The Sun

This is the third film in Aleksandr Sokurov's sequence on the power figures of the twentieth century; Moloch dealt with Hitler and Taurus with Lenin, and here the subject is Emperor Hirohito. The setting is the days just before Japan's surrender. Issei Ogata's performance is at its centre and is extraordinarily strange: a man regarded as a god who, preparing to announce that he is not one, no longer knows how his own body should behave. Ogata builds this from gestures, a tic that keeps his mouth working, and hands that will not stop clenching. The meeting with MacArthur is staged around two incompatible understandings of reality failing to meet inside one room. Sokurov's images are as always hazy, muffled and close to colourless, and the air beneath the bunker is almost physically present. The film screened at the Berlin Film Festival on 17 February 2005. Sokurov completed the sequence with Faust in 2011. Who it is for: viewers who value Sokurov's slow, painterly cinema and films about a single person inside history. Who it is not for: anyone expecting event, explanation or historical summary.