't know how to think.
Do you think 19th Century Russian officers
were like us?
No, no.
Were they so different?
Radically different, in everything.
Perhaps for them,
it was their work,
their vocation, the realisation of their dreams,
a social position, a way to develop...
their personalities.
For me of course these things partly remain.
But mostly it is just a means to survive.
To survive.
I don't live, I survive.
This is not life.
This is an existence. Just survival.
Something pushes us to survive, to survive, to survive.
Because you cannot do anything else.
To feed your family.
Because... you have to survive.
For a long time I believed in my own strength.
I still believe in it.
To a lesser extent.
Hopelessness stamps its mark on you.
You lose faith. I used to believe before.
To believe in myself.
It always worked.
But perhaps, when it doesn't work, you tend to forget.
Which commandments do you hold dear?
All of them.
The Commander was grateful to his friend
for sharing
the burden of his soul.
And he remembered how, not long ago,
they put out with their two ships to the White Sea.
They dropped anchor by the shore.
And the bosun from his friend's ship,
seizing the little steering wheel,
towed a raft of coal to the shore,
where
a deathly cold outpost could be seen.
And it seemed to him that the bosun
Iooked very much like Dante's Charon.
Here they go along the shore.
A scent of fog in the air...
and here is the fog.
And then something begins, something hard to forget.
The soldiers start to carry the coal,
further away from the water, nearer to the houses.
The settlement was empty.
Nobody came
out of the houses.
Watching this,
the Commander wanted to ask the young soldiers:
"Boys, what era do you come from?
Have I gone mad?
You, boy, come back, you've lost your way.
You've strayed into a different time.
The tyrant is dead.
You don't have to go on any longer."
It seemed to him he had shouted all this many times,
but nobody heard him.
Then somebody shouted that the tide was on the ebb.
With the remains of the coal
the raft returned to the ship.
Of course, they were freezing,
but come what may
they had to load again
and with the next tide
they had to go back to the outpost.
The Commander was thinking of what he saw around him.
What was needed, he thought,
was not a reform,
but a complete overhaul.
We have to reconsider completely,
what the army should be like.
It must be reinvented, starting from the beginning.
Perhaps our whole life, too,
needs this:
to be reinvented, one day, starting from the beginning.
Perhaps we could invite someone
to help us invent a reasonable life?
wrote the Commander.
What binds us together?
We understand each other,
we trust each other.
We rely on each other,
we have lived very similar lives,
and most likely something similar awaits us both
in the future.
Just recently he had had a dream,
in which he was a very old man,
nearing the end,
but he still served on the same ship.
And he understood that what terrified him
was not becoming old,
but that his ship did not become old,
the sea was not old, the air around was young...
But he was old and he knew all too well
the rest of the story.
Then he saw his friend's ship
moving along by a rocky shore.
It struggled against the squall
that was driving the ship onto the rocks.
"The sea was big..."
The Commander smiled, remembering this phrase of Chekhov's.
Towards evening, the bosun and a seaman returned to the ship.
They had taken medical officers on shore.
All the crew was on board.
We will stay the night here anchored by the shore
till the storm is over and in the morning,
God willing, we will move on,
wrote the Commander.
He added a full stop,
and went to bed.
Serguei Bakai The Commander
Camera Alexei Fiodorov
Editor Leda Semionova
Sound Serguei Moshkov
Alexander Sokurov CONFESSlON
from the diary of a ship Commander
End of Part Three
Nadejda 1998
Subtitles: Alexei Jankowski
Subtitling by TVS - TlTRA FlLM