OT?: "Russian Ark"
Thornhill
(can't say 'film,' as it isn't). It is, for me, one of the most
deliriously, transportingly, beautiful works I've ever seen, and gives
rise to this question:
*If* the script of Kubrick's "Napoleon" is ever to be filmed, who ever
could be a better director of it than Alexander Sukorov?
Thornhill
Boaz
> "Russian Ark" is for anyone with serious love for 'cinematic imagery'
> (can't say 'film,' as it isn't).
Sure, you can say "film." The word "film" will soon be generic,
signifying anything involving cinematic imagery, no matter what the
source/format is used to capture that imagery. I doubt very much that
with more "films" shot on 24P-HD, and projected digitally, that a new
name (besides "movie") will be coined in order desingnate (or even
distinguish) what camera/source/format is used.
Yo, David Mullen! What is your opinion on Thornhill's comment?
> It is, for me, one of the most
> deliriously, transportingly, beautiful works I've ever seen,
It's on one of my "must see" list. And to clear things up here for a
moment: This is a 90 minute long movie that is a constantly moving
camera that goes through an art museum in St. Petersburg. In order to
obtain an uninterrupted 90 minute image 24p-HD was employed. This is
what I've read. What was the name of the museum? And was it St.
Petersburg and not Moscow? I can't remember, as it has been a while
since I read about it (and saw a brief clip on the Ebert/Roeper show).
But, for the rest who may not know, that is why Thornhill is saying it
is not "film."
> and gives
> rise to this question:
>
> *If* the script of Kubrick's "Napoleon" is ever to be filmed, who ever
> could be a better director of it than Alexander Sukorov?
*If* the A&E production of "Napoleon" hasn't killed the chances, like
the Dino de Horrendous production of "Waterloo" killed Kubrick's
chances thirty three years ago.
Boaz
Peter Tonguette
>Petersburg and not Moscow?
The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
Darth Nub
Haven't seen it yet, but for Sydney (Australia) AMKers, it's showing
at the Valhalla in Glebe on Wednesday night, with a phone Q&A with the
director in St Petersburg.
Darth
Jan
> (can't say 'film,' as it isn't). It is, for me, one of the most
> deliriously, transportingly, beautiful works I've ever seen,
I was a bit disappointed. The film didn't surprise me in any way and
it felt just like a home video on steroids. I have no idea why Sokurov
wanted to film it in a continuous take. It would make sense if the
camera moves were truly breathtaking (as in, say, "Satantango") - here
they are just OK. The light on the set is bad, we keep getting the
glare off the key parts of the paintings constantly (which we would
have never seen had the film been shot and prepared normally) with the
camera operator no less obviously straining to avoid it - and we can
see it live on screen.
The Hermitage museum is gorgeous and the film is worth seeing just for
this reason.
Jan Bielawski
Thornhill
You make it sound as if "Russian Ark" was supposed to be a tour
through the Hermitage, nothing more ("a home video on steroids"). You
see error, while I see it as fixing, for a short time, the arc of
living transience (really, I can only imagine that, had they seen it,
Tarkovsky or Kubrick would have plotzed over Sukorov's work).
Maybe this local review will touch upon some things worthy of
consideration rather than condemnation.
Thornhill
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Winter Palace
Alexander Sukorov takes an imaginative journey through Russia's
ancient past--via one of its oldest museums
B Y G O D F R E Y C H E S H I R E
"Are you interested in beauty, or only its representation?"
-- from Russian Ark
April 16, 2003
The dance of change: Officers and ladies relish a cultural past as a
new century approaches.
Conceivably the most brilliant and important foreign-language film
that will play the Triangle this year, Alexander Sukorov's Russian Ark
contains innumerable marvels, yet its primary fascination can be
easily described: It is the first feature in movie history to be
comprised of a single shot, a shot that takes the viewer on an
extraordinary, dreamlike journey through the Hermitage Museum in St.
Petersburg.
Lest that make it sound like a mere technical stunt wedded to a fancy
museum tour, let me emphasize that Sukorov's dazzler is a triumph of
imagination and craft on every level, as singular a work of art as any
on the walls of the Hermitage.
The film's technical side, though, is breathtaking purely on its own.
Movies haven't been made in single shots before because cameras use
reels that generally can't contain more than 12 minutes of film.
Russian Ark was made possible by a confluence of new technologies,
primarily high-definition digital video, which results in an image
comparable to fine-grained film, and an advanced computer hard drive
that allows all the information to be stored during the film's
shooting.
