November 20, 2012 (XXV:12 Aleksandr Sokurov, RUSSIAN ARK (2002, 99 min)

Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov Written by Boris Khaimsky, Anatoli Nikiforov, Svetlana Proskurina and Aleksandr Sokurov Produced by Andrey Deryabin and Jens Meurer Original Music by Sergei Yevtushenko Cinematography by Tilman Büttner Film Editing by Stefan Ciupek, Sergey Ivanov, Betina Kuntzsch Sergei Dontsov…The Stranger (The Marquis de Custine) Mariya Kuznetsova…Catherine The Great Leonid Mozgovoy…The Spy Mikhail Piotrovsky…Himself (Hermitage Director) David Giorgobiani…Orbeli Aleksandr Chaban… Boris Piotrovsky Lev Yeliseyev…Himself Oleg Khmelnitsky…Himself Alla Osipenko…Herself Artyom Strelnikov…Talented Boy Tamara Kurenkova…Herself (Blind Woman) Maksim Sergeyev…Peter the Great Natalya Nikulenko…Catherine the Great Yelena Rufanova…First Lady Yelena Spiridonova…Second Lady Konstantin Anisimov…First Cavalier Aleksey Barabash…Second Cavalier Ilya Shakunov…Third Cavalier Anna Aleksakhina…Alexandra Fyodorovna, Wife of Nicholas II Vladimir Baranov…Nicholas II Valentin Bukin…Military Official Svetlana Gaytan…Museum Custodian Vadim Gushchin…Grandee of Catherine The Great Kirill Dateshidze…Master of Ceremonies Mikhail Dorofeyev…First Card Player Valentina Yegorenkova…Maid of Honor of Catherine The Great Sergey Losev…Court Official Vadim Lobanov…Lord Chamberlain Vladimir Lisetsky…Court Minister Aleksandr Malnykin…Servant of Peter The Great Sergei Muchenikov…Museum Official Yuriy Orlov…Grandee of Catherine The Great

Boris Smolkin…Chancellor Nesselrode Yuri Khomutyansky…Insane Italian Valery Gergiev…Conductor The State Hermitage Orchestra…Orchestra Aleksandr Sokurov…The Time Traveller (voice) ALEKSANDR SOKUROV (b. Aleksandr Nikolaevich Sokurov, June 14, 1951, Podorvikha, Irkutskaya oblast, RSFSR, USSR [now Russia]) has 58 directing credits, about half of them documentaries. Some of his films are 2011Faust, 2010 Intonatsiya. Vladimir Yakunin, 2007 Alexandra, 2006 Elegiya zhizni. Rostropovich. Vishnevskaya., 2005 The Sun, 2004 “The Diary of St. Petersburg: Mozart. Requiem”, 2003 Father and Son, 2002 Russian Ark, 2001 Elegy of a Voyage, 2001 Taurus, 2000 Dolce..., 2000 The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn, 1999 Moloch, 1997 A Humble Life, 1997 Mother and Son, 1994 Whispering Pages, 1992 Kamen, 1990 The Second Circle, 1990 Madame Bovary, 1989 The Lonely Voice of Man, 1988 Days of Eclipse, 1987 Mournful Unconcern, 1980 The Degraded (short), 1979 Posledni den' nenastnogo leta (short), 1974 “Avtomobil nabiraet nadezhnost” (short), and 1974 “Samye zemnye zaboty” TILMAN BÜTTNER (January 22, 1964, East Germany) has 6 cinematographer credits: 2007 Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps, 2005 “Kabale und Liebe”, 2004 Hinter der Tür (short), 2002 Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (segment "The Enlightenment"), 2002 Russian Ark, 1991 and Stalinallee (short).

