110.2Abstract (summary)
For starters, the device revolts against the father of Russian film theory, the brilliant Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein's cinema was based on dynamic montage, the collision of opposites in very short clips. Fired by the Marxist principle of dialectic and with access only to short lengths of film, Eisenstein developed both the aesthetic and the politic of a cinema based on quick, conflicting images. He valued editing over the actors' performances and camera movement. In Russkij Kovcheg, [Alexander Sokurov] amplifies the contrary style and values of Jean Renoir's humanism, which subordinated the editor to the moving camera's discovery in subtle performance. Eschewing the aesthetic of conflict, Sokurov challenges the tower of Russia's film history. Of course, he has always been engaged with history, chronicling Hitler's romance with Eva Braun in Moloch (1999) and Lenin's last days in Taurus (2001).
Here is the paradox. Especially compared to Eisenstein and [Alfred Hitchcock], Sokurov's eschewal of editing may seem to suggest the director's refusal to interfere with his material. Here the material seems "just to happen" without the director editorially imposing his control. But, to the contrary, this one-take panorama is really an astonishing demonstration of the director's control. The unbroken shot includes a cast of costumed hundreds, three live orchestras, and 22 assistant directors as the camera moves almost two kilometres through the equivalent of 33 sumptuously lit sound stages. Instead of the visible intervention of editing, Sokurov exercises the greater, invisible control of the director's authority. This creative force parallels the compelling sweep of visible and invisible forces in political history. Here the massive work was done in preparation, in planning and rehearsal, so that the film could be shot in the four hours of light provided by a winter day in St Petersburg - in (as Sokurov says) "a single breath."
The film opens in darkness over Sokurov's first words: "I open my eyes and see nothing." This void Sokurov fills with the Hermitage and its collection, which provoke the recreation of Russia's past. The "plot" concludes with the tsars' last Grand Ball in 1913, on the eve of the First World War - i.e., the start of Russia's "wasted twentieth century," as Sokurov informs the old-fashioned [Custine]. The ball is defined by the classical, precise mazurka. Then, as the guests pour down the double staircase, Sokurov's camera speeds backward out to the freezing night, out of the warmth of the revived memory. Sokurov loses Custine in the mob and leaves his glamorous characters to their deaths. He closes on the melancholy "... we must drift forever, and we must live forever."
A spectacular receptacle of history - both Russian and global - the Hermitage has somehow survived the most turbulent times of an especially turbulent nation.
Paintings of galleries by E. Gay, watercolour, 1853, the Hermitage.
MAURICE YACOWAR is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Calgary. His The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television's Greatest Series (Continuum) appears in an expanded edition this fall.
The whole world has been in love with film since its infancy, a little more than a century ago. So it comes as a shock to most of us that the actual celluloid medium is beginning to be eclipsed in the twenty-first century by revolutionary new technologies - high quality video tape and vivid high-definition digital cinematography. Now director Alexander Sokurov is attempting to marshal new technology and new directorial practice to create a revolutionary motion picture of unprecedented flow, and to glide his camera seamlessly through three hundred years of Russian history.
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ALEXANDER SOKUROV'S new film is advertised as "the first live-action one-take feature film ever made." Shot with a high-definition digital camera, the film is a 96-minute continuous tracking shot that sweeps through the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and across three centuries of Russia's history. The question is: What's the point? What does this technical tour de force mean here?
For starters, the device revolts against the father of Russian film theory, the brilliant Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein's cinema was based on dynamic montage, the collision of opposites in very short clips. Fired by the Marxist principle of dialectic and with access only to short lengths of film, Eisenstein developed both the aesthetic and the politic of a cinema based on quick, conflicting images. He valued editing over the actors' performances and camera movement. In Russkij Kovcheg, Sokurov amplifies the contrary style and values of Jean Renoir's humanism, which subordinated the editor to the moving camera's discovery in subtle performance. Eschewing the aesthetic of conflict, Sokurov challenges the tower of Russia's film history. Of course, he has always been engaged with history, chronicling Hitler's romance with Eva Braun in Moloch (1999) and Lenin's last days in Taurus (2001).
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More to the point, Sokurov abandons Eisenstein's fragmentation for continuity. In fact, the film's unbroken take makes continuity its primary theme. Specifically, the film takes the Hermitage - including its cultural treasures - as the emblem and site for the continuity of the human spirit in the face of political turmoil and change. The Hermitage is the Russian Ark because it has survived the tumult of time and the storms of history since its original life as the tsars' Winter Palace. As the spectacular building changed from the tsars' retreat to the peoples' museum, it enabled the survival of Russian culture, like its biblical forebear. As the film's rhetorical strategy, like its setting, emblematizes continuity, the film celebrates the three hundredth anniversary of St Petersburg's founding by Peter the Great.
