jury day 3 and 4 of 4 / 'Russian Ark'

after two continuous days of slogging my way through tedious and mundane design projects- first municipal markets in Bombay and villages in kerala and then rural hospitals in panvel and malls in mahim; i needed a shot of some esoteric art. i was feeling particularly ambitious when i picked sokurovs ‘russian ark’. the last film i had seen of his was ‘mother and son’ whose distorted images had almost put me to sleep.

‘russian ark’ is a high wire act as a film. a single shot over 90 minutes long that traces the whole of russian cultural history through the ‘hermitage’- a museum in st petersburg. we enter as the narrator accompanied by a strange french marquis into exquisite room after exquisite room in the museum, each door leading to a shift in time. historical figures float in and out of the frame providing some reference; and the discussion centers around the russian contribution to european art and europe’s dismissal of it.

somewhere between nationalistic propaganda and a promotional video tour of the museum the film neatly sidesteps, or only off-hand mentions 80 years of communist history. the attempt seems to be stake claim to cultural equivalence to europes finest by exhuming the golden age of a classical past- so much like our own urge to recreate an idealized past to deny the humiliations of colonialism.

it is unfortunate that because of this all the great art and cultural production of the avant-garde like the russian constructivists are left out of the picture. the time slot chosen is such that the controversial recent past is denied, making the films formal gymnastics merely diverting- a surface for us to feast on so that we believe that technical virtuosity is cutting edge art cinema. if it is ‘the hermitage’ that is the eponymous ark saving russian culture from the storms of the soviet era, it seems to be an extraordinarily reactionary position to adopt for a film maker who sees himself as a revolutionary auteur.