University of Cape Town – FAM4004S

Martin Botha

15 October 2017

‘Infinity Goes Up on Trial’:

The Ideal Perspective of Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002)

“You descend from the heavens and no longer know how to behave yourself.”

– From ‘the Stranger’s’ narration.

“Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while…”

– From ‘Visions of Johanna’ by Bob Dylan

“The empty crowd will laugh, the fool have his oration,

But you must stay quite calm, unbending, and austere.

…

You choose your destination,

Go where your questing mind shall now elect to steer

To bring perfection to the thoughts you hold most dear…”

– From ‘To a Poet’ by Alexander Pushkin (Trans. A. Myers)

Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark is a sublime subject for any greater consideration of the cinematic avant-garde, because it bears a fame far beyond its ostensible content – the fate and future of Russian history and high culture – for being the first feature film to present itself ‘in one breath’, as one 90-plus minute continuous steadicam tracking shot, and has thus subsequently been taken up by critics both as one of the transcendent technical achievements in the medium’s history and the most explicit instance imaginable of gimmickry triumphing over substance in the ongoing cosmic squabbles for the Seventh Art’s soul, but if we are to agree with Sokurov himself when he claims, in the film’s making-of documentary, that such cinematographic enterprise can only have any lasting value if it is employed in service to the film’s story, then the question arises of how exactly the unprecedented use of a one-take, despite all its manifold physical and logistical near-impossibilities, can be deemed essential to the depiction of a whirlwind walking tour of St. Petersberg’s Hermitage Museum as well as most of Russian history since Peter the Great, so that even the most elegantly conceptual of film forms still follows from a basic function, and part of my answer, as you’ve probably started to guess by now, will be found in the experience of the form of this presentation in itself, consisting as it does (and will continue) of one very long and playfully unwieldy sentence, with the rest of my conclusions coming from a consideration of spectacular filmic continuity – the meanings implicit in the act of defying any impulse to embrace the signature cinematic method of editing – which allows the film to surpass the unconscious human capacity for blinkingly distinguishing between moments, epochs and the simplest pieces of knowledge, and sweeps up our viewing consciousness, via the drifting subjectivity of its bewildered narrator (voiced by Sokurov himself), into an impossible understanding of the breadth and span of national heritage as an unfolding tapestry of interlocking performances, just a little too strangely seen to be a dream, and proving our cynical 19^th-century French guide, the Marquis de Custine, correct in his throwaway comment that “Russia is like a theater”, whilst also allowing us to transfigure the usual boredom of traversing the compartmentalized deadweight of two kilometres of real-world museum space into a resuscitated experience of engagement with the showcased paintings and sculptures of the past such that they seem to exist and even dance before us as events in their own right in parallel with the sumptuous costume-drama recreations of scenes from the lives of such luminaries as Catherine the Great, Alexander Pushkin, Princess Anastasia and the last of the rose-tinted Romanovs (so soon to be liquidated in the aftermath of the Revolution), and this is especially because so many of both kinds of encounter are presented as brief glimpses, quick moments of appreciation for each occupant of the mythical ‘Ark’ itself – be they Rembrandts, Tsarinas or present-day tourists – before moving on ceaselessly to the next attraction, much like any ordinary trip to a museum, and then focusing in on details – the brilliant blue and gold of a noble china set, the symbolic figures of a cat and cockerel at the foreground of a painting, a passing gentleman’s beautiful white gloves, and so on – that seem almost arbitrarily chosen merely to suggest and invoke the unwitnessed wealth of possible targets of attention in such a vast imaginative emporium, just as the many idly passing extras our eyes are bound to notice throughout the film are all scattered stereotypical figures from across the centuries, ranging from orthodox nuns to Red Army soldiers, populating the film’s countless corridors without comment or concern, just to add to what Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli calls an almost Chekhovian realism (2005) based on showing the residual drama in the absences of more spectacular scenes rather than the many more seminally violent iconic moments one would immediately associate with a guided tour through Russian history, and which Sergei Eisenstein – the original avant-gardist Russian auteur – would have revelled in montaging; but in a sense this anti-dramatic strategy only logically follows from the constraints of the one-shot concept itself, which obliges Sokurov to occupy so many swathes of intervening minutes, as the camera journeys between rooms and major set-pieces, with commentaries and observations that draw in, warp and flatten (as the camera’s zoom and depth-of-field adjusts) every remaining physical feature of the museum – the marble floors, the vaulted golden ceilings, the Raphaelian décor etc. – so as to