In this respect Sokurov's device coheres with two interesting precedents. In the first, Alfred Hitchcock shot his Rope (1948) in uninterrupted 10-minute takes (limited by the length of his raw film reels). In this film, inspired by the Leopold-Loeb case, two wealthy young men (John Dall and Farley Granger) kill a friend and hide his body in a trunk, over which they then entertain their victim's family, girlfriend, and their philosophy professor (James Stewart), whose classroom musings prompted their crime. The continuous takes embody the title image, as the "heroes" become tied up by the consequences of their deed. The philosopher is appalled that his purely theoretical notions of "murder as an artform" could have led to such amoral action; he did not expect the continuity from his words to their deed. Where Hitchcock contended that in Rope he had abandoned the "pure cinema" of editing, in the second precedent, Wavelength (1966-67), Michael Snow reached for an even purer cinema. His 45-minute film is a continuous zoom - into and through a room, past the suggestion of a murder plot, climactically to focus upon a photograph of a seascape. Snow's technical strategy explicitly dismisses narrative cinema for the higher value of perceptual meditation.
And here is the paradox. Especially compared to Eisenstein and Hitchcock, Sokurov's eschewal of editing may seem to suggest the director's refusal to interfere with his material. Here the material seems "just to happen" without the director editorially imposing his control. But, to the contrary, this one-take panorama is really an astonishing demonstration of the director's control. The unbroken shot includes a cast of costumed hundreds, three live orchestras, and 22 assistant directors as the camera moves almost two kilometres through the equivalent of 33 sumptuously lit sound stages. Instead of the visible intervention of editing, Sokurov exercises the greater, invisible control of the director's authority. This creative force parallels the compelling sweep of visible and invisible forces in political history. Here the massive work was done in preparation, in planning and rehearsal, so that the film could be shot in the four hours of light provided by a winter day in St Petersburg - in (as Sokurov says) "a single breath."
Sokurov also interposes himself as one of the two protagonists who continue across the centuries the film portrays. At the beginning of the film Sokurov himself speaks from behind the camera as someone who - through an accident of time and space - has been transported to an eighteenth-century ball in the Winter Palace. There he meets the second protagonist, the Marquis Astolf de Custine (Sergey Dreiden), a more garrulous man who moves spectrally through the action. Custine wrote a nineteenth-century history of Russia; his diplomatic career ended when six soldiers entrapped him in the Bois de Boulogne, beat him up, and exposed his homosexuality. As the two men make their way through the gallery's paintings, and through different periods of Russian history, they discuss their nation's fate.
Sokurov's dialogue with Custine represents the tension between the public and the personal across history. Custine mentions attending the 1815 Congress of Vienna and repeats his - understandable - dislike for the military. At a theatrical event Catherine the Great (Maria Kuznetsova), who founded the Hermitage in 1764, seeks some place to urinate. The mundane and comical always undercut the momentousness of the historical. We watch Peter the Great beat up a general, and see the domestic happiness of Nicholas II's family, oblivious to their imminent doom. We glimpse Pushkin and hear the current Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky chat with his father (Alexander Chaban).
Hence, too, there is the alternation between the paintings and historical events. The art not only witnesses but survives the accidents of time and politics, like the Persian diplomats' apology for the 1829 attack on the Russian embassy in Tehran, the Leningrad blockade (represented by a coffin maker's preparations), and the Revolution, inter alia. Though the collection's Van Dyck, Rubens, El Greco and Rembrandt masterpieces attest to the royal collectors' taste and their respect for the European masters, the lesser characters prove comically detached.
The film opens in darkness over Sokurov's first words: "I open my eyes and see nothing." This void Sokurov fills with the Hermitage and its collection, which provoke the recreation of Russia's past. The "plot" concludes with the tsars' last Grand Ball in 1913, on the eve of the First World War - i.e., the start of Russia's "wasted twentieth century," as Sokurov informs the old-fashioned Custine. The ball is defined by the classical, precise mazurka. Then, as the guests pour down the double staircase, Sokurov's camera speeds backward out to the freezing night, out of the warmth of the revived memory. Sokurov loses Custine in the mob and leaves his glamorous characters to their deaths. He closes on the melancholy "... we must drift forever, and we must live forever."
A nation's political identity and its culture are the arks in which it can survive the tumult and ravages of time - and the briefly perceptible arc in the infinite curve of a history. In this light the continuous 96-minute take embodies the glory of human continuity and the radical power of art both to memorialize and to revive.
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Word count: 1377
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Summer 2003
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