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SERGEI YEVTUSHENKO has four composer credits: 2009 The Last Station, 2007 The Border, 2002 Russian Ark, and 1999 Robert. A Fortunate Life (short). SERGEI DONTSOV… The Stranger (The Marquis de Custine) (b. Sergei Simonovich Drejden, September 14, 1941) has 24 acting credits: 2011 Expiation, 2009 “Ivan Groznyy”, 2009 Taras Bulba, 2009 Help Gone Mad, 2008 Antonina obernulas, 2007 Jolka, 2006 Mnogotochie, 2004 Daddy, 2003 Do Not Make Biscuits in a Bad Mood, 2002 Russian Ark, 2002 The Tale of Fedot, the Shooter, 2001 Podari mne lunnyy svet, 1999 Marigolds in Flower, 1998 Tsirk sgorel, i klouny razbezhalis, 1994 Viva Castro!, 1994 Okno v Parizh, 1993 Drug voyny (short), 1993 Vladimir svyatoy, 1991 Abdulladzhan, ili posvyashchaetsya Stivenu Spilbergu, 1990 Tank 'Klim Voroshilov-2', 1989 Fontan, 1975 Moy dom, teatr, 1975 Vozdukhoplavatel, and 1966 A Ballad of Love. MARIYA KUZNETSOVA…Catherine The Great has 17 acting credits: 2009 Dvoynaya propazha, 2006 Vy ne ostavite menya, 2006 Travesti, 2005 Dreaming of Space, 2005 The Italian, 2005 Golova Klassika, 2005 “Kazus Kukotskogo”, 2004 Imeniny, 2003 Tayna Zaborskogo omuta, 2002 Tycoon: A New Russian, 2002 Russian Ark, 2002 “Lyubov imperatora”, 2001 Taurus, 1994 Koleso lyubvi, 1992 Glaza, 1989 Utoli moya pechali, and 1987 “Gde by ni rabotat....” LEONID MOZGOVOY…The Spy has 13 acting credits: 2011 “Raspoutine”, 2011 Gogol. Blizhayshiy, 2009 “Isayev”, 2009 “Ivan Groznyy”, 2007 Dyuymovochka, 2007 The Border, 2006 Gadkie lebedi, 2005 Garpastum, 2002 Russian Ark, 2001 Taurus, 2001 Text or Apologia of a Commentary, 1999 Moloch, 1992 Kamen, 2004 Bozhestvennaya Glikeriya, and 2003 In One Breath: Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (short). MIKHAIL PIOTROVSKY…Himself (Hermitage Director) has four acting credits, all as himself: 2011 “Pozner”, 2003 “Shkola zlosloviya”, 2003 In One Breath: Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (short), and 2002 Russian Ark. ALEKSANDR CHABAN…Boris Piotrovsky has four acting credits: 2005 “The Master and Margarita” (9 episodes), 2002 Russian Ark, 2002 “Lyubov imperatora”, and 1992 The Waiting Room. ALLA OSIPENKO… Herself (1932, Leningrad, USSR [now St. Petersburg, Russia]) has 8 acting credits: 2002 Russian Ark, 1989 Otche nash, 1988 Filial, 1987 Fuete, 1987 Mournful Unconcern, 1987 Ampir (short), 1985 Zimnyaya vishnya, and 1982 Golos . D. From Wikipedia:

Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Соку́ров; born June 14, 1951) is a Russian filmmaker. His most significant works include a feature film, Russian Ark (2002), filmed in a single unedited shot, and Faust (2011), which was honoured with the Golden Lion, the highest prize for the best film at the Venice Film Festival.

Sokurov was born in Podorvikha, Irkutsk Oblast, in Siberia, into a military officer's family. He graduated from the History Department of the Nizhny Novgorod University in 1974 and entered one of the VGIK studios the following year. There he became friends with Tarkovsky and was deeply influenced by his film Mirror. Most of Sokurov's early features were banned by Soviet authorities. During his early period, he produced numerous documentaries, including an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a reportage about Grigori Kozintsev's flat in St Petersburg. His film Mournful Unconcern was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 37th Berlin International Film Festival in 1987.

Mother and Son (1997) was his first internationally-acclaimed feature film. It was mirrored by Father and Son (2003),

which baffled the critics with its implicit homoeroticism (though Sokurov himself has criticized this particular interpretation). Susan Sontag included two Sokurov features among her ten favorite films of the 1990s, saying: "There’s no director active today whose films I admire as much." In 2006, he received the Master of Cinema Award of the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg.

Sokurov is a Cannes Film Festival regular, with four of his movies having debuted there. However, until 2011, Sokurov didn't win top awards at major

international festivals. For a long time, his most commercially and critically successful film was the semi-documentary Russian Ark (2002), acclaimed primarily for its visually hypnotic images and single unedited shot.

Sokurov has filmed a tetralogy exploring the corrupting effects of power. The first three installments were dedicated to prominent 20th-century rulers: Moloch (1999), about Hitler, Taurus (2000), about Lenin, and The Sun (2004) about Emperor Hirohito. In 2011, Sokurov shot the last part of the series, Faust, a retelling of Goethe's tragedy. The film, depicting instincts and schemes of Faust in his lust for power, premiered on 8 September 2011 in competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival. The film won the Golden Lion, the highest award of the Venice Festival. Producer Andrey Sigle said about Faust: "The film has no particular relevance to contemporary events in the world—it is set in the early 19th century—but reflects Sokurov's enduring attempts to understand man and his inner forces."

