Russian Ark

2002 trip through a museum

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A guy stumbles awake at the Winter Palace of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. I think he's a ghost. Anyway, nobody seems to be able to see him, but he encounters a Frenchman in black who can and they wander about meeting historical figures and looking at pretty pictures.

Favorite scene: The Frenchman leaves a room. The door closes behind him, and he just stands there for a moment. The door opens slightly, and a guy's head and shoulders peek out. He blows a raspberry at the Frenchman who immediately blows one back. Then, the guy's head and shoulders go back into the room, and the door closes.

This movie is boring. Maybe even really boring. Part of the trouble was probably that I don't know anything at all about Russian history. I recognized some names (i.e. Catherine the Great), but those names might as well have been anything (Danny Doppleheimer, Lance Bickenstaff, Corrina Peabody, etc.)because they didn't mean anything to me. Despite the movie's relatively short running time (just a bit over 90 minutes), I had to watch this in two installments. My son couldn't make it through fifteen minutes. Having said that, this is a remarkable achievement, and the more I think about the amount of work that had to have gone into this production, the more I'm impressed. The film's famous for being the first film that is an uninterrupted single shot, the camera flowing through a myriad of rooms occupied by seemingly thousands of actors and actresses. The effect is dreamy, hypnotic, and exceptionally beautiful. There's artwork--naked people statues, paintings--and the architecture of this palace is artistic itself. Most of the time, the screen is stuffed with beauty, and I found my eyes wandering from corner to corner of my too-tiny television to take it all in. Technically, it's just an amazing long take. If one of these thousands of people screws up, everybody has to get back in their places and the whole shoot starts over again. And even though this movie was shot in 96 minutes or so, it actually involved four years in preparation, practice, and positioning. When I think about how much work had to go into things like lighting, I'm just amazed. Truly an ambitious and extraordinary feat. The guy who plays the Frenchman, Sergei Dontsov, is especially good, and I loved how the camera would drift over a wall or a painting or thousands of dancing people and then settle on the guy just standing there waiting. Russian Ark is also interesting because you get a first-person point of view. You borrow the anonymous narrator's eyes for 90 minutes which puts you right in this museum. And you don't even have to pay to get in! I wonder if there are any other first-person movies like this. Is anybody even reading this far? This is too dull, too haunting, too historically dense, and too Russian to appeal to most folk, but there's really something fascinating about the whole thing. It absorbs you.

I looked it up, by the way. The finished film was actually the fourth take. The first three had to be stopped because of technical difficulties.