Boris Godounov

The peace of a newly crowned tsar is taken from him by a man who says he is the true heir to the throne. There is also a heavy suspicion in the air: the tsar himself may have ordered that heir’s death. Rather than settling the suspicion, the account shows how power is forced to defend its own legitimacy at every moment; past a certain point whether the impostor is really an impostor loses its importance. The film was adapted from an opera and uses the music not as a decoration of the account but as the thing that carries it. The staging does not stay inside the closed world of the opera; the camera films the chorus as though it were the crowd itself. Ruggero Raimondi appears in Andrzej Zulawski’s hundred and fifteen minute French film, completed in 1989.