A Visit to the Museum: Aleksandr Sokurov's "Russian Ark" and the Framing of the Eternal

Author(s): Tim Harte

Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), pp. 43-58
Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
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A Visit to the Museum: Aleksandr Sokurov's
Russian Ark and the Framing of the Eternal

Tim Harte

On 23 December 2001, the Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov, using

state-of-the-art digital video technology, filmed in one continuous ninety-
minute shot a most unusual tour of St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum
(or the Winter Palace, as it was known before 1917). Russkii kovcheg (Rus-
sian ark), the result of Sokurov's ambitious work, documents the whimsi-
cal passage of a foreign visitor-the nineteenth-century French diplomat
Marquis Astolphe de Custine-through thirty-three rooms of this most
famous of Russian institutions. Gliding past the Hermitage's paintings
and three hundred years of Russian history, Sokurov highlights a wealth
of art and events, as actors playing Peter the Great, Nicholas I, and other
Russian historical figures appear sporadically among the rooms and cor-
ridors of the Hermitage.
Over the course of this cinematic tour of the museum and Russian his-
tory, the Marquis (who was the real-life author of the travelogue Russia in
1839) and the film's off-screen narrator (Sokurov himself) engage in a
lively debate on Russian culture vis-a-vis the west and Russian history. Ul-
timately, the discussions and museum going lead to a majestic ball, im-
plicitly set in 1913, where Russia's Valerii Gergiev conducts his Mariinskii
Theater orchestra in a performance of a mazurka by Mikhail Glinka. Fol-
lowing this lively music and dancing, the camera follows the ball's aristo-
cratic attendees as they slowly make their way toward the building's exit,
through which is visible a digitally generated view of fog rising from a fore-
boding sea. With this somber concluding image, Sokurov accentuates the
Hermitage's status as an ark, a vessel of culture adrift at sea.
Since its international release in 2002, Sokurov's Russian Ark has
elicited a broad array of critical reactions. Some have hailed the underly-
ing technical novelty of this Russian film, noting the work's unique status
as the longest single uninterrupted shot ever produced in the cinematic
medium. Filmed entirely within the gates of the Hermitage, Sokurov's film
has also impressed many with its majestic, often sublime imagery.2 Others,
however, have taken Russian Ark to task for its depiction of Russian history,
arguing that the sporadic appearance of various historical figures within
the film betrays the director's unabashed nostalgia for his nation's impe-
rial past.3 The film, these detractors claim, ideologically promotes a na-

1. Marquis Astolphe de Custine, La Russieen 1839, 4 vols. (Paris, 1843).

2. Noteworthy criticism on Russian Arkincludes: Birgit Beumers, "And the Ship Sails
On... Sokurov's Ghostly Ark of Russia'sPast,"Rossica9 (Winter 2003): 56-59; Ian Christie,
"The Civilizing Russian," Sightand Sound 13, no. 4 (2003): 10-11; andJ. Hoberman, "And
the Ship Sails On," Film Comment38, no. 5 (September/October 2002): 54.
3. See, for instance, Pamela Kachurin and Ernest A. Zitser, "Afterthe Deluge: Russian
Ark and the (Ab)uses of History," NewsNet43, no. 4 (August 2003): 17-22. Kachurin and

SlavicReview64, no. 1 (Spring 2005)

44 Slavic Review

tionalistic, unnecessarily mystical view of Russia and Russian culture's sta-

tus within world civilization.4
While the groundbreaking nature of Russian Ark and Sokurov's con-
tentious view of history are both undoubtedly noteworthy, they have nev-
ertheless obscured other, more significant aesthetic issues at play in the
film. Indeed, artistic motifs stemming from the Russian filmmaker's long-
standing preoccupation with pictorial art constitute a crucial facet of Rus-
sian Ark, and Sokurov uses the film's one, extended take to pose impor-
tant questions on cinema's status within Russian and western European
culture. It is therefore necessary to go beyond the controversy to spot-
light Sokurov's explicitly cinematic treatment of art in Russian Ark. Set-
ting aside ideological controversies as much as one can when discussing
such a provocative film, I will explore Sokurov's frequent blending of
the cinematic image with images of individual paintings, a conspicuous
synthesis of art forms that arises over the course of the camera's steady
tour through the Hermitage, where a succession of frames-doorframes,
picture frames, and the constant film frame-guide this movement. The
unique premise and underlying composition of Russian Arkallow Sokurov
to convey how the museum, its art, and cinema, transporting the past so
evocatively into the present and beyond, can all merge to affirm a nation's
cultural longevity. By using the frame to help bridge the past with the pre-
sent (much as he links cinema and painting), Sokurov is able to accentu-
ate the ongoing human struggle against mortality, such a fundamental as-
pect of culture and a foremost concern in the Russian filmmaker's work.
Thus, in Russian Ark, the ninety-minute single-shot fusion of western Eu-
ropean art and Russian history enables Sokurov to establish his own cine-
matic framing of culture's eternal essence.
References to eternity abound in Russian Ark. "Weare destined to sail
forever and to live forever," the narrator proclaims in the film's waning
moments, as the camera approaches the exit of the Hermitage, revealing
through this last doorframe the final digitally generated shot of fog and
water (see figure 1).5 The film must conclude, but the cultural spirit con-
veyed by the artwork and celluloid perseveres. For the Hermitage, the true
protagonist of Russian Ark, this concluding reference to immortality and
the threat of oblivion has particular significance. As Sokurov'sjuxtaposi-
tion of human transience and art suggests, the existence of Russia's cele-
brated museum, this Russian vessel of world art, will help ensure the sur-
vival of the country's own cultural values and its permanence in the face
of persistent historical turmoil. Thus Sokurov appeals to the notion that

