GETTING IMMERSED IN THEATRE

Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark (Russkiy kovcheg, 2002) is considered a technical tour de force, since the film was shot in one uninterrupted segment of ninety minutes. This implied positioning and choreographing over 4,700 cast members (867 actors, hundreds of extras and three live orchestras), all dressed in garments from several periods of history and moving between thirty-three different all-lit rooms of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. From an aesthetic perspective, however, the accomplishment lies in the mise en scene and the impression of flowing through both time and space. One of the characters in the film remarks ‘it feels like we are floating’, and the last sentence spoken, in voice over, is ‘we are destined to sail forever, to live forever’. Works of art (and the human beings portrayed in them) are fixed in eternity, living through preservation or memory, but, somehow, implicitly they also contain movement. As a character points out in relation to El Greco's painting of Saints Peter and Paul: ‘they are covered with the dust from their long road to appear in this painting’.

The film is structured as a walk through part of the Hermitage complex (museum and Winter Palace) and shows many of its celebrated rooms. There are two main characters in the film: a French Marquis simply named The Stranger in the end credits, but modelled upon the historical Marquis Astolphe de Custine, and an anonymous present-day man whom we never see but hear in a continuous dialogue with the Marquis. The two protagonists walk through the State Hermitage, especially the areas most related to Imperial Russia, and encounter diverse people along the way. Such characters may be historically remote personalities (the Tsar Peter the Great, Catherine the Great seen in two different periods of her life, Nicholas I and his wife, Nicholas II and his family, the poet Alexander Puskhin), as well as anonymous and long-deceased ordinary citizens, such as a custodian during the 900-day siege of Leningrad during World War II, several guards and officers, courtiers and aristocrats, servants, a troupe of masquerading performers, musicians and simple visitors in bygone centuries. The film also contains present-day characters, either alive on the actual day of the shooting (23 December 2002) or having lived not too long before that.