The military world of the former USSR is one of Sokurov’s ongoing interests, because of his personal connections to the subject and because the military marked the lives of a large part of population of the USSR. Three of his works, Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of a War, Confession, From the Commander’s Diary and Soldier’s

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Dream revolve around military life. "Confession" has been screened at several independent film festivals, while the other two are virtually unknown.

In 1994 Sokurov accompanied Russian troops to a post on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. The result was Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of a War, a 327-minute cinematic meditation on the war and the spirit of the Russian army. Landscape photography is featured in the film, but the music (including works by Mozart, Messiaen and Beethoven) and the sound are also particularly important. Soldiers’ jargon and the combination of animal sounds, sighs and other location sounds in the fog and other visual effects give the film a phantasmagorical feel. The film brings together all the elements that characterize Sokurov’s films: long takes, elaborate filming and image processing methods, a mix of documentary and fiction, the importance of the landscape and the sense of a filmmaker who brings transcendence to everyday gestures.

On the journey from Russia to the border post, in the film, fear never leaves the faces of the young soldiers. Sokurov captures their physical toil and their mental desolation, as well as daily rituals such as meals, sharing tobacco, writing letters and cleaning duties. There is no start or end to the dialogues; Sokurov negates conventional narrative structure. The final part of the film celebrates the arrival of the New Year, 1995, but the happiness is fleeting. The following day, everything remains the same: the endless waiting at a border post, the fear and the desolation. In Confession: From the Commander’s Diary, Sokurov films officers from the Russian Navy, showing the monotony and lack of freedom of their everyday lives. The dialogue allows us to follow the reflections of a Ship Commander. Sokurov and his crew went aboard a naval patrol ship headed for Kuvshinka, a naval base in the Murmansk region, in the Barents Sea. Confined within the limited space of a ship anchored in Arctic waters, the team filmed the sailors as they went about their routine activities.

Soldier’s Dream is another Sokurov film that deals with military themes. It contains no dialogue. This film actually came out of the material edited for one of the scenes in part three of Spiritual Voices. Soldier’s Dream was screened at the Oberhausen Film Festival in Germany in 1995 – when Spiritual Voices was still at the editing stage – as Sokurov's homage to the art critic and historian Hans Schlegel, in acknowledgement of his contributions in support of Eastern European filmmakers.

Pasquale Iannone in Senses of Cinema: Following on from Goethe’s famous observation that “architecture is frozen music”, Raymond Durgnat has argued that cinema is “unfrozen architecture”: “When the camera moves, the roofline flows past us like a river. The camera tilts rapidly up, and banister and staircase cascade down.”

However, the camera, Durgnat argues, “explodes architecture” because of its ability to distort scale. The latter emphasis on the camera almost as mutilator could not be further from the

reverence, the child-like wonder with which Alexandr Sokurov approaches the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the setting of his monumental film Russian Ark/Russkiy kovcheg.

The film’s sheer scale and ambition elicited gasps of awe upon its release in 2002. Four years in development, it was the first feature to be shot in one continuous, HD Steadicam shot covering more than one and a half kilometres. Utilising more than 850 professional actors, 1000 extras and spanning three centuries of Russian history, the film is set in a museum which holds several million artworks. Russian Ark was, as Sokurov has stated, an attempt to make a film “in one breath”.

The film’s narrative drive comes from the relationship between the off-screen Russian narrator (Sokurov himself) and the on-screen Marquis Astolphe de Custine (Sergei Dreiden), a 19th century French diplomat. Custine, in his inflexible conviction of the supremacy of Western European art over that of Russia, is the often-cynical guide to the 33 opulent salons of the Hermitage (which, before 1917, was of course the Winter Palace). As the camera moves through the museum, the director recreates critical moments in Russian history, introducing historical figures such as Catherine the Great, Peter I (the founder of St Petersburg in 1703) and Tsar Nicholas II.