Zitser, as the title of their article suggests, criticize the political and ideological treatment
of history in Sokurov's film.
4. I am reminded here of a statement by the film critic and essayist Phillip Lopate on
earlier Sokurov work and its underlying mysticism: "In interviews he talks all kinds of re-
actionary, Russian-mystic nonsense; but the man makes beautiful movies.... Does it take
having a cockamamie philosophy these days to make rigorous, visionary films?" Phillip
Lopate, Totally,Tenderly,Tragically:Essays and Criticismfrom a Lifelong Love Affair with the
Movies (New York, 1998), 337-38.
5. Aleksandr Sokurov, director, Russian Ark, DVD (2002; New York, N.Y: Wellspring,
2003). All English translations from the soundtrack are mine.
Sokurov s Russian Ark and the Framing of the Eternal 45

Figure 1. Aleksandr Sokurov, Russian Ark (2002), image courtesy of Hermitage

Bridge Studio.
via the institution of the museum a society preserves its culture in an ef-
fort to guarantee its future survival and to defy mortality. As the British an-
thropologist Edmund Leach has noted, virtually every culture challenges
the irreversibility of time and the inevitable consequence of time's pas-
sage, death. Through efforts "to repudiate the 'reality' of death," the
progress of time is symbolically halted by means of religious ritual and
other cultural practices, such as museum going.6 In western civilization
the ritual of both establishing and attending museums is crucial, for here
the past can be invoked and revisited to sustain the vitality of a given soci-
ety's culture.
Accordingly, the Hermitage Museum and the works of western art fea-
tured in Russian Ark constitute an important conduit between the past,
when these cultural objects were produced, and the present (and future),
when they are encountered. Even the deceased figures of Russian history,
ephemeral ghosts in the background of the film, seem to exist somewhere
between past and present, representative of the eternal substance of Rus-
sian history and culture. Peter the Great, Aleksandr Pushkin, and a num-
ber of other iconic figures quickly come to embody the liminal state of the
museum, its tenuous position between the past and the present. Although
Sokurov makes no attempt to depict his historical figures with any fastidi-
ous accuracy, he does use them as allegorical symbols of the museum's
essence, its protest against death through the preservation of Russia's im-
mortal cultural spirit.
6. Edmund Leach, RethinkingAnthropology (London, 1961), 125. Cited by Carol Dun-
can, CivilizingRitual: InsidePublicArt Museums (London, 1995), 17.
46 Slavic Review

This cinematic discourse on the eternal is given heightened artistic

significance by means of Sokurov's continual focus on frames throughout
Russian Ark.In making these marked borders so conspicuous, Sokurov be-
gins to underscore the critical link between his celluloid images and the
medium of painting, which both depend on the frame for visual and pre-
sentational purposes. Picture frames enclose painted images, demarcat-
ing their status as timeless works of art, while within the institution of the
museum, the frame, in addition to enabling the installation and display of
paintings, directs the human gaze, helping the observer to focus on and
explore a given image. Meanwhile, for the medium of film the frame is
even more of a constant (albeit a less obvious one), for every individual
image on a strip of film constitutes an individual frame.
Frames, however, can be more than visual guides. The doorframe,
for example, suggests movement and change as it guides one's passage
through space. In a broader, metaphysical sense, the frame signifies an ac-
tive transition into a new, unfamiliar realm of experience. Hence frames,
be they doorframes, window frames, or picture frames, denote a thresh-
old over which the viewer or traveler must cross to reach what is on the op-
posite side of the frame. For the work of art, the threshold of the frame
encourages the viewer to enter into a separate aesthetic sphere. As Jose
Ortega y Gasset has written, "Painted canvases are portholes of ideality
which are perforated in the mute reality of the walls. They are openings
of illusion into which we can peer, thanks to the beneficent 'window,' the
frame."7 In other words, the frames and their respective paintings consti-
tute vivid, ideal worlds-eternal spheres-into which the viewer enters.
In addition to accommodating these "portholes of ideality," the insti-
tution of the museum itself functions as an ostensibly timeless frame,
guiding the viewer through various periods and schools of art. Just as the
picture frame draws attention to the content of a painting, the museum
focuses our attention on the collected artworks and their arrangement
throughout the museum. This narrative established within the museum
stems in part from an urge to see artwork participate actively in an on-
going cultural process. "The necessity to preserve objects from paralysis,"
writes Wolfgang Ernst, "already sets apart the museum as a place of shel-
ter-framing not just as a material but as a discursive practice."8 Thanks
in large part to the museum "frame"and its coherent display of paintings,
the work of art endures, existing for future generations within the frame-
work superimposed by the museum.
In Russian Ark these various manifestations of the frame emerge as an
expedient device in the seamless filming of the Hermitage Museum and
its artwork. Sokurov's film, which the director himself has described as be-

