Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- The Contributors
- Introduction: The Art of In-Betweenness in Contemporary Eastern European Cinema
- Part 1 Entangled Sens ations, Cinema in-between the Arts
- 1 Intermedially Emotional: Musical Mood Cues, Disembodied Feelings in Contemporary Hungarian Melodramas
- 2 Black-and-White Sensations of History and Female Identity in Contemporary Polish and Czech Cinema
- 3 Sculpture and Affect in Cinema’s Expanded Field. From Aleksey Gherman’s Hard to Be a God to Aleksey Gherman Jr’s Under Electric Clouds
- 4 Intermedial Densities in the Work of Jan Švankmajer: A Media-Anthropological Case Study
- Part 2 Immersions into Memory , Culture and Intermediality
- 5 Trickster Narratives and Carnivalesque Intermediality in Contemporary Romanian Cinema
- 6 Photographic Passages to th e Past in Eastern European Non-Fiction Films
- 7 Trauma, Memorialisation and Intermediality in Jasmila Žbanić’s For Th ose Who Can Tell No Tales
- 8 An Immersive Theatrical Journey through Media and Time in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark
- Part 3 Refl ections upon Reality, Representation and Power
- 9 The Real and the Intermedial in Alexander Sokurov’s Family Trilogy
- 10 Th is is Not Magritte: Corneliu Porumboiu’s Theory of Representation
- 11 Intermedial Détrompe l’Oeil and Contemporary Polish Narrative Cinema
- 12 Superhero Genre and Graphic Storytelling in Contemporary Hungarian and Russian Cinema
- Index
8 - An Immersive Theatrical Journey through Media and Time in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- The Contributors
- Introduction: The Art of In-Betweenness in Contemporary Eastern European Cinema
- Part 1 Entangled Sens ations, Cinema in-between the Arts
- 1 Intermedially Emotional: Musical Mood Cues, Disembodied Feelings in Contemporary Hungarian Melodramas
- 2 Black-and-White Sensations of History and Female Identity in Contemporary Polish and Czech Cinema
- 3 Sculpture and Affect in Cinema’s Expanded Field. From Aleksey Gherman’s Hard to Be a God to Aleksey Gherman Jr’s Under Electric Clouds
- 4 Intermedial Densities in the Work of Jan Švankmajer: A Media-Anthropological Case Study
- Part 2 Immersions into Memory , Culture and Intermediality
- 5 Trickster Narratives and Carnivalesque Intermediality in Contemporary Romanian Cinema
- 6 Photographic Passages to th e Past in Eastern European Non-Fiction Films
- 7 Trauma, Memorialisation and Intermediality in Jasmila Žbanić’s For Th ose Who Can Tell No Tales
- 8 An Immersive Theatrical Journey through Media and Time in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark
- Part 3 Refl ections upon Reality, Representation and Power
- 9 The Real and the Intermedial in Alexander Sokurov’s Family Trilogy
- 10 Th is is Not Magritte: Corneliu Porumboiu’s Theory of Representation
- 11 Intermedial Détrompe l’Oeil and Contemporary Polish Narrative Cinema
- 12 Superhero Genre and Graphic Storytelling in Contemporary Hungarian and Russian Cinema
- Index
Summary
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Caught In-BetweenIntermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema, pp. 163 - 182Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020