If The Russian Ark were a term paper, I’d give it A+ for concept, D for execution. Though with an extremely limited release (there seem to be only a few, subtitled prints making the rounds of festivals, art houses, and museums), the movie has received a fair amount of critical attention because of the concept: the 96-minute film was done in one take (except for a tiny bit digitally patched on at the very end, which we’ll get to). Conceived as a panorama of Russian history, or at least the last 300 years thereof, the movie starts outside the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, enters, and explore rooms, galleries, nooks, crannies, attics, where this unprecedented cinematic eye that never blinks discovers all manner of famous and unknown persons from Russia’s past and present, climaxing in an eight-minute full-dress ball (a reproduction of an actual event in 1913), complete with live symphony orchestra. Throughout, we are more or less guided by a voice-over whose owner we never see—and whom the people in the movie also apparently cannot see. This narrator—hardly omniscient—comments, at times confusedly, on the remarkable scenes unfolding before us, often clueing us less-expert students of Russian history in to the identify of some of the major characters we see (Peter the Great, Catherine, Pushkin, etc.). Immediately on entering the museum, we encounter our real guide, an elderly, highly judgmental Frenchman (based on a historical figure who was sort of the de Tocqueville of Russia). It is he whom the camera follows as he meanders from room to room. He is as much interested in the art (the Hermitage has one of the great collections of European art, equal to that of the Louvre, or the Prado) as he is in the people he meets. He is aware of, and converses with, our unseen voice-over narrator, and also at times interacts with people from the past and the present along the way. There is much talk of art, philosophy, history, politics, and especially of Russia’s place vis à vis Europe. All the while, the camera keeps moving, moving, moving. No one seems sure exactly how many actors were involved in the making of The Russian Ark, somewhere around 2,000, with almost as many in the film crew. In any case, it’s a lot of people, a lot of costumes, and a lot of very tricky timing to have everybody set, ready, and waiting for the camera—and us—to arrive in each new part of the museum. Technically—and quite extraordinarily—the massive take comes off without a hitch. Word is that seven months of rehearsal preceded the shoot, but that the filmmakers had full access to the museum only for one day to do it (rehearsals occurred piecemeal and off-site; there was no complete rehearsal at the Hermitage). On appointed day, after a couple of false starts, cinematographer Tillman Büttner with his 77 pounds of trusty Steadicam (plus 10 assistants) successfully completed his 96-minute, 4000-foot walk into cinematic history. The take was recorded on digital video; no film camera can hold that much film; even the video was a problem, requiring the use of a very large external hard-drive that traveled along with the camera. [Nerd note: You’re proud of how big some of your media files are? When the camera was finally turned off, the resultant single file of uncompressed digital imagery came to—ready?—1 terabyte.] The concept and its flawless, virtuosic execution are unique. The movie should be seen and studied for this, if for no other reason. Now come the "buts", the big "buts" to explain the "D" for execution, in order of increasing importance:  Subtitles
are always, at best, an iffy proposition. In The Russian Ark, they may
make the movie fatally flawed—and really inaccessible—to a non-Russian-speaking
audience, because your eye is never able to focus without interruption on the seamless
visual flow. Maybe a dubbed version will help.
Yes,
it is a single 96-minute take… but at the end, the camera moves to a veranda, and we
look out onto a wintry, foggy ocean (we are in an ark, get it?). St. Petersburg of course
is on a river, not an ocean. That last shot is actually of the Baltic Sea and was
digitally stitched in. To me it was a cheating shot, suddenly jerking us
out of the unseamed, authentic reverie of the reality of the vast Hermitage, and plonking
us back into the manipulative fake world of traditional cut-cut-cut movie editing.
OK,
OK, maybe I’m nit-picking. We still have that remarkable chunk of (almost) 96 minutes
of unbroken looking. But—and here is what I find most problematic—the
sound track is clearly your standard multi-layered, highly edited sound track.
Yes, we SEE what the unblinking camera saw, but we HEAR what the director and his sound
design people want us to hear.
Mind you, the audio track is beautifully realized, never calling attention to itself as something separate from the visual track. But the simple fact is: the sound is an artificial construct—no matter how skillfully put together—that when you begin to think about it wholly undercuts the esthetic raison d’etre of the long visual take. Naturally it would have been impossible to have the mike that traveled with the camera pick up in a convincing manner the varied ambiences of the many spaces we enter, the actors’ distant and near voices, plus the voice-over, plus the music that drifts in and out of our aural focus. Sokurov readily admits as much in an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle: "When we shot the film, we were only recording a rough guide soundtrack." (The visual "track" as we see it in the finished product is also not virginal: light- and color-balancing was applied in post-production.) The silk purse that comes from this audio sow’s ear is that The Russian Ark, as realized, brings home the lesson as probably no other movie can of how absolutely and critically important the sound track is to what we think of as the cinematic experience. What a different—and brutally amateurish—film this would have been if the director had insisted on aural verisimilitude (to match the visual verisimilitude), using only the aural track that the camera mike had picked up. The effect would have been disastrous—the world’s longest, most expensive and completely unwatchable home video, full of extraneous sounds, distantly echoing voices, and no music to speak of. Movies are a visual art, but is it possible, I have to wonder after seeing The Russian Ark, that the true fundament, the ur-foundation on which the movie miracle rests, is aural, with the visual then layered immediately above? Finally,
there is the content itself. Certainly this Russian ark is filled with riches,
both the in situ architectural beauty of the Hermitage and the art that hangs in such
abundance on its walls. In addition, the eye feasts on the lavishly costumed personages
from the past (and some eyes will find themselves perhaps making sympathetic Marxist
judgments as the exploitative wealth rolls past). As if that were not enough, we must also
contend with the historical events being referred to (we even glimpse the girl Anastasia
at play, as her mother looks up and says, "Do I hear gunshots in the
distance?"). Then on top of all this we have the non-stop
philosophical-artistic-historical dialogue between the narrator and our French guide.
It is, in the end, too much. The best movies, the greatest movies, are highly controlled, tightly focused dreams that the filmmaker convinces us we can share. Such masterful dreams range from the simple (The Red Balloon) to the utterly fantastic (2001: A Space Odyssey). We accept the offered reality, because such movies as they unfold draw us totally into their world of aural-visual make-believe. The Russian Ark is a phantasmagoria containing a number of powerful images but whose dream-nature never achieves the engulfing level of true art. It leaves us at the end spinning in that familiar confusion we all know from the mixed adventures of our own nocturnal dreams. But (the last one): Is it an important movie? Yes. Should you see it? Yes. For all the problems, it is not only unique, but uniquely stimulating and uniquely provocative.
For more, see the movie’s home page: And reviews and viewer comments at:
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