7. Jose Ortega y Gasset, "Meditations on the Frame," trans. Andrea Ball, in Richard
Brettell and Steven Starling, The Art of the Edge: EuropeanFrames 1300-1900 (Chicago,
1986), 24.
8. Wolfgang Ernst, "Framingthe Fragment: Archeology, Art, Museum," in Paul Duro,
ed., The Rhetoricof the Frame:Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork (Cambridge, Eng.,
1996), 115.
Sokurov' Russian Ark and the Framing of the Eternal 47

ing shot "in one breath,"9 is indeed an impressive technical achievement

and a work of great ingenuity. For instance, the film had to be carefully
choreographed in order for the camera to navigate smoothly through the
various rooms and doorways of the Hermitage. The necessity of painstak-
ingly orchestrating-or framing-an astounding 2,000 or so actors and
extras within the museum inevitably compounded the technical challenge
of the filmmaking. In deciding not to make cuts or to introduce jumps in
time and space, Sokurov endowed the film with a distinct fluidity that
heightens the impression of three-dimensional space and the sensation of
"real" time passing. Viewers cannot help but be aware that this is a single,
ninety-minute shot occurring entirely within the confines of the Hermit-
age.10 Given the film's conspicuous absence of cuts and the quick, fluid
camera movement over the course of the Marquis' tour through the mu-
seum, it is not surprising that Sokurov would repeatedly focus on door-
ways and windows in Russian Ark, using these frames to help guide the
viewer's gaze in an otherwise disorienting stream of uncut images.
From the initial moments of Russian Ark to the film's conclusion,
doors, windows, and thresholds of various kinds abound. Of course, one
could argue that the prevalence of doorframes (as well as picture frames
and window frames) in Russian Ark is inevitable; considering how the ac-
tion occurs in thirty-three rooms over the course of the movie, the film-
maker could hardly avoid these conspicuous frames given the architec-
ture of his setting. Yet Sokurov does more than simply move the camera
through an endless succession of doorways. Rather, he highlights the
physical movement of the camera and actors across these thresholds by
means of various filming techniques: expressive, tilted camera angles that
increase as the camera approaches entryways; a slight deceleration of for-
ward camera motion that frequently occurs as the camera and the Mar-
quis move up to and across the doorways (often the camera slows as doors
are opened); shots of doorways that are situated in the background of var-
ious scenes to help frame closer thresholds (frames within frames), high-
lighting a distinct path along which the camera and the Marquis will
travel; and the overlaying of artificial noises, such as a subtle, yet discern-
able "swoosh" (a sound the Marquis himself sporadically makes as he en-
ters a room) that intensifies the movement of the French visitor and the
camera across a threshold and into a new, unfamiliar space. Sokurov uses
these filming devices to accentuate the passage from one hall into an-
other, as if a surprise awaits the viewer on the other side of the threshold.
Before commencing his one long sequence of successive frames,
Sokurov initially situates his viewer in darkness: the film's opening credits
are followed by nearly thirty seconds of a black, imageless screen, over
which the narrator's monologue begins. This detached, authorial voice

9. Alexander Sokurov, "In One Breath," Hermitage Bridge Studio, http://www

.russianark.spb.ru/eng/film_socurov.html (last consulted 7 October 2004).
10. In addition, the fact that Sokurov filmed Russian Ark on 23 December, the short-
est day of the year, means that the filmmaker and his cameraman had only approximately
four hours of St. Petersburg daylight with which to work.
48 Slavic Review

