The Place-Museum
On the problem of culture in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark
“Consider the darkness and the great cold
In this vale which resounds with mystery.”
— Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
The first thing that comes into inevitable conflict with our habits as audience when we first encounter Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) is the whim of its visual perspective. Along the entire 99-minute length, we witness—literally!—just a single take. This is the reason why some Western critics, accustomed to constant shifts in visual perspective, pronounced Russian Ark as purely an exercise in style. Other painfully familiar prejudices against Russian artists surfaced. Many accused Sokurov of nationalism, bourgeois philistinism, immodest nostalgia about the days of Russian imperialism, and so on. Support for these accusations may indeed be found in the movie. However, they make it difficult to identify the real problem posed not only in the narrative, as well as in the technical approach itself, but also in the general historical situation in which it was produced. The context from which the movie arises is far more complex and nuanced. In other words, it is far from being limited exclusively to the Kremlin’s political ambitions and has more to do with the local problems that…
