Russian Ark: I went with interest, though prejudiced: I
don't much care for Sokurov's films, nor, having met him a few times
and having some other direct awareness of some things about him, do I
care for him: he is for me unbearably pretentious and, perhaps like
Greenaway, seems to regard himself as god's gift to the world.
His films for me have a similar preciousness. So I went
prejudiced, and, having seen a few of his things, also with a
preconception as to what I was likely to see. I was more or less
correct in the latter.
Russian Ark is a continuous long hand-held (Steadicam hand-held, done
very well) HD shot (digital info fed directly to hard disk) in which
the camera enters the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and continues for
about 90 minutes, led "narratively" by a somewhat quirky
(and in my view irritating - both in terms of his function in the
film, his "acting" and the content of what he says/does)
character, a hypothetical french diplomat with frizzy hair, somewhat
exaggerated mannerisms, all exacerbated by the minimal narrative
demands placed on him - he is a kind of excuse, a figure for the
camera to follow, but his persona and narrative functions don't really
support him as a central figure, and so as time goes by he becomes
more and more superfluous and hence annoying: who needs him?
Sokurov apparently did, and in the work he (apparently his voice) is
in continuous voice-over conversation with him, making presumably
serious commentary about the nature and quality of Russian culture,
its "inferiority" complex vis a vis "European"
culture, etc. Again, this commentary which postures a deep and
serious scarcely scrapes the surface. As, finally, does the
film. Russian Ark is a vast costume/set piece, in which the
camera floats through a hypothetical compression of Russian history,
clearly with a nostalgic (and blind) eye, dropping names, a kind of
narcissistic historical voyeurism, in which we get an alleged glimpse
of Catherine the Great, or this or that figure, of the wealth, the
decadence, the this and the that, but never do we feel on hard real
ground. Nope, Russia, the vast treasure house of it, lies
resolutely very far off screen. What is on screen is a costume
epic of some sort that would make a Hollywood studio quiver.
Extras - we got 'em by the thousands, all decked out in spiffy
18th century clothes and wigs; setting? we got the Hermitage, a vast
imperial palace the walls of which are heavy with "name" art
(if in fact not really the best of the name art); pretensions?
we got 'em, a combo of history and Kulture interlaced with
a deepset inferiority complex that gives rise to all kinds of
pompousities about "Europe" and "Russian soul"
etc. etc., and with no less than 3 live orchestras too boot, each
cranked up and ready to deliver as the camera glides into sight.
Russian Ark is a tour de force of orchestration, no doubt about it.
But it is, at 90 minutes, and despite the heavy lacing heavy
cultural "significance" and the technical bravura of this
long digital take, rather thin gruel. After a while the
spectacle of the Hermitage, the paintings, the costumes, the
orchestras, the entire panoply which Sokurov throws at the spectator,
pales into a kind of triviality. What emerges is the overt
failure to actually take on the real history of Russia and to offer
instead a merangue of costumes and music; what sinks this epic shot is
the flimsy twit who has taken you through all this with not a
meaningful thought to express - whether the flimsy twit is Sokurov
himself or his surrogate French diplomat; what one arrives at is a
grand effort in which the end result clearly fails to warrant all the
bother.
The audience (sizable, on a Thursday night, with many Russians
present) which I saw it with left unstirred, and clearly perplexed.
I don't think it was the single-shot tour-de-force quality of
the work that left them behind, the seeming avant-garde filmic quality
(a delusionary quality which in fact was essentially theatrical and
not cinematic). Rather it was the vapid content juxtaposed to
this would-be spectacle in which expectations were constantly
disappointed: not a single moment contained a drama worth
watching, not a single utterance managed to approach the vast tragedy
of Russia, not a single moment of the camera work (always at eye-level
with the exception of a few modest lifts) actually rose above the
technical sassiness of "hey look long take."
Rather while the orchestration was vast (literally THOUSANDS of
extras), piece by piece it never moved beyond the pedestrian, the
little "acts" were one by one trivial and silly, the
"actors" never required to do much more than move about and
flutter a bit, with the obnoxious "French diplomat" unable
to bring things to any level beyond the mechanical. The end
result - despite the would-be bravado of the closing (20 minutes)
passage of dance (Buzby Berkeley where are you when we need you?), in
which a throng of extras go through the motions of a grand dance which
never really materializes, and finally exit enmasse (the well costumed
mass being the only impressive matter) to conclude the film - is flat
and empty as was everything which preceded it: bad history, bad
nostalgia, bad acting, bad directing, bad writing all masked with a
bravura technical idea encased in costumes and a setting to die for.
Naturally, critics took the bait as surely Sokurov knew they would.
The audience at the Music Box (spectacular theater by the way)
most certainly did not. Nor, well armed with my
prejudices, did I.
As a filmmaker I looked at this as a rich opportunity squandered,
though as a cynic I understood: how many people would mistake the
stupid veneer of fancy 18th century costumes and the stucco
theatricality of the Hermitage for "art" when the far far
more difficult work of orchestrating in a meaningful fashion a
continuous 90 minute take was trivialized into wading into the costume
department?? The meaningful usage of the potential of a 90
minute take remains open for someone with a lot more creative power
than Mr. Sokurov has. Any takers?