(Sokurov himself, providing an aural frame for his images) admits to a

sense of disorientation, for he claims not to know where he has arrived or
in what era he now finds himself. All this narrator can remember is that a
"misfortune" (beda) has occurred. Yet this motionless, formless contem-
plation is suddenly disrupted, for out of the darkness and the spatial and
temporal void of the opening seconds comes a burst of St. Petersburg's
bright winter light, as the camera ushers a group of nineteenth-century
Russian officers and society ladies out of a horse-drawn carriage that has
evidently arrived in the Winter Palace's main courtyard. The camera
quickly retreats backwards as these lively, laughing visitors proceed under
a high archway and into an adjacent yard within the palace gates. Linger-
ing at a near corner, the camera gives the aristocratic guests time to ad-
vance onward. The camera follows the crowd up to an entrance and into
the interior of the Winter Palace, as if pushing these people across the
doorway, the film's first significant threshold. Above all, this fluid camera
movement allows Sokurov to accentuate a sense of graceful motion into
the rarefied world of the Hermitage and the Winter Palace.
Once inside the palace, Sokurov's camera initially focuses on a space
visible through a large aperture in a thick wall; simultaneously, a visitor
shouts for the doors to be closed to keep out the cold air. With the doors
quickly shutting off screen, the creaking of the door hinges and the dis-
appearance of natural light in the shot convey the sense that the camera
and hence the viewer have entered a hermetically sealed, somewhat tomb-
like space. This emphasis on the doors and the architectural framing of
the building's interior space presages the array of doors and painting
frames that await the viewer inside the museum. Moreover, the Hermit-
age-the "Russianark"-has virtually swallowed up the aristocratic crowd
and the camera, as the bright outdoor light gives way to the darkness and
claustrophobia of the crowded entryway within the Winter Palace's de-
tached, interior sphere, a place where multiple time periods are able to
coexist. Thus it is out of these opening scenes-the darkness of the initial
images and the camera's hurried entrance into the museum-that Soku-
rov's underlying objective emerges: to penetrate past periods of Russian
history and to evoke as well as celebrate the cultural heritage (that is, the
paintings) contained within the Hermitage. Hence, the doorway into the
museum is the first in a long series of thresholds that will be crossed in
Russian Ark.
Before any art is viewed, however, Russian history materializes, lurk-
ing behind the palace's ubiquitous doors and windows. Soon after the
quick, energetic entrance into the Winter Palace, Sokurov's camera, fol-
lowing after the young aristocratic crowd, proceeds into the interior of the
palace, where it briefly encounters the French marquis before pausing in
front of a set of windows that enclose several rooms decorated in early
eighteenth-century fashion. Through these windows, Sokurov takes a
glimpse into Russian history, focusing on an individual-by all indications
Peter the Great-who yells at servants and physically abuses a woman (ap-
parently the Tsar's wife). It should be noted that the camera first captures
Sokurov'sRussian Ark and theFramingof theEternal 49

this scene through the glass panes of the room's window before proceed-
ing around a corner and across two prominent doorways as it enters the
Tsar's living quarters. In providing this brief foray into Russian history,
Sokurov initially shoots the scene through the windows in order to com-
municate the historical remoteness of the scene, but with the camera
movement through the doorframes, the historical, temporal barrier is
broken. Crossing the threshold into the chamber, the camera moves
confidently into Russia's past, simultaneously establishing this past in the
present (and ostensibly eternal) moment of the film.
This careful, though hardly chronological, framing of Russian history
occurs throughout Russian Ark. For instance, the distinctive image of a
dark corridor leading up to or away from a brightly lit doorway appears
several times in the film. This inverse silhouette of a door symbolically
suggests the looming or retreating threshold of historical time. During the
Marquis' retreat from one of the film's central scenes-a 1829 Winter
Palace ceremony during which Persia's ambassador to Russia apologizes to
Tsar Nicholas I for the murder of the Russian diplomat and dramatist
Aleksandr Griboedov-the backward motion of the camera causes a hall
door's bright threshold to recede into the distance. The stark image of
this diminishing aperture conveys a sense of loss and nostalgia for a by-
gone imperial era. Later, towards the end of the film, when the Marquis
and the camera have entered a long hallway (the Hermitage's portrait
gallery of the Romanov family), they encounter a group of young, angelic
girls, who proceed to run down the long hallway, playfully chased by the
Marquis. The camera moves briskly after these girls and past the Marquis,
eventually slowing to focus on two women-a nun (implicitly Grand
Duchess Elizaveta) and Aleksandra, Tsar Nicholas II'swife-who also pro-
ceed down the long corridor (see figure 2). The hallway space ahead is
ominously dark, save for a distant, brightly lit doorway in the center of the
image. With the Empress Aleksandra expressing fear over the future and
the growing violence in the country, the emergent aperture of the door-
way signifies in austere visual terms the historical threshold of the 1917
Revolution over which the imperial family and Russia will fatally cross.
This interplay between thresholds and history in Russian Ark also
points to an important metaphysical concern for Sokurov: movement
across the divide separating the eternal and the ephemeral. Throughout
his career, Sokurov has repeatedly focused on themes of mortality and his-
tory, and given the prominence of death in all his films, it is not surpris-
ing that he would link the framing of history and art to his conception of
immortality." Discussing Sokurov's 2001 film Vostochnaiaelegiia (The east-
ern elegy), which evokes the essence of pictorial art by means of inten-
tionally flat images, Mikhail Iampolski has commented on the filmmaker's
11. Sokurov's preoccupation with mortality and history is particularly evident in the
recent films Molochand Taurus,which explore the final, waning days in the lives of Hitler
and Lenin, respectively. In other films, Sokurov similarly investigates the delicate, liminal
state between life and death that arises as so many of his characters confront mortality (like
the son and his dying mother in Sokurov's 1997 Motherand Son).
50 Slavic Review

