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This is a five and a half hour documentary and the below doesn't remotely come close to expressing all my thoughts reactions to it, but wow what another hypnotic piece of art by Sokurov. Or a real landscape. Desolving into the vespertine hour.

Translunary veneer. Snow blanketing the Russian earth. It might be Isaak Levitan's 'Eternal Rest' filling up the screen. It might be a real Russian landscape.

Tremulous Sokuvoran micro-undulations confuse the eye. Floating landscape. Delicate elegiac piano-sequined chauntacoustics of Mozart, Beethoven, Messiaen, three embattled lives, drift up from the snowy underworld, melancholic sounds, invocations of angels, evocations of demons.

Susurrating narration punctuates sublimity of music and fantasy snows cape. Darkness deepens. Candles burn but briefly, stars outshine themselves. A figure transepts across the landscape. Disappears amidst trees. A glittering spangle of birds.

This is a real place after all. A shift from dawn to dusk and the body and face of a soldier mistily emerges. Five and a half hypnotic hours of unplumbed profundity in a martian-like sun-bleached spallated paleaceous rock-blasted scoured flayed ruddied ochred rufescent gizzard lifeless trackless Afghanistan-Tajikistan border-landscape alongside silent sunbleared Slavic Russian (and Central Asian) soldiers maundering through the torrid chaff-dusted waste-blasted land.

Five and a half hypnotic hours of dizzying vertical navigation giving way to melancholic horizontal quiescence. The agony of sunlight the ontology of waiting the agony of restlessness the pointlessness of war the fantasia of night. Nations and Men enslaved by sciamachic war. Invisible enemies. Alien world where soldiers do not belong. Soldiers motionless and muted and scattered.

A book of Russian fairy tales opened to 'The Tale Of The One-Eyed Devil'. Atavistic bare-boned daily routine. A collapsed empire uncreating its own sons. Skin and bone and boots and guns.

Uncreating and unlearned and inhumane. From the first segment: She died without knowing it -- out like a candle She was completely unaware of her surroundings I pressed her hand and she started to talk, neither seeing nor hearing me, not conscious of anything Exactly five hours went by in the same way until, at twenty-one minutes past eleven in the evening, she (Mozart's mother) passed away Substitute the soldiers for Mozart's mother. Out like a candle, they neither see nor hear, they're not conscious of anything, they undergo a spiritual death, their voices snuffed out, the spirit of a collapsed empire snuffed out. Nothing but steppe all round. Looks like a baby bird.

So tiny and delicate. Takes flight. It's wingspan expansive, a much bigger bird than it seemed to be.

A gun battle with the invisible enemy. About an hour long. Nothing violent appears on screen but you can feel the fear of eminent battle and you can almost taste the metallic heat of the shrapnel mingled with dust and sweat.

Day turns to night, soldiers' limp bodies and sleeping faces seamlessly merging and disappearing into the crumbled landscape. Passing from the body into the earth, in the morning, passing from the earth into the body. Leaden storm-clouds. A new musical palette. Ship horns and dissonant strings conjuring up icy churning waters. Icy churning waters juxtaposed against crumbled martian landscape.

Clouds move to the menacing music of Takemitsu and Wagner. Roseate and ochre tints fade out. Landscape devoid of colour. Men devoid of colour. Men falling into a state of desuetude.

Humanity falling into a state of desuetude thanks to the Military-Industrial Complex.