A young doctor, Dmitry Malyanov, comes to an unnamed provincial town in Central Asia to work on his dissertation. Everything prevents him from working: unbearable heat, strange people, mysterious omens, alien intervention. Everything is a sign for something else. But what?

The Days of Eclipse [Dni zatmeniya). Directed by Alexander Sokurov; screenplay by Yuri Arabov, Arcady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, and Pyotr Kadochnikov; based upon a novel A Billion Years Before the End of the World by Arcady and Boris Strugatsky; cinematography by Sergei Yurizditsky; production design by Elena Amshinskaya; music by Yuri Khanin. Cast: Alexei Ananishnov, Eskander Umarov, Irina Sokolova, and Vladimir Zamansky. Color, 140 min. Lenfilm Studios production, 1988.

8. A prepubescent angel visits the hero of The Days of Eclipse (1988), directed by Alexander Sokurov, heir apparent to Andrei Tarkovsky and the last auteur of the Soviet screen. (Photo: Kinocenter and Sovexportfilm.)

This is a strange film, mysterious beyond all limits. I watch it again and again, wandering inside it as if through a labyrinth of ruins. I stumble and freeze, embarrassed and stunned. I am unable to reduce my impressions to one denominator.

Yet the images remain in front of my eyes as if printed on my mind: a dry heat, with its light-absorbing colors; half-ruined mud and straw houses that look like the remains of an earthquake; strange faces; figures, sitting motionless or moving in agony. And over this, there is the atmosphere of disaster, of a psychological coma, of moral stupefaction. The houses are comfortless and strewn with belongings. People seem to be camping out, as if ready to take off for someplace else.