_'

Figure 2. Sokurov, Russian Ark (2002), image courtesy of Hermitage Bridge

Studio.

interest in probing "the transition into the sphere of death and eternity,
... from the three-dimensional world to a flat world." 2 In Russian Ark, the
Hermitage's paintings-the flat world that Iampolski speaks of-provide
a convenient prism through which Sokurov can explore issues of death
and the preservation of Russian culture.
Throughout Sokurov's tour of the Hermitage, the frames and their
thresholds suggest movement into not only a detached spatial sphere, but
also into a variety of temporal realms. Amidst all the grandeur of Russian
Ark,in fact, Sokurov creates a conspicuous, shifting temporal dynamic be-
tween the limited, ordered time (ninety minutes) of the filming, the far
broader time of Russian history, and the timelessness of the Hermitage's
artwork. This pastiche of temporalities, all so prominent during the Mar-
quis' fluid passage within the Hermitage, emerges in an early scene of the
film when the Marquis follows the figure of Catherine the Great through
a large palace door. The Marquis' guide, however, will be the doorways of
the Hermitage rather than the Empress, for Catherine the Great soon dis-
appears, much like an actress exiting the stage (as the Marquis strides
through the various doorways in this sequence, he exclaims that Russia is
like an enormous theater), and thus the Marquis is left to navigate the
museum on his own without the temporal and historical specificity em-
bodied by Catherine II. Indeed, Sokurov's framing shifts from history to
art, as if the historical figures can now give way to the paintings.
Having lost track of the Empress, the Marquis-followed by Sokurov's
camera-temporarily exits the realm of Russian history, crossing from the
imperial rooms of the Winter Palace into the Hermitage's renowned col-
12. Mikhail Iampolski, "Representation, Mimicry, Death," in Birgit Beumers, ed.,
Russia on Reels:TheRussian Idea in Post-SovietCinema(London, 1999), 138.
Sokurov'sRussian Ark and theFramingof theEternal 51

Figure 3. Sokurov, Russian Ark (2002), image courtesy of Hermitage Bridge

Studio.

lection of art. From a small room with doors leading in all four directions
(and offering a multitude of options for the visitor), the Marquis grace-
fully passes through two subsequent doorways, slowly opened for him as
he proceeds into the Hermitage's famed Raphael Loggias (see figure 3).
In this bright, colorful hallway,with his arms stretched wide, the Marquis
marvels at the resplendent Vatican frescoes, exclaiming, "It's simply the
Vatican. The Vatican." The Marquis, it seems, has entered into an aes-
thetic realm far removed from Russia. The multiple doorways through
which the Marquis has just passed accentuate this sudden jubilation, for
the doors, along with the sight of the artwork, enable the filmmaker to
create a spatial and temporal shift in the narrative, accomplished of
course without the use of the traditional film cut. The space (the Hermit-
age) and time (the ninety minutes of the film) may be contiguous, yet the
internal architecture of the Hermitage (particularly the many doorways
and windows) provides Sokurov with the means to make important tran-
sitions within his single film shot. Thus Sokurov avoids the fragmentation
of montage while enhancing the camera's intrusion into a series of dis-
parate realms.
Fluid shifts in time and space continue as the Marquis and Sokurov's
camera proceed onward through the Hermitage. In fact, the interweaving
of various historical and artistic periods only intensifies in the scenes that
follow the Marquis' awed reaction to the Vatican frescoes. Moving through
a door out of the Raphael Loggias, the Marquis enters the Small Italian
Skylight Hall, a gallery featuring sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ital-
ian masterworks. In this spacious gallery, modern-day museum goers wan-
der alongside the Marquis, thus producing an anachronistic mix of peo-
ple analogous to paintings from widely disparate eras or artistic schools
52 Slavic Review

