Русский ковчег

cf.imdb.

You would have heard of Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark because it's set in the beautiful Hermitage and consists of one single 96 minute-long shot. And not much else. The film's soul elludes catchy poster slogans and plot synopsi.


At the end of a lazy rainy Sunday in my room, I strolled down the hill to another room and watched this beautiful hypnotic and inspiring walk though the Tsars' Palace.
Russia flows, white and immense, through her own history as if she does not live it, but dreams of it. The Winter Palace is the boat, on which her rulers have sought refuge from time and from the gods' wrath which sent the Flood.

From a technical point of view I found the film difficult on the viewer, demanding alertness at all times. Like a paragraph from Joyce's Ulysses - an even more powerful multisensory stream of consciousness, of someone else's consciousness. Like the Flood.

At the same time the sheer lack of cutting does not leave the film without any punctuation. One cannot help but wonder how much planning must have gone into the smooth transition from scene to scene, separated by turning the camera around a column, a close-up on a detail of a painting in passing, and how interestingly those selected elements of a physical walk through the Hermitage fit in a new sequence on film. It is just as challenging for the viewer to make sense of this discourse, as it must have been for the authors to compose it, provided the constraints, greater than those of a documentary film.

To be honest, the technical awesomeness of the film often drew my attention away from the said discourse / plot. I am not sure how justified it is to praise a film so obsessed with its own form and unambitious in its content. However, I believe it is more interesting to look at how the form and the content work together.

Perhaps because the Francois Vase is ubiquitous in my recent lectures, The Russian Ark reminded me of the Greek kraters found in Etruscan tombs. Firstly, the shape of a krater can not be modified much if the vessel is to preserve its purpose - to mix wine and water, so the decorating artist has to work with the space as it is available to him. The handles and curves are to him what the coridors of the Hermitage are to the cineaste. Due to the awkwardness of the forms he is obliged to break up his message in bands of storyline, decorative elements and isolated scenes. The sequence in the Hermitage is present in the same shot as on the krater the bands and scenes are present at the same time on the same surface.

It is then for the viewers, whose attention the krater exacts at the symposium, to note the programmatic unity of the piece and unveil the intent of the host who commissioned it. The 'host' figure is strongly present in the film too.

Finally, there is the issue of borrowing and 'otherness'. The Etruria and Russia were peripheral to the Greek-speaking Aegean and Europe, respectively. Both are seen as ambiguous, both have appropriated cultural elements (the graeco-roman pantheon, music, Versailles) and integrated them in interesting and fairly underexplored ways. [I can't bring this paragraph to a conclusion. Russia, Etruria, Britain, Thrace of course! ... all the places where I want to go remain underexplored and irresistable.]

In the root of the 'borrowing' is the trope of saving somehting old from destruction and bringing it by boat to new land. Obviously, the film's title alludes to Noa's Ark and a band on the vase represents Patrocles' funerary games, which are more subtly connected to Aeneas' flight from Troy to Italy. My analogy is broad and far-fetched, but the survival of numerous similar vases telling stories to Etruskans is no more accidental than the scriptwriter's choice of framework to tell his story of Russia. [There's another point I would allude to if I had made up my mind about its meaning yet - Fidel's arrival in Cuba with the celebrated yacht Granma.]

The issue of borrowing incorporates the theme of 'identity in the making'. Hence in the Russian Ark Russia is presented in permanent flight for survival. Wherever the waters take the Ark, Russia will sow whatever it has taken aboard - the fathers and mothers of more fires and vicissitudes. The present moment in history can only be liminal, dream-like. Our only hosts in the present and guides to the future can only be ghosts from the past, with a soft raspy voice in Russian behind the scene, or scribbled in red on black pottery.

Maybe I'll ask Santa to convince Greenaway to film something inspired by Greek pottery, in the vein of his hommage to Rembrandt, of which I inarticulately wrote before. Homeric battle scenes and history of art - all in one? Yes, pleeease.