Craigie Horsfield / Spiritual Voices: A Film by Alexandr Sokurov

Alexandr Sokurov is recognised as one of the most important contemporary Russian directors and his most recent feature film, Mother and Son, was shown at Documenta X last year. Spiritual Voices was first shown as part of Chris Dercon’s Face à L’Histoire at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1996. This is the first time that Spiritual Voices has been shown in the English-speaking world and this English-subtitled version has been specially commissioned by Frith Street Gallery.

A marker to the time, to stories of lives and of community, Craigie Horsfield’s work is a part of a wider European debate and contributes to a philosophical project concerned with the individual and the common place and the central ideas of relation and dialogue. His method involves the constitution of art as a part of relation, within relation. His work reflects the responsibility as an artist within the world as well as the difficulties of conceiving an art of action that is voiced in the form of contemplation and compassion. Through these works, Horsfield expresses his fierce belief in the utter necessity of addressing the material present, however compromised we may be as agents within it. His work is informed by the necessity of art and of a truth, and by an intense attachment to hope in the face of the void.

Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices, a documentary filmed in colour and black and white, is an elegiac chronicle of the lives of Russian soldiers drafted in to guard the border between Tadjikistan and Afghanistan. Sokurov has said that he is interested in the state of people’s feelings and how they live in the state of war; how they cope with loneliness and solitude. Both his features and documentaries are an attempt to create a different type of real life, not what actually exists. As Susan Sontag has said of Sokurov: 'Sokurov is what Cinema can be at its greatest. His films have a visual power and moral depth that create an unforgettable emotional experience.'