hung side-by-side on a museum wall. This connection is made explicitly

by means of the ensuing dialogue. Introduced to two men from present-
day Russia, the Marquis not only bemoans the appearance and dress of
contemporary visitors to the museum but also complains about the close
arrangement of vastly different paintings in the Small Italian Skylight
Hall. Indeed, the juxtaposition on one wall of Massimo Stanzione's Cleopa-
tra (1630s-1640s) and Lodovico Cardi's The Circumcision of Christ (late
1590s), which the Marquis criticizes as an incongruous merging of secular
and Christian themes, mirrors the live action occurring before these
paintings as the nineteenth-century guest clashes with the contemporary
crowd in both appearance and aesthetic sensibility. With this implicit
analogy, Sokurov suggests that a synthesis of the modern cinematic image
and the older, static medium of painting is attainable despite the inherent
incongruity.13
Here, in the Small Italian Skylight Hall, Sokurov initiates his close ex-
amination of a handful of the Hermitage's most celebrated paintings,
working toward a fusion of painting and film. Rather than moving quickly
past these paintings, Sokurov hovers over them to give the images height-
ened importance in the film. In this hall of Italian art, the picture frames
(much like the entryways of the various galleries) invite viewers into the
works' static aesthetic spheres. Moreover, in the ensuing close-ups of a va-
riety of paintings, the frame stands out as an important border between
the live action in the museum space and the static canvas.'4 When the
camera slowly zooms in on one prominent painting in this hall-Jacopo
Tintoretto's late sixteenth-century The Birth ofJohn the Baptist (see figure
4)-the picture frame, along with the finger of one of the museum goers,
is featured at the bottom of the cinematic frame, as if beckoning viewers
to cross over the aesthetic, liminal threshold and, conversely, for the time-
less subjects in the painting to overflow into the live-action of the film.'5
Speaking with the Marquis, the narrator's modern-day friends point out
two minor symbols at the bottom of this painting, a chicken that repre-
sents greed and a cat that symbolizes cruelty and cynicism. These animals
and their symbolism explicitly interact with the live action of the film.
The close attention Sokurov pays to these Italian paintings and other
masterpieces in the Hermitage collection conforms to the filmmaker's
long-standing preoccupation with painting and its two-dimensional static
image. In almost all of his work, in fact, Sokurov has sought to impart
an intentional flatness to his live-action images, transforming cinematic
moments into quasi-paintings. Take, for instance, Sokurov's Mat' i syn
(Mother and son, 1997), in which slow camera pans and flat images cre-

13. The fact that Stanzione's Cleopatrawas acquired by the Hermitage in 1968 further
accentuates the film's anachronistic mix of art and action.
14. For a detailed discussion of a similar interplay between live-action and the static
canvas in Sokurov's work, particularly Robert:A FortunateLife, see Iampolski, "Representa-
tion," 128.
15. Only for a brief moment (approximately one second) are the frame and the hu-
man finger not visible in this close up of Tintoretto's painting. Otherwise, part of the frame
is alwaysvisible.
Sokurov' Russian Ark and the Framing of the Eternal 53

Figure 4. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Birth ofJohn the Baptist (late sixteenth century),
image courtesy of The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
ated by a special camera lens evoke a distinct painterly quality in the work.
Whether in Mother and Son, Robert: Schastlivaia zhizn' (Robert: a fortunate
life), a 1996 documentary on the eighteenth-century French painter Hu-
bert Robert, or the 2001 Elegie de la traversee (Elegy of a voyage), a film that
concludes in a Rotterdam museum amidst the work of various Dutch mas-
ters, Sokurov has explored issues of painting like virtually no other film-
maker of his era. As various critics and Sokurov himself have noted, most
of this work betrays a deep allegiance to Germany's nineteenth-century
romantic painters, particularly Caspar David Friedrich, and the English
landscape artist William Turner. In various interviews, moreover, Sokurov
has articulated his position on the significance of painting in his own cre-
ative process, stating that the tradition of classical painting has defined
"the route of his inner development" and enabled his visual memory to
take shape.16 This steadfast urge to link camera and painting, conveyed by
a repeated emphasis on the masterpieces of the Hermitage, prevails
throughout Russian Ark.
Whereas in Sokurov's earlier films long, slow-moving, live-action shots
evoke the flatness of a static canvas, in Russian Ark the filmmaker elicits
the essence of painting through other means: the continuous internal
framing (rather than any flatness) unites the artistic media of painting
and cinema. Conspicuous doorframes, for instance, lend a heightened
sense of three-dimensionality to the live action of the film, for they en-

16. Aleksandr Sokurov, "Izobrazhenie i montazh," Iskusstvokino, 1997, no. 12:111. In

this interview, Sokurov discusses the role of painting in Motherand Son.
54 Slavic Review

Figure 5. Anthony van Dyck, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Madonna with Par-
tridges) (1630), image courtesy of The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

hance the cinematic illusion of depth in so many of the museum scenes.

