Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 32, October 2003
Dorota Ostrowska
Sokurov's _Russian Ark_
_Russian Ark_ Directed by Aleksandr
Sokurov (2001) Aleksandr Sokurov's
relationship with tradition is a single, logical, and
consciously constructed element of his film art. [1]
This naturally makes _Russian Ark_ a meditation, a study,
and a negotiation of this relationship. The film itself, the
interviews with its author, and the few articles written
about his works reveal the complexity of Sokurov's concept
of tradition, and the numerous ways in which the filmmaker
engages with it. There is a question of the place of
_Russian Ark_ in the context of Russian filmmaking, in the
context of Western filmmaking, and in the context of the
history of fine arts -- painting in particular. The ways in
which Sokurov places his film with regard to these different
traditions becomes his contribution to an overarching and
broader issue of the relationship between Western and
Russian artistic traditions. The question of difference
between these two traditions crops up in the critical
reviews of not only _Russian Ark_, but also of Sokurov's
earlier films. Frederic Jameson's article, 'On Soviet Magic
Realism', about Sokurov's adaptation of a Russian
science-fiction novel, _Days of Eclipse_, opens with a
statement that, 'Soviet Science-Fiction was always
instructively different from its Western counterpart'.
[2] Ian Christie, who in the recent years has been
responsible for bringing Sokurov's filmmaking to the
attention of English-speaking audiences, describes Sokurov's
artistic experiments as having 'a peculiarly Russian form'.
[3] Sokurov himself contrasts the West and Russia by
referring to Russia as 'the land of inspiration and
illumination' and to Europe as 'the domain of disciplined
intellect'. [4] It is in regard to this
question of difference that the dialogue of _Russian Ark_
between an off-screen voice and the French Marquis could
serve as the *mise en abyme* of Sokurov's film. This
dialogue is an effort to establish with some degree of
certainty the place and the time of the encounter. This
questioning is prolonged and confused by new elements
brought in by the movement of the camera in the course of
the film. The multiplication of the possible answers could
perhaps be seen as a reflection of Sokurov's questioning
attitude towards his relationship with
traditions. The undeniable attraction
of _Russian Ark_, and the technical achievement of the film,
lies in its being created in one take, 'in one breathe', as
Sokurov describes it. [5] The choice of this radical
formal strategy contrasts Sokurov's work with that of
another famous Russian, Sergei Eisenstein, who became
renowned for his theory and use of montage in film.
Eisenstein created meaning through conflict and contrast
between the shots, and valued rupture rather than
continuity, revolution over evolution. Sokurov distances
himself from the fascination Eisenstein and montage hold for
Western critics and filmmakers. For Sokurov, in films such
as _Strike_ (1924), Eisenstein appears to be overwhelmed
with political concerns while artistic preoccupations take
the back seat. 'Maybe this is why you Westerners love him so
much, because of his socio-political ideas', Sokurov muses.
[6] In light of such views, Christie is right when
he remarks that Sokurov 'believes it's still possible to
kick politics out of cinema and restore *the rights of
aesthetics*'. [7] Does this mean that Sokurov wants
to position his art as a completely new phenomenon in the
history of Russian cinema, virtually independent from the
work of Soviet filmmakers? Sokurov appears to
renounce Eisenstein and the use of montage on ethical,
artistic, and political grounds. For Sokurov, who regards
film as a living body, the use of montage is unacceptable on
moral grounds because it constitutes a violation of the
filmic body. Sokurov's critique of montage shows how he
distances himself from a very long tradition of filmmaking
in Russia, born roughly at the same time as the Bolshevik
revolution. This attitude is also reflected, at least to
some degree, in the subject matter of _Russian Ark_, which
is a tour of an art collection established by Russian tsars
and an excursion into different periods of Russian imperial
history ending with the last pre-revolutionary ball. In many
ways, _Russian Ark_ is a piece full of nostalgia for both
pre-revolutionary Russia and also pre-revolutionary Russian
art. Even more importantly, _Russian Ark_ is an effort to
move away from the revolutionary lineage for Russian cinema
and an attempt to reinforce its links with non-Russian
artistic traditions. What is most striking is
Sokurov's humility and reverence for the Western fine arts
tradition. He says: 'What can I say when I go to the
Hermitage museum to shoot _Russian Ark_ and see Rembrandt
and El Greco standing behind me? I must always remember I am
only a film director'. [8] In Sokurov's eyes,
cinema's place in the pantheon of arts is below painting. He
also believes that cinema, brought by montage too close to
literature, still lacks its own language of artistic
expression. Cinema needs to develop its alphabet which would
place formal limitations upon filmmakers and would impose
artistic rigueur upon them. [9] Christie remarks
that such critical attitude towards cinema is more *Russian*
than Sokurov would like us to believe. Even Eisenstein's
cinema has been reproached for lagging behind what had been
achieved in other arts. [10] Such lament was also
heard in Paris in the late 1950s when Francois Truffaut
identified some undesirable tendency in French cinema which
was bringing it to an artistic standstill. Sokurov attempts to gain
cinema its cultural place by relating it closely to
painting. The making of _Russian Ark_ was the first step in
developing this lineage. According to Sokurov, the images of
_Russian Ark_ were obtained through the composition,
manipulation, and adjustment of colour and light.
