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Who could resist the pitch in the preview for the new Alexander Sokurov
showpiece, Russian Ark? "2000 actors. 28 rooms of the Hermitage museum.
3 live symphony orchestras. One ... single ... shot." Like the moon landing,
like that French novel written without ever using the letter "e", like -- a lot
like -- state-funded torture, it had to be done because it could be done. Thanks
to innovations like high-definition digital video and the hand-held Steadicam,
it is now possible to do for real what Alfred Hitchcock tried to create the
impression of doing in Rope (1948): to film an entire movie in one
continuous, uninterrupted take, the filmed action taking place once and only
once, staged around and for the moving camera, like a theatrical event. At 96
minutes long, and with none of the tricks Hitchcock had to use in order to
disguise the breaks between reels, Sokurov's new film is the single longest
continuous take in the history of cinema. Sure, it 's a stunt, as was
Rope itself. But anyone who loves movies qua movies -- who's
obsessed with the formal possibilities of the medium -- could not not
see Russian Ark.
On the particular Sunday I took my obliging friend Amy (who could, very easily, not have
seen Russian Ark), to do just that, I could have gone uptown to
Symphony Space to catch a rare double feature by the wonderful Iranian director
Abbas Kiarostami. Granted, I had seen both the movies in question before; but
once is never enough with Kiarostami, whose films are not only some of the best
art going in any medium, but an excellent argument for staying alive. I
guarantee you will flush your suicide note after seeing A Taste of
Cherry. You will call your youngest relative if you make it through
Where is the Friend's Home? And after Close-Up, you will walk
out of the theater wanting to make art out of whatever you see on the sidewalk:
string, a tin can, and a chewed piece of gum. Part of what makes Kiarostami's
movies so great, and such a good foil for this discussion of Russian
Ark, is how deeply cinematic they are, how thoroughly they make use of the
features unique to this and only this art form: movement, depth of field, the
rectangular space of the movie screen. His tricks are less flashy than a
96-minute take, but they sneak up on you; first, you find yourself moved by a
landscape, a face, a line of dialogue, and only then do you notice how the
framing, the editing, the sound design, all work together in such a way as to
perfectly match form and content. Of course, the world according to Abbas is
simple, uanssuming and austere, a million miles from the opulent tyranny -- and
tyrannical opulence -- of Sokurov's. Russian Ark is poised somewhere
between a Merchant-Ivory period piece and Andy Warhol's ten-hour shot of the
Empire State building: a picture-perfect costume drama that also attains the
loftiest realms of avant-garde boredom.
I won't waste too many of my precious thousand words describing the "plot" of
this technically breathtaking snoozefest. Essentially, there are only two
characters: an invisible narrator who seems to be one with the soaring, swooping
camera, and an unnamed old gentleman (Sergei Dreiden), apparently a
nineteenth-century diplomat of some kind, who is the only person onscreen able
to see and interact with the camera/narrator (and therefore with us.) Together,
the two of them go on an interminable tour of the Hermitage, all wedding-cake
architecture and ornate gold picture frames, and witness a series of random,
lavish vignettes from several centuries of Russian history. I can't imagine a
worse person to look at art with than the Old Guy, whose slavish adoration of
master paintings is of a piece with his unironically presented jones for S鑦res
china. This is a movie for the kind of people whose favorite part of a museum is
the decorative arts wing: Empire vases and gilded marble balustrades are
lingered over as lovingly as statues of naked women (all of which the Old Guy,
to Amy's lasting embarrassment, addresses as "Mamma.") At one point,
rhapsodizing over a rather mediocre Vermeer, the Old Guy intones, "These are the
eternal people." Amy makes it a point never to talk during movies -- her second
most endearing quality, after her loyalty -- but she told me later that she had
a snappy comeback at the ready: "You should know."
In fact pretty much all of the 2000 extras on view here are the eternal
people -- both in the sense that they seem to exist in a nostalgic snowglobe of
suspended history, and in the sense that they just never bloody go away. Two
thousand people: that's lot of folks, pouring en masse down marble
staircases, dancing the mazurka in beaded organdy, and just generally disporting
themselves in the manner that got Czar Nicholas and his entire family gunned
down when the revolution came in 1917 -- an event that, unfortunately, is not
pictured in this movie.
By far the best part of the experience of seeing Russian Ark was the
trip to the pan-Asian noodle bar afterwards with an increasingly livid Amy.
"That was really upsetting," she began, prompting me to inquire how worked up
one could reasonably get over a film that offered such slim possibilities for
emotional involvement. "No, I mean conceptually upsetting." After her
second Singha, the epigrams flew fast and free: "To compare this movie to a gold
brocaded jacket does an injustice to the jacket." "You could wheel someone
through the Hermitage Museum on a gurney, snoring, and it would be as
interesting as this movie. In fact, it would be better." As her rant increased
in pace and volume, her formulations became more and more crystalline, until I
abandoned my coconut noodles, took out my High Sign notebook, and began simply
transcribing every word she said, like a medieval amanuensis. Amy Goodman in
full rant is a bonny sight to see, her curls trembling like antennae, her
normally well-modulated voice cracking like Wallace Shawn's in My Dinner
with Andr?/EM>. Soon she hit on the ultimate metaphor: Sokurov, in his
singleminded insistence on the one-shot format, was himself a czar, a mildewed
remnant of the same decaying aristocracy he purported to satirize, an aesthetic
despot who would brook no disagreement from his two thousand brocade-draped
minions, or for that matter from us, his viewers and indentured servants. "There
is no greater honor than to serve a great man," she droned in a bad Russian
accent, pounding the table Soviet-style.
In an interview, Kiarostami says something very nice about the slow pace of
his films: that one of the most generous things cinema can do is to allow us to
take a little nap once in a while. By insisting that we witness every second of
the technical marvel of his one unbroken shot -- even if there is nothing there
to see -- Sokurov does just the opposite: he deprives us of the right to nap,
thus becoming a greater tyrant than Czar Nicholas the II ever was. If you go to
see Russian Ark -- and as I say, those among us who love movie movies
are hard pressed not to -- do as I did, O my comrades, and stand up to the
tyrant in the only way you can: do your own editing with a little revolutionary
shut-eye, and catch some z's in the bargain.