establish the material history of the museum itself as an inseparable aspect of the consideration of its collection (even though the Hermitage is simultaneously presented, through a grand mercurial spectrum of lighting and colour temperatures, as a haunted and fantastical shelter for the living and the dead) as well as to play directly against the historically dominant strand of Russian cinematic materialism exemplified in the stringently rhythmic cross-cutting of a Dziga Vertov or Vsevolod Pudovkin, which meant to reveal reality not through dwelling in the details of scenes but by breaking them up into their mathematical components and then suturing together their revolutionary solutions; and this immanent opposition to the Soviet style – and obvious direct inheritance from Andrei Tarkovsky’s slow, spiritual cinema – reverberates in the red-elephant-like conspicuous lacuna of almost any mention of the Communist era in the film’s aesthetic litany, as well as the relative neglect of the peasant and working-class constituencies, whose pairs were apparently bounced at the door to Sokurov’s Ark before the film started, which, taken together with the film’s pervading concern with the actuality of Russian “national sympathies”, shows a defining disregard for the difficulty and value of envisioning the future and indicates a certain profound, if admittedly intelligent and self-critical, political conservatism on the director’s part that extends most productively to his concurrent trilogy of films each investigating the absurd life of a twentieth-century dictator, but centers quite unashamedly here on depicting the survival of the aesthetic taste, splendour and refinement of past power in the present, implicitly valorizing the Hermitage’s purpose as a public protector and institutionalized celebration of the inheritance of the authoritarian state, whilst of course also taking many opportunities to remark, through the Marquis’s acrid quips, on the paradoxes of Russia’s long-standing envy of (Western) European culture, reaching back to remember Peter the Great’s Herzogian madness in first founding St Petersburg, his new modern capital city, in the middle of a swamp, and acknowledging the irony of the Hermitage’s historical and propagandaistic prominence as the setting and showcase for much of Russian national mythology despite the vast majority of the actual art collection we get to see being the products of French, Flemish and Italian old masters; and naturally the effect of Sokurov’s perpetual motion technique, which allows the Tsars and their surroundings to feature only as flip-through vignettes, does more to reduce the image of their divinity than to reassert it (Catherine the Great for example rushes away at one point to go pee), but in so far as the film structures itself and explains its single-shot conceit as the disassociated first-person ordeal of a confused and nameless narrator post-apocalyptically dropped into the rollercoaster ride of a timestuck panoply (with his guide being a similarly misplaced foreigner assessing all he comes across in aloof, judgementally nationalist terms), we as the audience are positioned into appreciating the reassuringly purist pageantry of the entire production, especially as it culminates in the breathtaking staging of three other pristine mediums of communal performance –  a group Mazurka dance, a symphony orchestra and a massive aristocratic procession – with each one synchronizing in sequence with the camera’s flowing movement as it swans to catalogue the graces and idiosyncracies of literally hundreds of the last generation of idle gentry before the revolution, whose impeccably snazzy and collectively flawless self-performance demonstrates a last bright twirl of delight to match the continuous vigour of the orchestra and the patriotic strut of the Mazurka, and imbue us with a feeling of having finally arrived in a kind of paradise, after all the unprogressive chaos of the tour’s trajectory and the many half-mentions and side-glimpses of the depictions of angels throughout, leaving even the Marquis with a sentimental twinge that obliges him to stay behind as the party departs; all of which in my opinion amounts to a plea for the possibility of accomplishing an aesthetic sublime that goes beyond the context of political economy and takes pity, like Sokurov himself, even on the most ruthlessly privileged for their innocent ignorance of their forthcoming annihilation, moreover discovering through idealist performance a means of transforming the bravura long-take – that mainstay of Bazinian realist cinema – into a testament of filmic divinity, passing through and collecting every mode and detail of potential representation of the past in a manner that unstoppably defies the human experience of consciousness until we are dropped off facing the banal grey infinities of the Russian sky and the River Neva, alone again with Sokurov’s last whispered worry, which I carelessly forgot to quote when I walked down the Hermitage’s staircase 12 years after the shot fired, that “[w]e are destined to sail forever, to live forever”, recasting the entire preceding single take as a leap of faith into imaging the dispiriting endlessness of the collective living task of humanity, condensed into one nation’s imaginary, of preserving and improving our attempts at capturing a kind of final form of beauty, of which Russian Ark ultimately valiantly becomes an example by pretending it can go on filming itself beyond the end of the world.