Charlotte Garson has rightly observed that the film, as an extended plan-séquence, has its aesthetic antecedents in such films as those of Miklos Jancsò, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and the cinema of Max Ophuls. Garson tantalisingly speculates on how, with access to Sokurov’s technology, these directors would have undoubtedly relished the opportunity of composing an entire feature in a single extended sweep of the camera. However, for Sukurov, the technique is no gimmick, no “vain formal feat” or “supplementary aesthetic trump card” – it is the very essence of the film. It could be argued that the key relationship of Russian Ark is not that between the narrator and the Marquis but that between the camera and the Hermitage. The film’s mise en scène is the living culture of Russian and European history. Of the directors cited above, I would argue that camera movement in Sokurov’s film comes closest to the feathery, ethereal glide of Ophuls, indeed many references are made in Sokurov’s film to floating, birds and flying. One passage near the beginning of the film, moving left to right outside a succession of windows recalls the opening sequence of “Le Maison Tellier”, the central story in Le Plaisir (1952), Ophuls’ adaptation of three stories by Guy de Maupassant. Decidedly Ophulsian too, is Sokurov’s frequent subjugation of camera movement to actors. In the densely populated ceremonial scenes or the climactic ball, the movement of Tilman Büttner’s steadicam, whether moving along tightly regimented columns of soldiers or weaving amongst dancers, is never intrusive – characters swirl around the camera unencumbered. However, whilst Ophuls’ camera at times takes flight (and, as Kubrick famously exclaimed, “moves through walls”), Sokurov’s gaze can be more closely likened to that of a child – free certainly, insatiably curious, but also cautious, often coming close to being a Deleuzian seer. On the opening of each salon door, the camera hovers in wide-eyed anticipation. Each opening is a revelation and none more so than the door opening into “1917” and leading to the introduction of Anastasia and her sisters, one of the film’s most joyous, exhilarating passages. The Marquis shoos, then playfully runs after the children. Passing an exhausted Custine, the camera too careers breathlessly after them. As a snapshot of the twilight of the Romanov dynasty, it is

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unmistakeably Viscontian in its elegiac quality. The relationship between Custine and the narrator is one

whose dynamic shifts as regularly as the film’s diegesis shifts in space and time. The Marquis is first presented almost as a Nosferatu-like figure emerging from the shadows. Wiry, pallid, hunched and clad in black with sprigs of grey hair he becomes an irascible, laconic guide to the treasures of the Hermitage. His teacherly status is abruptly reversed when he arrives at a cold, colourless salon, filled with dust and empty frames – we are now in the time of World War II. A bewildered Marquis is warned by the narrator not to enter but he does so nonetheless, encountering a museum worker in a room depicting the hardship imposed on the Russian people and its culture during the siege of Leningrad.

Tim Harte has observed that Custine “has gotten a stark glimpse of the mortality that contrasts with the film’s earlier evocations of the eternal within the ubiquitous ‘living’ frames featured elsewhere in the museum.” It is the narrator now who has to provide a history lesson for the Marquis. Apart from this wartime segment, it is interesting to note that there almost nothing in the film on the Soviet era, with no mention of figures such as Lenin or Stalin.

Somewhat predictably for a film whose visuals are so spectacular, the film’s sound design has been largely neglected in critical writings. There can surely be little doubt that the meticulous visual choreography is also matched by the aural. After the opening titles, and before a fade-in allows the camera to begin its flight, Sokurov introduces his narrator in complete darkness, with gusts of wind whistling on the soundtrack. The director’s own delivery is akin to that of one who has awoken from deep sleep in a state of bewilderment: “Where am I? Where are they rushing to? Has this all been staged for me? Am I expected to play a role?” If we return to the motif of the child, this emergence from darkness is of course akin to birth.

As the camera progresses through the Hermitage, the soundtrack is peppered by whispers, chatter and hushed laughter from a plethora of characters. But constant throughout the film is an audible breathing – presumably of the narrator – symbolic of a culture that is living, a culture “destined to sail forever”.

Harry Sheehan in LA Weekly, Jan 10-16, 2003, “Russian Ark”: Writer-director Alexander (née Aleksandr) Sokurov — a perennial presence at major film festivals with such recent work as Taurus (2000), Moloch (1999) and, earlier and much more satisfactorily, Mother and Son (1996) — is on the whole more respected than beloved. Before attending film school, the now-51-year-old country boy – turned – St. Petersburger got his university degree in history,

and has looked there for his subject matter ever since. Only it's not just history, to hear his admirers tell it: On Sokurov's own official Web site, one Russian critic describes the filmmaker's subject as "man and his fate" — surely a daunting ambition for anyone's lifework, and one that has led to accusations of grandiosity. Certainly, only an artist with an inflated sense of mission could conceive of his work as a kind of biblical ark for 300 years of modern Russian history. Russian Ark opens with a black screen and the voice of an unnamed filmmaker (Sokurov's, actually) explaining that he's just regaining consciousness after some mysterious "accident" — perhaps, the viewer may come to believe, the historical "anomaly" of Russian communism. When the black gives way to a clear image, we're in a back courtyard of the Hermitage museum complex (of which Peter the Great's Winter Palace is the oldest building) amid

