September 12, 2002. On the Blurring of Lines: Some Thoughts About Alexander Sokurov by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein It has generally been agreed upon that Sokurov is to be considered as the "new Tarkovsky". There are certainly numerous reasons for this rapprochement, and one of the most pertinent ones is that Sokurov achieves, like Tarkovsky, the creation of dream within the art of cinema. However, though it is too early to speak about tendencies in Sokurov criticism - there simply is not enough of it yet - it is notable that, while Tarkovsky stimulated, also through his own writings, interpretations of his "dreams» through quasi-metaphysical concepts like "dream-time" or "dream-logic", Sokurov's work seems to inspire more aesthetic-perspectival intepretations evoking the existence of dreamlike "landscape paintings", perhaps happily summarized in the word "dreamscape". In Sokurov's films, the dreamlike ontological condition tends to be described as a "scape" linked to the metaphor of painting. Even natural sounds like wind or half-heard music (audible in Mother and Son), are likely to be described as an atmospheric and painterly "soundscape". This presents a contrast with Tarkovsky whose films have never been much described as "landscapes" and even less as "paintings". Tarkovsky's dreamlike spaces appear more as mental "zones", more or less linked to human civilization, and their theoretical elaboration seems to work better through the use of "structures" and "logic" than through "paintings" or "scapes". One could draw a daring parallel. Does it not look a little as if Wölfflin's old distinction between the "linear" and "painterly" style would here be reanimated, this time in the domain of cinema, Tarkovsky being the linear Dürer and Sokurov the painterly Rembrandt ? Should one not say that Tarkovsky is the one who sees