[11] In other words, shot images served as canvas on
which Sokurov was able to execute his cinematic composition.
In Sokurov's view, the art to which cinema is related and
out of which it grows is painting rather than literature or
Soviet cinematic tradition. The cinematic tradition to which
Sokurov's formal strategy and vision of cinematic art seem
to relate most closely is that of the French _Cahiers du
cinema_ in the 1950s and early 1960s. Sokurov's arguments
about the art of cinema especially evoke those of the
_Cahiers du cinema_ critics. The starting point for the
reflections of Sokurov and _Cahiers du cinema_ is the same.
When Sokurov speaks about the art of cinema, one gets a
sense that it is a young art in need of a definition, a
formal language, and a way of anchoring itself in the
history of Western arts. At the same time, Sokurov is far
more dismissive of the achievement of cinema in the last one
hundred years than the _Cahiers_ critics have ever been. For
instance, while the _Cahiers_ critics were bringing in the
literary canon in order to argue that a comparable canon
should be developed in cinema, Sokurov says that there are
no figures such as Thomas Mann or Charles Dickens in cinema
yet. [12] However, Sokurov's position is not
qualitatively different from that of the _Cahiers_ critics
and future nouvelle vague filmmakers. Rather, it is a
difference of degrees concerning the level of difficulty
required to make cinema into an art in its own
right. This attitude of raising
the stakes so high for cinema before any of its achievements
can be recognized may have something to do with the
environment of the Brezhnev era in which Sokurov's ideas
developed. Known commonly as the period of stagnation in the
history of the Soviet Union, it was also the time 'of
intense inner life for many Russian artists and
intellectuals'. [13] Insulated from the
proliferation of music and pop art taking place in the West,
Russian artists were engaged in the study of music,
painting, and the literary canon in a way which made
'classic art seem utterly contemporary', as Christie notes.
[14] Sokurov himself spent a long time in Gorky, one
of the *closed* Russian cities, with no contact with the
West. This forced isolation resulted in a more intense
relationship with the canonical arts, in the limited
exposure to the Western cinematic tradition, and in the
rejection of the Soviet one. Thus, although the ingredients
of the _Cahiers_ reflection and Sokurov's ideas about art
are similar, the conditions in which Sokurov's ideas
developed were far more extreme. Just like the _Cahiers_
critics, Sokurov refers to the documentary style of Flaherty
and the highly formalistic cinema of Robert Bresson.
[15] Among French filmmakers associated with both
_Cahiers du cinema_ and the nouvelle vague there is a
filmmaker, Alain Resnais, whose artistic objectives came
very closely to those of Sokurov. The affinity between them
is particularly visible when comparing _Russian Ark_ to
Alain Resnais's _L'Annee derniere a Marienbad_ (1961). The
parallels between these two films are uncanny and striking
because their experiments are very similar in nature, such
as the long take and collective history in the case of
Sokurov, and montage and individual mind in Resnais's film.
Sokurov uses one long take to lead us through the collective
history of pre-revolutionary Russia. He wants to show us
what it is like to live inside a museum -- which he compares
to an inside of a Faberge egg. [16] Resnais uses
montage to illustrate how thought and the individual mind
work. The structuring device in both films is a dialogue
between two individuals which reveals their constant
uncertainty regarding place, time, and purpose. Furthermore,
both filmmakers roll their cameras along corridors of
eighteen-century palaces. Resnais and Sokurov
subvert the established modes of filmmaking -- montage in
the case of Resnais, documentary filmmaking in the case of
Sokurov -- in order to create meanings which are not
traditionally linked with them. Resnais uses montage to
create a piece which, at the time of the Algerian War, was
widely criticized for its lack of political dimension.
