This June, Establishing Shot will feature a miniseries we’re calling Here’s Looking at You, 2002 as we take a look back at films celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. Today, former contributor Jack Miller returns to the blog with his assessment of a visionary historical drama that Roger Ebert once said “spins a daydream made of centuries.” Welcome back, Jack!
Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) may be one of the few “experimental” films that legitimately feels like a controlled experiment of sorts: the film is composed of a single, unbroken, 95-minute Steadicam shot which moves through 33 rooms in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, a site which also encompasses the Winter Palace. Though this awesome technical achievement can be seen as a formally radical gesture on Sokurov’s part, it is paradoxically brought toward a subject and a social milieu which could justifiably be seen as traditional or conservative: the aristocratic history of czarist, pre-Revolutionary Russia. In considering Russian Ark, one is immediately confronted with a certain paradox at the heart of the project, a shotgun marriage between radical and conservative aesthetics.
Putting aside for a moment the impressive nature of the film’s technical feat, which probably would have made dear old Max Ophüls proud, I’d like to explore the film’s mobile camera style in relation to its status as a work of historical pageantry. In 1959, Jean-Luc Godard claimed that a tracking shot was a question of morality. Though this provocative assertation might seem hyperbolic to some, it’s true that the visual forms of narrative cinema have long been tied to certain ideological tendencies. Many great auteurs of classical Hollywood cinema, especially figures like Ophüls, Otto Preminger, and Vincente Minnelli, have long been celebrated by visually sensitive critics primarily for their achievements in camera movement and the spatial language of mise-en-scène rather than for their editing procedures.
In fact, it was Preminger’s early noir work at Fox that inspired Jacques Rivette, in a Cahiers du cinéma piece on Angel Face (1952), to seductively define mise-en-scène in this way: “The creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space.” For me, a crucial aspect of Rivette’s definition is his use of the word “animated”: the arrangement of bodies and objects within a particular space that’s defined by the camera, but a space that’s constantly being redefined each time the camera moves. For some critics, notably the first-generation auteurist critics who revered Hollywood commercial cinema, this kind of filmmaking, predicated on complex, mobile compositions with minimal cutting, represented a kind of platonic ideal of what cinema could be.
Sokurov’s forefathers of Russian cinema, however, have historically tended to be much more interested in the expressive possibilities of montage and other editing techniques than in the classicism of spatial movement and mise-en-scène. Sergei Eisenstein, probably the most well-known of all Soviet filmmakers to this day, built on the editing language developed by Lev Kuleshov in classic communist films like Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927). For Kuleshov, the juxtaposition of two unrelated images through cutting could conjure a tertiary idea (or ideas) not present in either image on its own. Eisenstein’s features expanded and refined these theoretical adventures in montage; here was a formal approach that could embody a kind of comparative dialectic, a generative clash of opposing forces. Dziga Vertov and Alexander Dovzhenko were two other key figures, quite different from Eisenstein but both with a kind of experimental approach to film editing as well.
Soviet montage became associated in popular film criticism with the spirit of leftist and communist filmmaking, the formal apparatus of the great Soviet filmmakers, while in the more commercially oriented cinemas of the United States and Europe a different aesthetic took shape. This context should be seen as both bold and significant in relation to Russian Ark, a Russian film dealing with Russian history that speaks to us in a visual language staunchly removed from its own cinematic traditions. The critic J. Hoberman has even called it “the anti-October.”
In Sokurov’s work, three centuries of Russian art and historical images are glimpsed at amid a kind of unceasing dance, a ballet of movements performed by actors and the camera alike through the chambers of the museum. The absence of the cut gives the film its sustained, hypnotic power and, perhaps more importantly, harshly severs it from the formal patterns of Soviet cinema. This hardly seems like a coincidence for a work that accords paramount importance to historical memory as a subject. Rather, it seems that Sokurov has the directorial intelligence to know that camera movement is the best form possible in cinema for exploring the kind of vanished, aristocratic world that the Hermitage embodies in Russian culture. This film is not about a clash of ideological forces; instead, it is a kind of communion with ghosts, with cultural memories, ideas and images that perished under the dreams of the twentieth century. Sokurov’s grand spectacle of movement ultimately feels like an attempt at historical séance — reviving old spirits through the acting out of uncanny movements.
Russian Ark was screened at IU Cinema in October 2017 as part of its President’s Choice series.
Jack Miller enjoys the films of Howard Hawks, Jacques Tourneur and John Ford. He graduated from Indiana University with a BA in English, and currently resides in Chicago. He also enjoys listening to country and disco music.