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Russian Ark will be shown at the 40th New York Film Festival.
Alexander Sokurov dreams of rewinding history and beginning again. ãI open my eyes and I see nothing·.ä murmurs Russian Arkâs invisible narrator over a blank screen. There is the memory of some unspecified accident and suddenly a group of revelers in 18th-century costume disembark from their carriages at a side entrance to St. Petersburgâs palatial Hermitage, and the fantastic voyage begins.
An anti-October, designed to reproach the montage theorists of Soviet silent cinema, Russian Ark is a single 96-minute tracking shot in which the narrator and a 19th-century Frenchman, apparently the Marquis Astolphe de Custine, accompany a lively group of dead souls across several centuries through 33 rooms of the worldâs largest museum. Indeed, Russian Ark might have been inspired by the description of a Hermitage ball in Custineâs 1839 Letters from Russia: A procession ãproceeding from one immense hall to another, winding through galleries, crossing the drawing rooms, and traversing the whole building in such order or direction as the caprice of the individual who leads may dictate.ä
The narrator ÷ Sokurov ÷ wonders if this unfolding pageant has been staged for him, and, of course, it has. Russian Ark took over four years to finance and organize. Some 2,000 costumed actors and extras, not to mention the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra, rehearsed for seven months. The camera peers through windows and strolls around the artworks. People slip and fall and sidle through our field of vision on cue. One can only imagine the minuet going on behind the Steadicam.
Russian Ark was shot (by Tilman Buettner, the East Germanötrained cameraman responsible for Run Lola Run) on high-definition digital video that was saved to disk with a custom-built hard drive. There were evidently three short false starts and then the entire movie was shot straight through÷on a late December day with only four hours of sufficient existing light. The sound was subsequently layered and the images sharpened in digital post-production.
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