Though you can’t help but admire the ambition and precision of a film consisting of one uncut tracking shot through the Hermitage of St. Petersburg and featuring hundreds of extras each owning their own synchronized moment, a more-than-passing knowledge of pre-Bolshevik Russian history is probably desirable to more easily follow Aleksandr Sokurov’s paean to an institution that embodies Russia’s long-lost past. Without that knowledge, “Russian Ark” can have something of a soporific effect, dwelling as it does on individual artworks and engaging in long, ambiguous conversations between an unseen narrator (the director himself) and a contentious nineteenth-century European intellectual (Sergei Dontsov). Fortunately, Sokurov has the good sense to portray his vision as either a dream or coma-induced hallucination (the film begins with the narrator suggesting having been part of a shared cataclysmic accident with echoes of nuclear devastation—possibly Chernobyl?) which allows everyone to be included in the opportunity to experience the overwhelmingly in-depth journey into a Russia that most modern viewers have ceased to recognize and which the director clearly pines for. The conclusion is itself undeniably moving: a beautiful ball that ushers out the era of royalty (spanning the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great through Czar Nicholas) that Sokurov displays such deep melancholy affection for. The Steadicam cinematography is by Tilman Buttner (he also shot Tom Tykwer’s “Lola rennt”) and it’s astounding as it painstakingly details a landmark so abundant with art and a haunted history that it seems almost ethereal.
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