Russian Ark

Director: Alexander Sokurov

December 11, 2008
Little Theatre, National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai

A visually hypnotizing cinematic feat, this film is Alexander Sokurov’s spellbinding ode to St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, and is conceived as a kind of biblical arc for 300 years of modem Russian history. The Museum is conceived to be a time-machine, and Russian Ark doesn’t act so much as it muses: on art, on history, on Russia versus the West, on politics, set in one of the worlds greatest repositories of European art and civilization.

The film opens with a block screen (which reminds one of Malevich’s black square) and the voice of an unnamed filmmaker (Sokurov’s alter ego) explaining that he’s “rust regaining consciousness after some mysterious accident, perhaps the historical anomaly” of Russian communism. When the black gives way to a clear image, we’re in a back courtyard of the Hermitage museum complex (of which Peter the Great’s Winter Palace is the oldest building) amid officers and ladies, dressed in 18th-century finery, as they make their way to a party inside. The camera/unseen filmmaker moves along with them and soon meets up with the figure who will be our companion and guide, a 19th-century French diplomat known only as Marquis, a man of exquisite taste and the typical Western dilettante blind to the depths of the aggrieved Russian soul.

The film comes full circle as the costumed guests glimpsed at its beginning meander into the ball celebrating the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, the last great ball held of the Winter Palace, on the eve of the First World War. It was in a sense the grand finale of the monarchy, and it is Russian Ark’s grand finale, a seamless creation of a richly layered dream of art and history.