Losev (1989)

It was one of his mentors who once told Kossakovsky, "There are two types of intelligent people; some say what they know, while others think while they speak, in order to try and say something they did not know yet, something that suggests itself in them." Victor Kossakovsky took this profundity to heart and became a filmmaker of the second category. He dedicated his documentary debut to the speaker of these words, the Russian philosopher and religious thinker Alexey Fedorovich Losev (1893-1988), who died shortly after the completion of this film. Shot in black-and-white, the film consists of two crucial shots that symbolize silence and night at both ends of the life chain. In the beginning of the film, the rising sun slowly swathes a cemetery in daylight. At the end, the earth covers a coffin bit by bit and heralds the great darkness. In Losev's words, "Divine intentions that lie beyond our reason, that's why we die."