Film: Russian Ark (Sokurov)

What's immediately striking about Russian Ark is the formal audacity of this much heralded movie, a tour-de-force 100 minute sequence shot in which the viewer is sent on a journey through the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, encountering figures from Russian history as well as being offered a tourists view of the art and artefacts the museum holds.  The eye that the viewer sees through is that of a dead soul (perhaps), who's guided round the museum by another drifter, a wonderfully sarcastic French diplomat known as the Marquis.  Russian Ark feels more like a work of dance or architecture than cinema - dance thanks to the mind-bending choreography of the camera that gracefully and ceaselessly works its way through the cast of thousands; architecture because by the finale the Hermitage feels completely mapped as a system.

I was initially hesitant to embrace this movie, seeing it as little more than an exercise in pure style, kind of like the flipside to a movie like Avatar - where the style is fantastical and marvellous and addictive, but little more than beautiful ornate packaging for an empty box.  Yet the more I think about it, the more this film fascinates me.  There's a wonderful Raymond Durgnat essay in his collection Films and Feelings in which he forcefully argues that it's impossible to separate form and content from each other and that they're essentially the same thing. It's an idea which has been highly instructive in my readings of films, and can be neatly woven into the fabric of Russian Ark.

The decision to shoot in one shot begins to feel like an act of necessity when you think of the Hermitage's functioning as an organism. In much the same way as The Shining's Overlook Hotel and Last Year In Marienbad's chateau, the camera's insistent glide over each and every surface makes the Hermitage feel alive.  The body of Russian Ark is one that welcomes and resists.  Utterly rooted in Russian history, it openly rewards the viewer's prior knowledge - if you know Russian history you're quite likely Russian, and the movie opens its arms out to you.  On the other hand, if your knowledge is weak and you're an outsider, the pleasure is resisted.  You see this resistance playing out when the diplomat turns to the camera and asks 'Was that Pushkin?' long after he's disappeared from screen.  The outsider receives the knowledge too late for it to be meaningful.

Sokurov wanted the narrative to be experienced "in a single breath", which is a great way to convey the heady rush and eventual suffocation you begin to feel as the shot unfolds.  When we follow Catherine the Great out into the snowy night it feels like a release, a blast of air that refreshing after the stuffy opulence.  The comfort and wonder of living inside this body gives way to frustration and a desire for liberation, so the longing for the camera to cut operates as a metaphor for the desire for release from the closed off nationalism that the Hermitage can represent for Russians, a repository for art(ifice) cut off from the rest of the world.  This idea is realised in the beautiful final moments when the viewer exits the Hermitage and looks out onto the sea - Russia, adrift.