“Consider the darkness and the great cold
In this vale which resounds with mystery.”
— Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
The first thing that comes into inevitable conflict with our habits as audience when we first encounter Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) is the whim of its visual perspective. Along the entire 99-minute length, we witness—literally!—just a single take. This is the reason why some Western critics, accustomed to constant shifts in visual perspective, pronounced Russian Ark as purely an exercise in style. Other painfully familiar prejudices against Russian artists surfaced. Many accused Sokurov of nationalism, bourgeois philistinism, immodest nostalgia about the days of Russian imperialism, and so on. Support for these accusations may indeed be found in the movie. However, they make it difficult to identify the real problem posed not only in the narrative, as well as in the technical approach itself, but also in the general historical situation in which it was produced. The context from which the movie arises is far more complex and nuanced. In other words, it is far from being limited exclusively to the Kremlin’s political ambitions and has more to do with the local problems that Russians face.
Sokurov’s theme is obvious to an open-minded viewer, and it is, in fact, a theme-problem, or, if you wish, a philosophical problem—culture itself. Understood in a narrow sense, as a carrier or an artifact, and even more as a means of transmitting and re-transmitting values and meanings through the mediation of its inherent objectivity, culture becomes problematic mainly when its continuity has been ignored. And this, let us call it neglect, has many different manifestations. The demonization of the humanities in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, through their representation mainly as an ideological tool, is one of them. This was a consequence of the furious invasion of conspicuous consumption within a previously unaffected sphere—a questioning of culture and the cultural as such, as well as of both the author and authority.
Attempts at a deep interpretation of the past’s heritage beyond the simplified accessibility of its thereness are barely important now; the market needs the cultural to be consumed, immediately, just like any other goods or services. Works of art, as this heritage’s embodiment, have largely turned into beautiful objects. One might argue that the problem with art in general, and especially with these “high” or “noble” arts that the movie is concerned with, is that it is for the materially satisfied. Hegel, contrary to the scripture, wrote: “Seek food and clothing first, and the Kingdom of God will come to you of itself.” We should never let ourselves be deceived by those elitists who insist that art can flourish everywhere. Where only misery and necessity persist, it certainly cannot. Only apathy sprouts in such a substratum.
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