The end of the 19th century

On the end of the revolutionary syntheses: Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Solovyov (and by extension Dostoevsky), and, improbably later, Girard.

The Island

What is guilt? Who is guilty? Is redemption possible? What is sanity? Do persons have a telos, a destiny, both or neither? Ostrov (The Island) asks and attempts to answer all these questions and more.

A film that improbably remains one of the best of this century: "reads" like a 19th century Russian novel; the bleakly stunning visual setting is worth the time to watch alone.

Unlike Dostoevsky, the film is saturated with a literalism that is more or less typical of Eastern mysticism (in Karamazov, the corpse of Zosima begins to stink: it could not have been otherwise in his novel). Whether this is a virtue or a flaw or something else for Ostrov, I suspect depends strongly on the viewer. My own take is "something else".