#18
The Guardian (UK)
April 10, 2003
Cinema: Breathtaking history of Russia
BY PETER BRADSHAW

This is sort of an oddity - and sort of a miracle. Russian Ark is a strategic and logistical achievement whose effect, over an hour and a half, builds into something weirdly moving and certainly unique. The prolific Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov has composed a cinematic love letter to the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg, the "ark" in which Russia's elite cultural identity has been preserved more or less inviolate from the calamities of the 20th century.

He has done this by contriving a kind of installation-exhibit, something between cinema and theatre. His camera follows an imaginary French marquis who ambles questioningly through the museum, hardly realising why he is there or where he is going. Sokurov's voiceover is heard in a whispering Beckettian interior monologue, also unable to credit what is going on. Everything unspools in a single, travelling shot, that moves sinuously around the museum, roaming corridors, nosing into chambers, peering up and down stairwells - encountering scenes from Russian history from the 17th to the pre-revolutionary 20th centuries: from Peter the Great to Nicholas II. It is acted out by battalions of actors and musicians in full costume. And all of it seamless; not a single cut or edit. Cinematographer Tilman Buttner had to carry a specially modified Steadicam capable of recording up to 100 minutes of high-definition video on to a hard disk.

Russian Ark is a fluid dream-epic with no special effects. What you see is what you get. Although Sokurov was many months in rehearsal, he was only allowed to film in the Hermitage for four hours on a single day. This is high-wire movie-making.

There are a few errors. Extras glance uncertainly at the camera, and at one stage a bewigged gentleman, bent double, is seen scampering out of shot. But this only heightens the sense of witnessing an extraordinary, one-off event: a ballet in which the camera itself is the principal dancer, never off stage.

There really is nothing comparable to this "single-breath" cinematography. Mike Figgis's Timecode, on video, cannot match it for length, and Hitchcock's Rope had to find areas of complete blackness to hide the joins. The closest parallel I can think of is Olivier's Hamlet from 1948, in which the camera had a habit of roaming between scenes in the hugger-mugger corridors of Elsinore castle to seek out the drama; there was a notable reluctance to cut and a similar theatrical sense of unbroken space.

But why do it? Why abandon the grammar of cinema? The edit is what gives the film-maker the ability, in Tarkovsky's phrase, to sculpt time - and space too. Audiences can hardly be expected to admire the technological achievement alone; so is it just Dr Johnson's dog walking on its hind legs? The answer lies in the real time/real space continuum established by these working methods, allowing the viewer to experience the real presence of a giant cabinet of treasures that Sokurov has assembled in this historic place.

Sokurov has found a way to meditate on the nature of Russian national identity in its post-Soviet age, and rediscovered its passionate identification with western European civilisation between the Enlightenment and 1917. The implications of this rediscovery are complex. Should this splendour be celebrated, but kept under glass - or made to live again?

Not all films can be like Russian Ark, of course, and it is debatable if they could or should. But the effect of this cine-theatre event is extraordinary. When the cast of thousands are finally gathered for a vast, valedictory procession down the main staircase of the Hermitage, and the marquis moans: "Farewell Europe" - it is desperately sad. Sokurov is hardly as well known outside Russia as he should be. Moloch, his superb film about Adolf Hitler, has never been released in Britain - baffling, as Nazism is such good box office. But Russian Ark is enough to be going on with.

Could a British or American or French director have had the imagination and determination to achieve a similar costumed movie-staging in Buckingham Palace or the White House or Versailles? Sokurov did, and he has conjured up a Midsummer Night's Dream of Russian history.

Make no mistake . . . the cast of Russian Ark, shot in a single take, had to get it right first time

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