officers and ladies, dressed in 18th-century finery, as they make their way to a party inside. The camera/unseen filmmaker scurries along with them and soon meets up with the figure who will be our companion and guide, a 19th-century French diplomat known only as the Marquis (Sergey Dreiden) — a man of exquisite taste, and at the same time a familiar Russian punching bag, the Western dilettante

blind to the depths of the aggrieved Russian soul. With the Marquis' appearance, the film settles into its formal structure, a journey through the Hermitage as art museum and living historical presence. Working with German cinematographer Tilman Büttner, who was the Steadicam operator on Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, Sokurov shot all of Russian Ark as one continuous take. To accomplish this, he employed a high-definition video camera that stored its images on a specially developed portable hard drive that could record up to 100 minutes of uncompressed images. (The video image was eventually transferred to 35mm film.) As the camera makes its way through the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, the "ark" of the title, it weaves in and out of time periods, assessing canvases and sculptures, glimpsing small vignettes and vast scenes. To make sure that our eyes don't get bored, the camera moves up, down and all around, compensating for the absence of editing by continually reframing the action. But clearly, something more serious than stylistic innovation is afoot here — something too serious, Sokurov must have felt, for mere drama. Russian Ark doesn't act so much as it muses: on art, on history, on Russia versus the West, on politics. The first long segment of the tour touches upon the creation of the Winter Palace by Peter the Great (Maxim Sergeyev), whom we spy in a small room, dressed in one of his favored peasant costumes, thrashing a general presumptuous enough to have made advances to a princess. This

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Asiatic tyrant, the Marquis sniffs, is a cultural parvenu who, tellingly, built his "European" edifice on a swamp. Sokurov's rejoinder is purely cinematic, a stunning coup of motion that brings us up and down twisting staircases, out into a vineyard of ropes and creaking pulleys, a working backstage, down across the top of an orchestra pit, and up to a balcony where Catherine the Great (who founded the Hermitage as a museum and stocked it with paintings and sculpture) directs her own play, then dashes out to an upstairs foyer in desperate need of a place in which to "piss." High art, low comedy, hard labor and royal prerogative are here thrown together in an elegant unity, a breathtaking demonstration of Russian cinematic — hence artistic — brilliance. Russian Ark now begins a new sequence, detouring into a gallery filled with modern-day museum visitors. Without finding the Marquis particularly out of place, two of them — a doctor and an actor, friends of Sokurov — draw him over to a Tintoretto painting (The Birth of John the Baptist) and discuss the symbolism of a cat and a chicken. Next, the Marquis encounters a blind woman feeling a statue; she takes him onward to her favorite painting and stands aside as he smells the oil on the canvas. An intense desire to reanimate the artworks by bringing all the senses to bear on them culminates in a gallery of Goyas. Both the Roman Catholic Marquis and the ever-unseen Sokurov are struck dumb by the religiously themed canvases, as the camera nearly brushes up against them in a gesture of infatuation. By now, the film's allusiveness has grown extraordinarily intense: Goya's rejection of perspective and line in favor of color and light reflects the differences between film and video. And in the very next scene, the Marquis attacks a young Russian boy for not knowing enough to admire a portrait of saints Peter and Paul he's gazing at, undoubtedly a reference to the palace's Tower of Saints Peter and Paul, a site of much historical strife. Up till now, Russian Ark has been technically fascinating, but essentially cold and didactic. Now, energized by his encounter with fine art, the Marquis starts rhapsodizing over the cultural sophistication of the Russian czars. Oh, they were beasts, he says, but what good taste! (He would naturally think so: The Romanov court famously aped the French court in fashion and etiquette.) Then, in a fit of idle curiosity, he opens a door, only to find a hulk of a workingman — a survivor of Germany's 900-day siege of Leningrad (Soviet-speak for St. Petersburg), in which as many as a million Russians succumbed to hunger and disease — talking of death and destruction. But the Marquis doesn't want to hear about it. He slams the door shut and runs off to another building to join in a series of masques, official ceremonies and, finally, a gigantic, brilliantly photographed ball that, according to the press notes, depicts the last Great Royal Ball ever held in the Winter Palace, in 1913. Transfixed by the high life of the royal court, the Marquis doesn't want to hear about the struggles of the Russian masses. But what, in the end, does Sokurov want to tell us about them? Between the big fancy-dress scenes, there are smaller, more nostalgic moments. After a small group of lovely girls skip down a hall dressed as angels, one goes in to sit with her father, Emperor Nicholas II, and mother, Empress Alexandra, and is addressed as Anastasia. Sokurov

is invoking one of the great myths of White Russia, that of the missing princess who escaped the Bolshevik firing squad. Russian Ark is dallying with reaction here, and the flirtation persists right up