Sokurov brings to the extreme Bazinian principle of realist
filmmaking the context of a lifeless and fictionalized
subject: paintings and stereotypical vignettes from a
pre-revolutionary past. Just like Resnais, Sokurov takes the
established mode of expression and uses it in the new
context. Ultimately, it is his use of the realist mode of
expression, added to his concept of painting, which gives us
the best insight into Sokurov's view of tradition as an
organizing concept of his art -- a view that is illustrated
in the experiments of _Russian Ark_. For Sokurov, paintings are
living creatures because they are infused with the creative
energy of their makers. He says that 'our relations to
painting and to original sculptures are the same as our
relation to living beings . . . it is simply an organic
belief in the fact that fundamental high art is live energy
that has been preserved to our days'. [17] This idea
is best understood when it is compared to the interest in
brushstroke among art critics. The volume and energy of
brushstroke can only be appreciated in the immediate contact
with a painting which is a source of a unique sensory
experience. It is this experience that the maker of _Russian
Ark_ is trying to convey in his film. However, it still may
be difficult to appreciate the vitality of paintings (and as
a result that of the film as well) because they seem to be
closer to dead bodies or mummies than to living beings.
Interestingly enough, as Sokurov's critic Mikhail Iampolski
describes, such *death* vision of paintings also resonates
in Sokurov's universe, for whom dead bodies carry an
unfaltering attraction. Iampolski suggests that in all
Sokurov's films the body acquires some special attributes
after death. [18] This implies that the meaning
dwells outside the body of a human being; it is located in
thoughts, deeds, and aspirations. For Sokurov, then, films
are such metaphorical bodies and carriers of meanings
associated with the past. Sokurov was able to
realize his complex artistic ideas thanks to digital
technology. It allowed him to relate cinema closely to
painting, challenge the documentary filmmaking tradition,
and distance himself from the montage tradition of the
Soviet filmmaking. _Russian Ark_ constitutes an attempt to
return the ark of the Russian cinematic tradition to its
sources -- Western visual art -- from the communist and
post-communist deluge. What _Russian Ark_ manages to create
aesthetically is a new departure for both Western and
Russian filmmaking. The Queen's
College Oxford University,
England Footnotes 1. See Aleksandr Sokurov
and Edwin Carels, 'The Solitary Voice: Interview with
Aleksandr Sokurov', _Film Studies: An International Review_,
no. 1, Spring 1999, p. 73. 2. Frederic Jameson, 'On
Soviet Magic Realism, in _The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema
and Space in the World System_ (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), p. 87. 3. Ian Christie,
'Returning to Zero', _Sight
and Sound_, vol 8
no. 4, April 1998, p. 17. 4. Aleksandr Sokurov,
'Death, the Banal Leveller (on Tarkovsky)',
_Film
Studies: An International
Review_, no. 1,
Spring 1999, p. 64. 5. Aleksandr Sokurov and
John Hartl, Interview, _Seattle Post Intelligencer_, 2
February 2003 <http://www.russianark.spb.ru/eng/interview_full.php?int_id=14>. 6. Sokurov and Carels,
'The Solitary Voice', p. 74. 7. Christie, 'Returning to
Zero', p. 17. 8. Quoted in Ian Christie,
'The Civilizing Russian', _Sight and Sound_, vol. 13 no. 4,
April 2003, p. 10. 9. See Sokurov and Carels,
'The Solitary Voice', pp. 74-75. 10. See Christie, 'The
Civilizing Russian', p. 10. 11. See Aleksandr Sokurov
and Aleksandra Tuchinskaya, 'Interview with Aleksandr
Sokurov', trans. Anna Shoulgat <http://sokurov.spb.ru/island_en/feature_films/russkyi_kovcheg/mnp_ark.html>. 12. See Aleksandr Sokurov
and Kumi Sasaki, Interview, _Sputnik_ <http://www.sputnik.ac/interview%20page/forget.html>. 13. Christie, 'Returning
to Zero', p. 16. 14. Ibid. 15. See Sokurov and
Carels, 'The Solitary Voice', pp. 73-74. 16. See Aleksandr Sokurov
and Aleksandra Tuchinskaya, Interview. 17. Aleksandr Sokurov and
John Hartl, Interview. 18. See Mikhail Iampolski,
'Truth in the Flesh', _Film Studies: An International
Review_, no. 1, Spring 1999, p. 70. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Dorota Ostrowska,
'Sokurov's _Russian Ark_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 32,
October 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n32ostrowska>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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