WEEKEND WITH THE ARTS: RUSSIAN ARK

There's more to life than war, taxes and politics - and a lot of it's more fun, too! That's why every WEEKEND, here at THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS, we post some of the cultural things we're into, things we think you might also find entertaining, enriching, and stimulating. We just might turn you on to something cool.

After all, the arts - ALL ARTS, not just fine arts - are a big part of what our liberty is for, and what we're fighting to defend!

THIS WEEK: RUSSIAN ARK

WIKI:

A narrator, who is unnamed, and unseen by the audience, and voiced by the director, wanders through the Winter Palace (now the main building of Russian State Hermitage Museum) in St. Petersburg. The narrator implies that he has died, and is a ghost drifting through the palace. In each room he encounters various real and fictional people from various time periods in the city's three hundred year history. He is accompanied by a companion, 'the European' (played by Sergei Dreiden), who represents the nineteenth century traveller the Marquis de Custine, and who is visible to the audience. The fourth wall is repeatedly broken and re-erected; at times the narrator-director and the companion interact freely with the other performers, and at other times go completely unnoticed.

The film begins on a winter's day with the arrival by horse drawn carriage of a small party of men and women to a minor side entrance of the Winter Palace. The narrator (whose eyes are always our point of view) meets one member of this party, 'the European', and follows him through numerous rooms of the Palace. As each room is entered, we find ourselves in a different period of Russian history (but not in chronological order).

From the YOUTUBE notes:

'Russian Ark,' by Alexander Sokurov, might be the most cinematically groundbreaking work in the last couple of decades simply because it completely challenges that notion by being the most dream-like movie I've seen, while not featuring a single edit.
... 2000 Actors. 300 years of Russian History. 33 Rooms at the Hermitage Museum. 3 Live Orchestras. SHOT IN 1 Single Continuous Shot. 1.5 HOURS LONG!
...
Sure, this type of thing has been done before -- filming in feature-length, in a single, unbroken take -- but it was always a gimmick. Sokurov, that most transcendent of working filmmakers, transcends the gimmick, and 'Russian Ark' is flawless, breathtaking, and visually plausible -- a legitimate accomplishment. Many Russian films are esoterically Russian, and some of the content in 'Russian Ark' certainly is, exploring Russian history, art, tensions and rivalries with European art and European nations, and national identity crisis, but cinematically, the movie is universal. It's universally astonishing.

The narrative and narrator (a narrator in a physical sense only, more of a guide) drift through time and space as time and space become one, indistinguishable. The movie, in its unrelenting continuity and unblinking gaze, not only feels like a dream, but it sort of becomes one.

HERE ARE THREE OF THE TEN PARTS CURRENTLY AT YOUTUBE - PARTS 1 AND 9 AND 10. CHECK THEM OUT. AND CHECK OUT THE OTHER EXCERPTS AT YOUTUBE WHILE YOU CAN.

(SEVEN MINUTES INTO PART 9 IS THE KEY DIALOG OF THE ENTIRE MOVIE.)