to the film's end, which coincides with the end of the ball. As many hundreds of noble and military guests make their way down decorous, baroque-neoclassical halls to the huge main staircase, the camera walks among this politely surging mass of polished humanity and, in a last bravura flourish, turns and faces them head-on at the door and watches as they pass behind and into the street. Sokurov displays enormous ambivalence throughout these scenes of court life. While the Marquis runs off to join in the ball — and, indeed, on many occasions when the Marquis

runs off — the director's voice warns him to hold back. During the ball, the Marquis, as he waltzes, can't even hear the director's voice as he mourns the passing of so many lives, though not the end of this way of life. As he stands and watches the partygoers exit to their doom, it's with a certain detachment. The film has a secret code, and the code book is V.I. Pudovkin's 1927 Bolshevik classic The End of St. Petersburg, a story of the communist revolution. As dedicated to expressive editing as Sokurov is to long, long takes, Pudovkin ended his film on the same grand staircase as does Sokurov. But Pudovkin used montage to ascend the stairs and focused on an individual, a revolutionary woman searching for her husband. Sokurov’s long, unbroken shot with a huge group of aristocrats is a riposte to Pudovkin’s. Additionally, Sokurov’s movie ends the same year Pudovkin’s begins. Is Sokurov voicing a preference for the refinement of individual taste drawn from masses of undifferentiated aristocrats over the masses as represented by a single individual. It’s difficult to say. Both films, in a sense, are overcome by their techniques. But Sokurov does connect one piece of history with another and that is no small accomplishment. Jeremy Heilman on MovieMartyr.com: Surely one of the most technically impressive cinematic stunts ever attempted, I suppose one could say that Russian Ark, Aleksandr Sokurov’s ambitious new film centers around a gimmick, but you realize it’s one hell of a gimmick once you see it implemented. Filmed entirely in one shot, this digital experiment is insanely elaborate in its compositions and costuming. It makes even the complex multiple split screen techniques of Mike Figgis’ Time Code look simplistic. What begins as an exploration of the halls of the Royal Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg soon becomes a tour of modern Russia’s, and human, history. Instead of the series of relatively static tableaux that I expected, though, Sokoruv ducks, bobs, and weaves his way throughout the museum with as much aplomb as any director working without a one-shot quota. The script’s surprising playfulness keeps things fresh as the movie buzzes along. History becomes a malleable and transient thing as with entry into each decked out room we enter into another era of time and history. When we encounter an elderly Catherine II after earlier seeing a younger version of her frolicking about in the same shot some minutes earlier, it comments mournfully on the rapidity with which we age.

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All of the sumptuous period detail that Sokurov piles on during Russian Ark is given the expected reverence of a film that's been made with the blessing of a state museum, but the film never becomes didactic or boring because of the larger theme that binds together all of the temporal and spatial places that we travel during the course of the shot. With his typically sparse philosophical aloofness, the director puts forth the intriguing idea that we honor history and save art so that we might fend off our own undeniable mortality. In scattered moments throughout the journey, this premise achieves real emotional poignancy. The gracefully floating camera conveys the mostly unseen narrator’s point of view, but he occasionally interacts with a mysterious European man in black, who is a lot more vocal about his sense of loss. Through their relationship, which echoes the rapport between Russia and the rest of Europe, we come to understand the way that Russia became a country that became so utterly convinced of the power of its own pageantry. Other scenes, such as the indelible one where we see a blind woman caressing the works of a master sculptor so she might understand their greatness, are no less affecting. It becomes quite apparent that the bond between the transcendent nature of great art and the inevitability of human foible is an unbreakable and necessary link, and Sokurov’s examination of the two is as thought provoking as it’s nimbly presented. For those who find Sokurov’s philosophies tiresome, Russian Ark is still a must-see. Even before it builds up to its insanely staged ballroom scene, in which 3000 actors appear in full regalia, it’s waltzed itself into the art film pantheon.

Birgit Beumers, KinoKultura 2003: Sokurov’s Russian Ark (Russkii kovcheg, 2002) is a 96-minute-long tracking shot filmed with a steadicam held by the director of photography Tilman Buettner, whose excellent camerawork could be seen in Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, Tom Tykwer, 1997). There is thus not a single cut in this film. The camera follows minutely choreographed movements along a 1.5 km track with 33 sets of the 862 actors donning 360 costumes and masked with three buckets of powder. The filming took place on 23 December 2001, the shortest day in the year, in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, leaving just four hours of daylight during the polar nights for filming after two days of preparation in the museum. The film creates the impression that the uninterrupted journey through 300 years of history and 33 rooms of the Hermitage takes just one long breath. The sensation of floating through history is achieved by a sheer technical feat.