Thus the cinematography and framing of Russian Ark evoke a three-
dimensionality that is absent in so much of Sokurov's past work.
This merging of the artwork and the live action of the film intensifies
in an encounter between the Marquis and a blind woman (the blind
Tamara Kurenkova playing herself), who feels, rather than sees, her way
through the collection. Kurenkova interacts with the sculpture and paint-
ings by the touch of her hand (and from knowledge gained from many
trips made to the museum as she was losing her eyesight). This avid Her-
mitage patron also knows the number of paces up to the adjacent door-
way and into the next gallery of Dutch masterpieces, and thus her move-
ment across these various thresholds corresponds to her blind, yet precise
knowledge displayed in running commentary on several paintings. In the
adjacent gallery, the Marquis asks Kurenkova to expound on Anthony van
Dyck's 1630 The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Madonna with Partridges) (see
figure 5). As the camera zooms in past the Marquis and the blind woman
to show a close-up of van Dyck's canvas, she provides her own reading of
the painting, interpreting the apple tree, sunflowers, angels, and par-
tridges as symbolic evidence of God's presence in van Dyck's celebrated
work. With the camera slowly panning across the frame and painting, the
narrator remarks that the Marquis should leave the woman in peace since
she herself is an angel ("Ostav'teee. Ona zhe angel."). Hushed superim-
Sokurov'sRussian Ark and theFramingof theEternal 55

posed music and the sound of chirping birds accompany this discussion
between the Marquis and Kurenkova, as if the static elements of TheRest
on theFlight into Egypthave spilled out of the painting's frame and entered
into the narrative space of the film. By means of this and other instances
of live interaction with the Hermitage paintings in Russian Ark, Sokurov
shows how the static world of the painting and the action of the film in-
teract across the frame and begin to merge. Hence, Sokurov suggests that
the live action is endowed with the same sense of the eternal that is im-
plicit in the paintings.
A similar effort to transport the timeless scene of a painting across its
framed threshold into the live cinematic action occurs in the Hermitage's
Rembrandt room, where the Marquis, after making a dramatic entrance
(with outstretched arms) into the room through a large doorway, shifts his
attention from the three angels of the 1640 painting Abrahamand the Three
Angels (allegedly by Rembrandt and Jan Victors) to yet another real-life
"angel," the legendary ballet dancer Alla Osipenko (who, like the blind
woman, plays herself). Standing in front of Danae, the recently restored
Rembrandt painting of 1636, Osipenko attempts, in her own words, to
communicate with the artwork, announcing: "I am speaking with this
painting." From a low angle, Sokurov's camera slowly approaches Osi-
penko, now joined by the Marquis, as she stands before the painting and
attempts to venture emotionally beyond the painting's threshold and into
its timeless, eternal realm (see figure 6).
This interplay between paintings and live action across the picture
frame also allows Sokurov to broach his consistent themes of death and
immortality. In one brief Russian Arkscene transpiring in the Hermitage's
Tent Room, for example, the Marquis closely observes Frans van Mieris
the Elder's 1660 A YoungWomanin the Morning, noting wistfully how the
figures in the painting are "eternal people." Art, Sokurov implies, offers
humans glimpses of eternity, and as is evident here and elsewhere in Rus-
sian Ark, by crossing the painting frame immortality can be found. In
1995, Sokurov himself declared, "Only culture and only spirituality are ca-
pable of reconciling man with the inevitability of his departure into the
higher realm. And they prepare him to cross this boundary in as elevated
a state of mind and soul as possible. All my films are about this. I have no
other song to sing."'7 As this statement suggests, Sokurov has striven
throughout his career to cross fundamental metaphysical boundaries, and
in the Hermitage he found an ideal space through which to express these
lofty concerns and to explore the ability of art (that is, culture) to contend
with mortality.
Sokurov's complex interweaving of thresholds, art, history, death, and
immortality is nowhere more evident in Russian Ark than in a central
scene that occurs as the Marquis nears the end of his tour of the Hermit-
age's painting galleries. Ignoring the warning of the off-screen narrator
not to open a set of doors at the end of a dark corridor, the Marquis in-
sists on proceeding through this shadowed threshold ("it's such a beauti-
17. Sokurov,"Tvorcheskiialfavit,"Kinograf,1997, no. 3:88. Also cited in Iampolski,
143.
"Representation,"
56 Slavic Review

Figure 6. Sokurov, Russian Ark (2002), image courtesy of Hermitage Bridge

Studio.

Figure 7. Sokurov, Russian Ark (2002), image courtesy of Hermitage Bridge

Studio.

ful door," he exclaims). The Marquis and camera subsequently enter a

cold, colorless room that appears far removed from the splendor of the
earlier scenes. As we quickly learn, the time is that of World War II: a mu-
seum worker, surrounded by empty picture frames, fusses about in the
middle of the room (see figure 7). Depicting the hardships imposed on
Russian culture and the Russian people during the German siege of
Leningrad, this dark scene exudes a visual sense of horror as the gruff mu-
Sokurov'sRussian Ark and theFramingof theEternal 57