Even so, what's amazing here is not the technology but the film's
execution. If you've ever seen a movie being filmed, you know that
even shots lasting only 10 or 15 seconds usually have to be repeated
several times because of technical mistakes, an actor flubbing his
lines, or other problems. In Russian Ark, the shot runs 89 minutes and
encompasses elaborate movement through miles of galleries and
ballrooms, as well as the activity of hundreds of actors and three
symphony orchestras(!), and it all comes off without a hitch.
To take this challenge almost to the point of absurdity, Sukorov and
company had to accomplish their single shot in one take, because the
Hermitage declined to close its doors to the public for more than a
day. How did they do it? Well, they rehearsed in other spaces for
months on end, working out every movement of actors and camera down to
the finest details.
Still, the gods of cinema must have wanted this movie to happen,
because Sukorov and his wizardly director of photography, Tillman
Buettner (a German who shot Run Lola Run), pulled off what has to be
the most complex and amazing feat of camera choreography in the
history of movies. Honestly, I don't know that I've been as impressed
with a movie on a technical level since I encountered 2001: A Space
Odyssey at Raleigh's old Ambassador Theater in 1968.
Russian Ark opens outside the Hermitage as people in 19th century
dress, dashing officers and their beautiful ladies, make a jumbled,
high-spirited entry to the palace. The first words we hear are, "I
open my eyes and I see nothing. I only remember there was an accident
..."
Throughout the movie we are looking through the eyes of the man who
utters these words--the Narrator. We never learn much about him other
than that he's Russian, but we quickly gather he has just died and
awakened in this place. He soon meets the movie's other main
character, a caustic French writer-diplomat named Custine (Sergei
Dreiden) who's been dead much longer.
Custine (an actual historical figure who left memoirs of his time in
Russia) also seems to have no idea why his spirit is suddenly in this
palace, which he'd visited in life. (At first he thinks he's "in
Chambord, under the Directoire," only to be told, sadly, that
Russian's own Directoire lasted 80 years.) Yet the Frenchman quickly
begins to serve as the Narrator's Virgil, leading him on an excursion
through the Hermitage during which they cross paths with modern
museum-goers as well as figures such as Catherine the Great and
Czarina Anastasia.
With his black frock coat, upswept hair and theatrical manner, Custine
is a witty, entertaining guide, mixing dollops of aesthetic
appreciation and historical observation with barbed comments about all
things Russian. Sometimes he converses with the people he encounters;
at other times he and the Narrator remain invisible to others.
As its almost ceaselessly moving hand-held camera negotiates an
endless succession of gorgeous rooms, the movie has the feel of a
mysterious odyssey, a voyage into history and memory unlike any other.
The first time through, simply watching it is intoxicating. Yet
Russian Ark is also the first film I've seen in ages that grows more
fascinating on repeat viewings, which allow one to get a better sense
of its multi-leveled meanings--another thing it shares with 2001.
Regarding these meanings, the initial tip I would offer first-time
viewers is to notice how the film seems organized according to the
principle of twos, or doubleness. No doubt this is because Russian Ark
is deliberately self-reflexive--a work of art that is also a work
about art--thus every image also produces or implies its reflection.
Notice, in any case, how many of its elements occur in twos, beginning
with the two main characters (including a Narrator who says that he's
a Gemini!) and the implications of the film's two-word title. The
first of numerous biblical allusions, "ark" suggests two primary
referents--Noah's Ark as a physical refuge from ruin, the Ark of the
Covenant as a vessel of communal values--both of which apply to the
Hermitage and Russian Ark itself.
With its sinuously musical flow, the film might be said to unfold in
movements, like a symphony. Yet, apropos the principle of twos, I
think it also divides into halves that reflect the Hermitage's dual
identity as a present-day museum and the former home of Russia's
czars: The first half, where Custine tours the museum's picture
galleries, might be titled "art" while the second half, which
transpires mainly in the palace's state apartments and ballrooms,
might be called "history."
The theme of Russian identity predominates throughout and in the first
half centers around another duality: Russia and Europe. As he begins
looking at paintings, aware that St. Petersburg itself was created as
a European city in Russia, Custine superciliously remarks that the
czars "were Russophiles, but drawn to Italy," and that Russian art is
never more than imitative and second-rate.
The idea here, which filters throughout the film, is that culturally
Russians are bifurcated, forever obliged to see themselves through
both Russian and European lenses. But as for the putative corollary
that Russian art is necessarily inferior, I would say Russian Ark
itself constitutes a witty riposte to that, since it's easily as
accomplished as any European "art film" of late, and perhaps even more
impressive as a vessel of European tradition both cultural and
cinematic.