Sokurov compresses time. On the one hand, there are scenes from the life of the Russian tsars in chronological order: Peter the

Great beats his general; Catherine the Great attends a rehearsal in the theatre; Nicholas I receives the Persian ambassador to take an apology for the murder of Russian diplomats, among them Griboedov, in Tehran; and Nicholas II has breakfast with his wife Alexandra and his children, including Anastasia and the hemophiliac Alexis. This sequence of historical events ends with the finale, the last ball in the Winter Palace in 1913. On the other hand there are characters of different epochs, rupturing the neat chronology of the Romanov dynasty: Valerii Gergiev, the conductor of the Mariinskii Theatre, conducts the mazurka from Glinka’s Life of a Tsar. Past and current directors of the Hermitage museum discuss problems of conservation, and worry about the authorities’ lack of understanding of cultural heritage. Contemporary visitors stand next to historical characters in the museum. Moreover, time passes at the speed of breath: the empress Catherine is a young woman during the rehearsal at the Hermitage Theatre; a few rooms later she is an old woman, running off into the Hanging Gardens to get some fresh air. Some rooms contain the future of the past: a room with empty hoar-frosted frames remind of the blockade of Leningrad during World War II when the canvasses were evacuated to Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg). The journey through the space of the past is a journey through time, but the two never intersect. History possesses chronology, while existing simultaneously with the present and other epochs. The Hermitage is an enclosed space, containing past and present, preserving the past for the future. It is the preservation of the past for the present which interests both the Hermitage museum and the film-maker Sokurov. The Hermitage functions as the ark of Russian cultural heritage, containing one of the largest collections of paintings and the treasures of the Romanov Empire. In travelling through Russia’s past Sokurov aims to recreate its splendour. He draws, however, exclusively on that period of Russian history when the country was most exposed to European influences. He excludes the period before Peter the Great (the tsar who opened Russian to the West and founded the city of Petersburg as the ‘window onto Europe’) and ends his account with the last tsar, Nicholas II, excluding eighty years of Soviet rule and ten years of post-Soviet Russia. Sokurov refuses to see continuity from the Russian Empire to Soviet rule, as well as from the Kievan to the Russian Empire; moreover, he is not at all concerned with the politics of the time. Sokurov thus renounces the twentieth century as unworthy of depiction and lacking cultural value. Sokurov guides his viewer on the journey through the Hermitage not with an authorial narrative, but through the character of the Marquis de Custine, the French aristocrat who visited Russia in 1839 in an attempt to find there a justification for an absolute monarchy. He returned to France a convinced republican. Custine’s account of his visit to Russia brought him success as a writer, while his harsh and cynical account of Russian despotism was banned in Russia. Custine finds Russia a terrifying police state, a country where people lie bluntly to the foreign visitor and erect a façade of splendour and entertainment to hide chaos, where the ruling despot is adored by his slaves, who live only to achieve salvation of their misery through salvation in death, where neither the church has any moral authority nor nobility any duties. Russia is a country that lacks a national identity, imitating Europe instead. Using Custine as prism for a view on Russian history and culture, we are invited to acknowledge in Russian history only those elements that are pale imitations of European culture and history. At the end of the twentieth century nothing of value remains of Russia. Russia without its European

Sokurov—RUSSIAN ARK—7

connection is void. Russia is neither part of Asia nor its master. The final image of the film leads from the ‘ark’ (Hermitage) to the sea (the Neva) – a murky, foggy, grey patch of marshland rises outside the entrance to the Hermitage:

Sokurov says farewell to Europe as he leaves the year 1913, and thus annihilates Russia’s history that ensues. What remains in the ark is the splendid past, eclipsing the horrors of the Soviet regime, but also the Russian art movements of the 19th and early 20th century. Having severed its links with Europe, the ship is destined to sail forever in the limbo between Europe and Asia.

While creating a masterpiece of technological mastery of time Sokurov creates an unbridgeable abyss between Europe and Asia, placing Russia clearly in a European context, of which it is a poor imitator, a chimera, a ghost ship. The Hermitage is the ark, carrying Russia’s cultural heritage; as such, it harbours vast collections of Asian, Oriental and Russian art as well as Western European art. Sokurov chooses to ignore the Oriental/Asian part of the ark’s content, concentrating exclusively on the parts that deprive Russia of its own/another cultural identity and bear witness to the imported cultural heritage from Western Europe.

