| |
St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum is the Russian Ark guarding art and history. Alexander Sokurov's unique tour of the museum, consists of one, 96-minute-long, continuous tracking shot - the longest of its kind in the history of the medium. To have pulled off such an ambitious task proved no mean feat but the film's achievements are not restricted to its technical prowess.
Sokurov supplies us with two guides for his jaunt through three centuries of Russian history: he voices our unseen narrator himself, while Sergei Dreiden plays a boorish French marquis from the 19th Century. As we progress, the pair's discourse ebbs and flows between criticisms against and defences for the narrator's native Russian culture.
The same elegant, observant camerawork is sustained through each of the 30-odd rooms visited but conditions differ behind each door. In one room, modern-day tourists flutter around the Hermitage's world-famous art collection. Move into the next room and we see real historical figures such as Peter the Great. "Russia is like a theatre," we're told at one point and Sokurov's film shares the same quality, with the Hermitage's interiors making the grandest of stages for the nation's story.
Unmistakably the work of an autonomous talent, the word "director" hardly seems to give Sokurov enough credit. Yet Russian Ark finds each of its 2,000-plus cast and crew rising to the occasion. Director of photography Tilmann Büttner, who also shot Run Lola Run, deserves special mention. Shooting on high-definition video under immense pressure, his graceful steadicam work lends this bold experiment a certain dreamlike quality.
Chris Wiegand
|
|
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)