seum worker aggressively approaches the Marquis.18Only "corpses and

coffins" are here, he barks, as the Marquis moves backwards in confusion
and horror. Both thematically and physically linked to this morbid atmo-
sphere, the empty picture frames offer a most vivid symbol of culture's po-
tential demise, for instead of featuring eternal images of art, the empty
frames delineate a void. Moreover, the coffins constitute thresholds akin
to the frames, for they suggest an even more explicit entryway into death.
"Youare stepping on the corpses," the Hermitage worker bitterly mum-
bles, as the Marquis makes a quick retreat through the doorway and out
of this tomb-like room. It is as if the Marquis has gotten a stark glimpse of
mortality that contrasts with the film's earlier evocations of the eternal
within the ubiquitous "living"frames featured elsewhere in the museum.
The coffins and empty painting frames on display in this somber
World War II scene do not suggest the finality of human existence so
much as they do the tenuous border between life and death, such an es-
sential theme in all of Sokurov's work. For this unabashedly philosophical
filmmaker, it is not just mortality that is central, but also art's ability to
evoke a sense of the eternal. In Russian Ark, in fact, numerous episodes
highlight this fundamental juxtaposition of mortality and immortality.
And once again, these brief scenes occur through the prism of the frame.
In the sequence immediately following the World War II-related horror,
Sokurov shows a more elderly Catherine II, accompanied by her grandee
(who initially tries to bar her way out through a door), stepping outside
into a snowy courtyard of the Winter Palace. The camera follows the Em-
press (before eventually veering off back into the palace), but the Mar-
quis, cautioning that "mortals must not chase royalty,"remains indoors,
eventually meeting up with the camera at a later doorway off the court-
yard. The Marquis' emphasis on the immortality of the Empress corre-
sponds to the film's consistent merging of Russian history, the art of the
Hermitage, and issues of eternity. One of several allusions to how history
and paintings (and cinema) exist beyond the temporal and spatial realm
of the Hermitage, the elderly Catherine II and her grandee appear to walk
on forever into the snow-covered distance of the courtyard.
As the Marquis and the camera head determinedly toward the film's
final majestic ball, minor episodes continue to point to the Hermitage's
centrality in this discussion of art and history's eternal essence. In a dark
scene transpiring in the palace's Small Throne Room (The Memorial Hall
of Peter the Great), Mikhail Piotrovskii, the current director of the Her-
mitage, converses with actors playing previous (deceased) directors of
the museum, a discussion that yet again reveals how Sokurov is ultimately
concerned with the interplay between death and immortality through the
framework of art. "The dead weep with joy when their books are re-
printed," Piotrovskii remarks. These books, the Hermitage director sug-
gests, are representative of all eternal culture, for they unite the present
18. This scene alludes to the cannibalism that occurred in Leningrad during the 900-
day blockade of the city. The museum-worker, looking well fed (as the Marquis himself
notes), approaches the French visitor as if sizing him up for consumption.
58 Slavic Review

with death and the past. As this brief scene from Russian Arkindicates, the
fluctuation between mortality and eternity, as well as between the present
and the past, is ongoing within the museum and palace. Continually mov-
ing the camera (and the viewer) across the numerous thresholds of the
Hermitage and its artwork, Sokurov accentuates how culture-both the
art and the museum-can fuse these abstract spheres with the present.
In Russian Ark, Sokurov's constant accentuation of framed spaces
highlights not only the passage of life into art's eternal realm, but also the
passing of art into the living sphere. Over the course of this ninety-minute
film, culture, embodied by the Hermitage, its art, and cinema, comes
alive. By providing a frame and focus for the viewer's gaze, Sokurov can
guide us through history and the museum. The institution of the museum
must contend with death, but it also proves to be regenerative in that it of-
fers a resounding affirmation of culture's vitality. Described by Carol Dun-
can as a place that enables "individuals to achieve liminal experience-to
move beyond the psychic constraints of mundane existence, step out of
time, and attain new, larger perspectives," the museum facilitates Sokurov
in his exploration of a culture's ability to stave off death.19
In Sokurov's constant transitions between past and present, painting
and live action, and mortality and immortality, the medium of cinema it-
self figures prominently. Over the course of the film's single shot, Sokurov
has showcased a unique temporal continuity, for here the fleeting past is
preserved and ushered through the frame of culture into the present and
beyond. Throughout Russian Ark, in fact, Sokurov demonstrates how the
modern visual media of film and digital video can vividly capture the phys-
ical as well as spiritual passage across historical and cultural thresholds
while establishing a more modern conception of two-dimensional eter-
nity. Filmic images may be fleeting and seemingly void of the stasis so dis-
tinct in other visual art forms, yet Sokurov's work and its multitude of
frames invite the filmgoer to cross the border existing between everyday
life and the immortal realm of Russian history and the Hermitage. More-
over, by shooting his film in one take, such a distinct format, Sokurov was
able to present cinematic time in a startlingly original, tangible fashion
that allows for a broad evocation of temporalities and a seamless uniting
of the past with the present and future. Sokurov's one shot, although it
must end, is implicitly eternal in that no cuts, save for the beginning and
the end, occur; it is as close as cinema can come to capturing, at least vi-
sually and viscerally, the eternal essence of culture.
19. Duncan, CivilizingRitual, 12.