Rob Blackwelder in First Person, Past Tense: There is a genius to the experimental and utterly surreal historical epic "Russian Ark" that has nothing to do with the fact that it was shot in one uninterrupted, mind-boggling 93-minute take that passes dreamlike through three centuries of Russia's royal past.

If this movie had been made traditionally -- several takes of every scene edited together with close-ups, two-shots, etc. -- its story would still be enthralling as it follows a traveler (or is he a ghost?) set adrift in time inside the breathtakingly grand Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, the former Winter Palace of the czars.

As writer-director Alexander Sokurov ("Mother and Son") turns you, the viewer, into this traveler with psychologically seamless first-person cinematography (by Tilman Buttner “Run Lola Run”), the film becomes almost literally transporting, bringing alive the courts of bygone Catherines and Nicholases as it whisks you from room to room and era to era.

Guided by an eccentric French stranger (Sergey Dreiden), a similarly limboed 19th century diplomat who is able to interact with the people of the various centuries in a way the traveler cannot, we're witness to incredibly tangible moments of history -- some random, some pivotal -- as we pass through the opulent halls and ballrooms of the vast palace.

Leaving an 18th century party through a dark staircase leads

to an ornate private theater where a play is being performed for Catherine I, 100 years before. The traveler and the stranger later observe silently as Peter the Great belittles a subservient courtier, and subsequently debate history's perception of the man as a tyrant. They're surprised to pass into the present momentarily and discuss the museum's magnificent collection with modern patrons before opening a door and finding themselves in the middle of a the Nazi siege on Leningrad (which was the city's name during the Soviet era). And on it goes, in one fluid steadycam shot without a single edit, through a dozen eras of Russian history; through scores of magnificent rooms with decorated ceilings and marble walls; through hundreds upon hundreds of lavishly costumed extras; and through curious philosophical discussions between the two unwitting companions about Russian history and culture. The logistical feats of this movie are unprecedented -- imagine the planning involved in having a 150-room museum filled with hundreds of people in period costume (including four live orchestras), all of whom must be in precisely the right places at the right times because there can be no second take. But "Russian Ark" is so vivid and spellbinding that such rational thoughts will be the farthest thing

from your mind as you're drawn into the eras and events that unfold before your eyes.

The history is fascinating, whether you're familiar with Russia's past or not (although I'm sure the more one knows, the better it gets), and the journey of its characters as they slip between epochs is engrossingly bizarre.

The performance of Dreiden as the aged, unruly-haired and slightly Puckish stranger -- an eerily calm oddity in a long, cap-sleeved winter coat who keeps his arms folded formally behind his back except when struck with the impulse to be flamboyantly theatrical -- is strange enough to keep the traveler (and by extension us filmgoers) off balance. But he is congruent enough in the movie's living history to occasionally merge into a period party crowd, for example, leaving us momentarily lost in time.

But more importantly, Sokurov's camera behaves exactly as any of us might if we found ourselves invisibly enveloped in another time and place. Fascinated by every detail, sometimes we the traveler become distracted, staring at the tense hands of a royal guard. Other times we watch in amazed bewilderment as a museum employee backs away from us in a startled manner. What does he see? During a 19th Century ball, we float through the dancers, then move across the room to see the view from the orchestra stage (providing the film's one visual mistake for the detail-oriented -- a musician wearing modern glasses).

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"Russian Ark" may be an astonishing achievement in filmmaking, but what makes it unforgettable is Sokurov's ability to draw us so deeply into the vibrant worlds he conjures -- without any cinematic slight of hand -- that the technical aspects of the picture

become invisible and forgotten. Quite simply, I've never seen -- or even imagined -- anything

like it.

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2012 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXV: Nov 27 WHITE MATERIAL Claire Denis 2009

Dec 4 A SEPARATION Asghar Farhadi 2011

CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu

…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu ...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com

...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto list@buffalofilmseminars.com ....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center

and State University of New York at Buffalo with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News

Spring 2013 Buffalo Film Seminars XXVI (preliminary screening list):

George Pabst, Pandora’s Box 1929 Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator 1940 Marcel Carné, Les visiteurs du soir1942

Jean Vigo, L’Atalante 1947 Orson Welles, Touch of Evil 1958

Kon Ichikawa, Revenge of a Kabuki Actor 1963 John Huston, Fat City 1972

Volker Schlöndorf, The Tin Drum 1979 Mike Leigh, Naked 1994

Michael Cimino, Heaven’s Gate 2000 Paul Thomas Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love 2002

Sidney Lumet, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead 2007 Zack Snyder, Watchmen 2009

Marleen Gorris, Within the Whirlwind 2009