A film about Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler directed by a Russian using Russian actors speaking dubbed German sounds rather implausible. But Alexander Sokurov is not an ordinary Russian director. Among his 30-plus credits as a director is a 10-minute montage-documentary titled Sonata For Hitler, made 20 years ago. On the making of Moloch he offered these comments: "These people, the people of power, turned their lives into theatre. Guided by a myth, they conceived and modified their lives, staged real mise en scène and subordinated their behaviour to rituals and ceremonies.

This pattern is by no means unique, and Hitler was not exceptional. It's a common occurrance that grandiose shows driven by vanity end up in the dustbin of history."

Of the three Russian stylists once named as "rightful heirs" to the art cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky - Ivan Dykhovichny, the late Alexander Kaidanovsky, and Alexander Sokurov - only Sokurov's cinema has survived the test of time. Always searching for new ways to employ the language of cinema, he probes the human experience through the eyes of a sceptic and pessimist. One meeting with Alexander Sokurov is all that's needed to feel that down deep he's a restless man, a film-maker who invites controversy by the very choice of his themes, an artist who will talk circles around the meaning of his films rather than offer any kind of direct answers that may come back later to haunt him.

Born in Siberia into a military family that was always on the move, he spent his childhood in Poland, his youth in Turkistan, and his university years in Gorky and Moscow before settling down in St. Petersburg to work at the Lenfilm Studios on documentaries and feature films. When his diploma film at the Moscow Film School (VGIK), The Lonely Voice Of Man (1978), was rejected by school officials as being too negative and pessimistic, Andrei Tarkovsky was among those who spoke out in his defence. Moving on to Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) to make Lenfilm his permanent base, Alexander Sokurov spent most of the 1980s fighting to get his films released - as opposed to being completely banned, and the negatives destroyed. In the case of The Summer Of Maria Voynova, or Maria (1978/88), a portrait of an exploited woman labourer on a collective farm, he had to wait a decade for his film to be released in its uncut version. His literary homage to George Bernard Shaw, Painful Indifference (1983/87), had to be pieced together from a partially destroyed negative when it was presented at the Berlinale.

Most critics have nothing but praise for his cycle of poetic "elegies" - seven to date on key personalities in Russia and the ex-Soviet Union - and a pair of recent interview documentaries: The Knot (1998), a 90-minute interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Confession (1998), in which young Russian sailors openly speak their mind. But it was his haunting feature film Mother And Son (1997), a poignant sketch of a son's undying love for his mother as he carries her to a resting place before she breathes her last breath, that confirmed his status as one of Russia's leading film-makers. Programmed at last year's Forum of Young Cinema in Berlin, the Russian-German co-production (via Berlin partner Zero Film) provided the stylistic design and visual imagery for the filming of Moloch.

When Sokurov first conceived the film - originally to be called The Mystery Of The Mountain - all he knew for certain was that it would focus on a single day in the lives of Hitler and Braun while they stayed at the Führer's Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden during the late spring of 1942, a couple of months before the German defeat at Stalingrad. He approached the task from a moral viewpoint. "For a Christian it's through love that one finds the essence of salvation," he says. "But can one save one's soul by loving a monster? That's the question that troubled me the most. Eva Braun, according to existing memoirs, was capable of sacrificing herself for love. Because of this, she was doomed for a tragic existence. She is the real main character of the film."
Ron Holloway