‘Director’s Diary’ Venice Review: Aleksandr Sokurov’s Exhaustive Chronicle of a Changing World
The Russian director of Mother and Son revisits the major world events that took place between 1957 and 1991 in this documentary built from his diaries and archival footage.
Spanning more than three decades of world history—34 years, to be precise, from 1957 to 1991—Aleksandr Sokurov’s Director’s Diary unfolds as a dense notebook of annotations and observations. Except for a handful of personal fragments, the film moves far from the realm of a private journal and instead takes the shape of an immense survey of the political, economic, cultural, scientific, and sporting events that defined those turbulent years. What Sokurov offers here is less an intimate diary than a personal compilation of milestones, supported by an extraordinary trove of Russian archival footage.
The structure is consistent and rarely deviates across its five daunting hours. Each year opens with what appear to be handwritten notes by Sokurov himself, followed by intertitles that list the key events of that period, paired with contemporary footage: film reels, news reports, propaganda materials, or cultural ephemera. The choices are not idiosyncratic enough to feel like a subjective diary, yet they provide a framework for a chronological narrative of the era. The archival images, always drawn from material of the time, sustain the viewer’s immersion in this sweeping historical montage.
The roll call of events is astonishing in its breadth: major scientific breakthroughs, Academy Awards ceremonies, sporting competitions, the Space Race, book publications, the births and deaths of cultural figures, wars, tragedies, and political upheavals. The Soviet Union remains the gravitational center of the narrative, with text highlighting the constant oscillations in its political and social life. What emerges is an endless compendium of human history—some episodes monumental, others minor, and a few bordering on trivia—that alternately impresses and exhausts.
If the film has an undeniable strength, it lies in its remarkably preserved archival footage, most of it in crisp black-and-white. One could imagine an alternative version that would let these images breathe without being constantly overlaid with text. Sokurov’s insistence on including everything—the essential and the trivial, the urgent and the absurd—creates a dissonant, almost cacophonous clash between words and images. The result is that Director’s Diary often feels like a film one ends up reading rather than watching.
Sokurov’s system does not sustain five uninterrupted hours of viewing. But approached in smaller doses—say, a five-year block at a time—it becomes more digestible, even illuminating. In this fragmented form, the film works as a vivid rediscovery of the Cold War era, with its rhythms, contradictions, and milestones. Less a diary than an encyclopedia, Director’s Diary resembles a semester-long history course projected on screen: exhaustive, overwhelming, yet often captivating.
