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2002
Directed by
Alexander Sokurov
96 minutes
Rated G

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3 stars

Russian Ark

Synopsis:It’s mid 19th century St Petersburg and guests are arriving for a ball at The Hermitage. The camera wanders through them and the museum led by a guide who appears from nowhere.

It is common knowledge that this film was shot in a single 96 minute take and I had somewhere read or heard that it was set in The Hermitage Museum and took us through two or three centuries of Russian history.

Well, the first bit is true. As for the second I would defy any of the film’s panegyrists to tell me anything about Russian history based on seeing this (not that that in itself would make it a good film, of course). Like most people, I’ve heard of Ivan the Terrible, and Catherine the Great and these people get mentioned but that’s about it. As we wander through The Hermitage we encounter characters from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Perhaps for those who know their Russian history well, there are meaningful references but for anyone else it’s at best an anachronistic pastiche, one that seems to wallow in a post-Soviet nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary glory of Mother Russia (we see nothing of the mass misery that led to the Revolution).

To understand this film it appears one must know what the author knows (Sokurov co-wrote) for there is little here that is generally accessible, historically, culturally or philosophically. As our musty cicerone, a moth-balled time-traveller, wanders through the acres of umbrageous religious painting, button-holing the occasional bystander, now charming, now haranguing, and sometimes chatting with the camera we see and hear fragments that to the uninitiated are largely meaningless. For the non-initiated then, the most interesting implications of the film lie with its exploration of our knowledge of the past (the Ark being a means of preservation). We the audience sit behind a camera operated by an unidentified contemporary voice (who appears not to know where he is) watching a character from the past who watches events from another past in a place which is a collection of traces of yet other pasts. Where does history end and myth begin? Undoubtedly in the context of this film this is a question which has more resonance for a Russian viewer but the question does have general applicability.

So what of aspects which are not so culturally-grounded or meta-cinematic. Specifically, the much-vaunted single take. This is not hand-held, cinema verité. Yes, the complex editing process of conventional cinema creates an illusion of epistemological seamlessness which is philosophically, if not morally, questionable, but the filming of this was so completely rehearsed in order to achieve a seamless transition from room to room that there is no apparent reason, other than as a self-sufficing technical challenge, why the film was shot in a single take, impressive an achievement as that is. Every dark corridor passed though or corner turned, every shift from century to century could have been a cut. This is no more real, spatially or temporally, than your standard Hollywood movie. There are some lovely shots – a group of Botticellian nymphets running down a corridor, an old lady and her footman running through snow into the distance, the mass of guests descending a magnificent staircase. But we’ve already seen these in the promo, haven’t we? There are other moments but a lot of this is simply tracking through room after room. The digital video used does not have great depth of focus nor does it seem to be able to deal well with movement. As a result, large group scenes in particular are often blurry and sometimes appear distorted.

Although neither in content nor form did I find this film remarkable it’s not a case of the emperor having no clothes. There’s costly fabric galore here and some fine tailoring but costumes with characters makes for a relatively cold experience.

 

 

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