Sokurov's work is prodigious, historically fundamental, formally path-breaking, and at the same time virtually unknown in the West. Certainly it needs a popular general introduction, but it is rare for so thorough a volume as this by Jeremi Szaniawski to offer so thought-provoking and novel an interpretation at one and the same time. His proposal to sort Sokurov's production into cycles is extraordinarily helpful, while his technical commentaries on these films will be indispensable to the layman. This exciting book is a marker with which all future students of Sokurov will have to come to terms; its accounts of cultural, political and literary contexts will be as illuminating to the non-specialist reader as its history of production will for film studies.–Fredric Jameson, Duke University