The film's first half also presents various casually articulated
arguments about art, all of which redound on the filmgoer. Is
Sukorov's movie an elaborate allegory which those not versed in
Russian history can't hope to understand? It's easy to suspect as
much, given its dense and playful allusiveness. Yet I think the film
answers this question in a scene where Custine examines paintings in
which different elements symbolize certain things (e.g., a chicken
means avarice), and we're reminded that we have left this world of
settled symbolism.
So, unlike The Odyssey or the Divine Comedy, Russian Ark doesn't
emerge from a culture of cohesive meanings. Rather, it belongs to the
dispossessed tradition of modernism and--like The Waste Land, or
Ulysses, or The Cantos--looks back on those lost cultures from a
perspective that is inevitably eclectic and idiosyncratic.
The film exhibits a similarly playful way with meaning when it comes
to cinema aesthetics and history. I admit I laughed when Custine
complained of a painting of Saint Cecilia being hung next to The
Circumcision of Christ. This must be the most droll swipe ever at
Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage, the cornerstone of Soviet
cinema (it's doubly funny if we read Custine as a stand-in for another
French Catholic writer, Andre Bazin, whose theories overthrew
Eisenstein's).
Sukorov inhabits this territory very comfortably. He knows that he's
giving new meaning to Dziga-Vertov's idea of the "Kino-Eye" and that,
as Hitchcock proved in Rope (a film crafted to look like it was made
in one shot), Eisenstein's idea of intellectual montage didn't depend
on editing in any case. Yet looming over all this is the rueful irony
that Russian Ark may be cinema, but it is not film, and therefore it
can only refer back to an art defined by a now-vanishing technology.
The nostalgia endemic to that position (like Custine, the film is a
ghostly visitor at the ball) also infuses the movie's second half,
where the dialectic between Europe and Russia gives way to another:
Public versus private. The Winter Palace, of course, served both
functions. Thus, while we glimpse Catherine the Great as well as
Nicholas II and Alexandra with children in family quarters, we also
witness an elaborate ritual in which Nicholas I receives a Persian
prince.
Thanks in part to the subtle manipulation of color and light levels in
these sequences, they virtually glow with an aureate radiance that
mournfully whispers, "Look, look what was lost." Sure, the people we
see are cosseted and privileged, yet the film's emphasis falls on the
evanescent essentials: Beauty, grace, humanity, life. Against these,
tragically, are posed the encroaching shadows of the 20th century,
symbolized by a hidden room of corpses and coffins.
Public and private, symbol and sentiment converge in a double tour de
force that climaxes the movie. In the first of two astonishingly
realized sequences, both Custine and the camera join scores of
officers and their ladies (the ones we saw at first) in dancing a
spirited mazurka that, like a valentine from Tolstoy and Renoir, seems
to provide a soaring elegy for an entire way of life. When the music
stops, the Narrator leaves Custine, saying, "Goodbye Europe, it's
over."
What comes next can barely be described, but it's one of the most
haunting sequences I've ever seen in a film: Hundreds of ballgoers
amble down the palace's vast marble staircases, like phantoms knowing
they must disappear with the dawn. The camera then glances out of a
side door and sees a steaming river that precisely recalls Tarkovsky's
illusory planet, Solaris. As we realize how many odysseys Sukorov has
invoked--Noah's, Homer's, Joyce's, Kubrick's and Tarkovsky's
cinema's--we are told, in a tone too gnomic to be reassuring, that the
voyage is not over: "We are destined to sail forever ... ."
The words linger long after the phantoms have faded into nothingness.
Jan
> You make it sound as if "Russian Ark" was supposed to be a tour
> through the Hermitage, nothing more ("a home video on steroids").
Well, I mean by it that this film _is_ a tour through the Hermitage,
not that it was supposed to be one (it was obviously supposed to be
something else). For all the technology, costumes, and the fascinating
history it's astonishing all this produced so little.
"When the gagged Russian nation finally regains its freedom of speech
we shall hear so much arguing that to the surprised world it would
appear the times of the Tower of Babel have returned."
Astolphe, Marquis de Custine
Jan Bielawski
Thornhill
(http://www.filmthreat.com/Reviews.asp?Id=3674) is for you, as the
first line is "RA is a thoroughly boring movie." I'll stick with
Cheshire's insightful read, and others. "Russian Ark," as you say, is
a tour through the Hermitage, though "it was obviously supposed to be
something else." I believe it was something else, and the least of
that "else" was simply a tour de force.
Thornhill
dev_n...@yahoo.com (Jan) wrote in message news:<5a3651e8.03042...@posting.google.com>...