November 20, 2012 (XXV:12 Aleksandr Sokurov, RUSSIAN ARK ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

SERGEI YEVTUSHENKO has four composer credits: 2009 The Last Station, 2007 The Border, 2002 Russian Ark, and 1999 Robert. A Fortunate Life (short). SERGEI DONTSOV… The Stranger (The Marquis de Custine) (b. Sergei Simonovich Drejden, September 14, 1941) has 24 acting credits: 2011 Expiation, 2009 “Ivan Groznyy”, 2009 Taras Bulba, 2009 Help Gone Mad, 2008 Antonina obernulas, 2007 Jolka, 2006 Mnogotochie, 2004 Daddy, 2003 Do Not Make Biscuits in a Bad Mood, 2002 Russian Ark, 2002 The Tale of Fedot, the Shooter, 2001 Podari mne lunnyy svet, 1999 Marigolds in Flower, 1998 Tsirk sgorel, i klouny razbezhalis, 1994 Viva Castro!, 1994 Okno v Parizh, 1993 Drug voyny (short), 1993 Vladimir svyatoy, 1991 Abdulladzhan, ili posvyashchaetsya Stivenu Spilbergu, 1990 Tank 'Klim Voroshilov- 2', 1989 Fontan, 1975 Moy dom, teatr, 1975 Vozdukhoplavatel, and 1966 A Ballad of Love. MARIYA KUZNETSOVA…Catherine The Great has 17 acting credits: 2009 Dvoynaya propazha, 2006 Vy ne ostavite menya, 2006 Travesti, 2005 Dreaming of Space, 2005 The Italian, 2005 Golova Klassika, 2005 “Kazus Kukotskogo”, 2004 Imeniny, 2003 Tayna Zaborskogo omuta, 2002 Tycoon: A New Russian, 2002 Russian Ark, 2002 “Lyubov imperatora”, 2001 Taurus, 1994 Koleso lyubvi, 1992 Glaza, 1989 Utoli moya pechali, and 1987 “Gde by ni rabotat....” LEONID MOZGOVOY…The Spy has 13 acting credits: 2011 “Raspoutine”, 2011 Gogol. Blizhayshiy, 2009 “Isayev”, 2009 “Ivan Groznyy”, 2007 Dyuymovochka, 2007 The Border, 2006 Gadkie lebedi, 2005 Garpastum, 2002 Russian Ark, 2001 Taurus, 2001 Text or Apologia of a Commentary, 1999 Moloch, 1992 Kamen, 2004 Bozhestvennaya Glikeriya, and 2003 In One Breath: Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (short). MIKHAIL PIOTROVSKY…Himself (Hermitage Director) has four acting credits, all as himself: 2011 “Pozner”, 2003 “Shkola zlosloviya”, 2003 In One Breath: Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (short), and 2002 Russian Ark. ALEKSANDR CHABAN…Boris Piotrovsky has four acting credits: 2005 “The Master and Margarita” (9 episodes), 2002 Russian Ark, 2002 “Lyubov imperatora”, and 1992 The Waiting Room. ALLA OSIPENKO… Herself (1932, Leningrad, USSR [now St. Petersburg, Russia]) has 8 acting credits: 2002 Russian Ark, 1989 Otche nash, 1988 Filial, 1987 Fuete, 1987 Mournful Unconcern, 1987 Ampir (short), 1985 Zimnyaya vishnya, and 1982 Golos . D. From Wikipedia: Sokurov—RUSSIAN ARK—2 Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Соку́ров; born June 14, 1951) is a Russian filmmaker. His most significant works include a feature film, Russian Ark (2002), filmed in a single unedited shot, and Faust (2011), which was honoured with the Golden Lion, the highest prize for the best film at the Venice Film Festival. Sokurov was born in Podorvikha, Irkutsk Oblast, in Siberia, into a military officer's family. He graduated from the History Department of the Nizhny Novgorod University in 1974 and entered one of the VGIK studios the following year. There he became friends with Tarkovsky and was deeply influenced by his film Mirror. Most of Sokurov's early features were banned by Soviet authorities. During his early period, he produced numerous documentaries, including an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a reportage about Grigori Kozintsev's flat in St Petersburg. His film Mournful Unconcern was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 37th Berlin International Film Festival in 1987. Mother and Son (1997) was his first internationallyacclaimed feature film. It was mirrored by Father and Son (2003), which baffled the critics with its implicit homoeroticism (though Sokurov himself has criticized this particular interpretation). Susan Sontag included two Sokurov features among her ten favorite films of the 1990s, saying: "There’s no director active today whose films I admire as much." In 2006, he received the Master of Cinema Award of the International Filmfestival Mannheim- Heidelberg. Sokurov is a Cannes Film Festival regular, with four of his movies having debuted there. However, until 2011, Sokurov didn't win top awards at major international festivals. For a long time, his most commercially and critically successful film was the semi-documentary Russian Ark (2002), acclaimed primarily for its visually hypnotic images and single unedited shot. Sokurov has filmed a tetralogy exploring the corrupting effects of power. The first three installments were dedicated to prominent 20th-century rulers: Moloch (1999), about Hitler, Taurus (2000), about Lenin, and The Sun (2004) about Emperor Hirohito. In 2011, Sokurov shot the last part of the series, Faust, a retelling of Goethe's tragedy. The film, depicting instincts and schemes of Faust in his lust for power, premiered on 8 September 2011 in competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival. The film won the Golden Lion, the highest award of the Venice Festival. Producer Andrey Sigle said about Faust: "The film has no particular relevance to contemporary events in the world—it is set in the early 19th century—but reflects Sokurov's enduring attempts to understand man and his inner forces." The military world of the former USSR is one of Sokurov’s ongoing interests, because of his personal connections to the subject and because the military marked the lives of a large part of population of the USSR. Three of his works, Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of a War, Confession, From the Commander’s Diary and Soldier’s
Dream revolve around military life. "Confession" has been screened at several independent film festivals, while the other two are virtually unknown. In 1994 Sokurov accompanied Russian troops to a post on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. The result was Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of a War, a 327-minute cinematic meditation on the war and the spirit of the Russian army. Landscape photography is featured in the film, but the music (including works by Mozart, Messiaen and Beethoven) and the sound are also particularly important. Soldiers’ jargon and the combination of animal sounds, sighs and other location sounds in the fog and other visual effects give the film a phantasmagorical feel. The film brings together all the elements that characterize Sokurov’s films: long takes, elaborate filming and image processing methods, a mix of documentary and fiction, the importance of the landscape and the sense of a filmmaker who brings transcendence to everyday gestures. On the journey from Russia to the border post, in the film, fear never leaves the faces of the young soldiers. Sokurov captures their physical toil and their mental desolation, as well as daily rituals such as meals, sharing tobacco, writing letters and cleaning duties. There is no start or end to the dialogues; Sokurov negates conventional narrative structure. The final part of the film celebrates the arrival of the New Year, 1995, but the happiness is fleeting. The following day, everything remains the same: the endless waiting at a border post, the fear and the desolation. In Confession: From the Commander’s Diary, Sokurov films officers from the Russian Navy, showing the monotony and lack of freedom of their everyday lives. The dialogue allows us to follow the reflections of a Ship Commander. Sokurov and his crew went aboard a naval patrol ship headed for Kuvshinka, a naval base in the Murmansk region, in the Barents Sea. Confined within the limited space of a ship anchored in Arctic waters, the team filmed the sailors as they went about their routine activities. Soldier’s Dream is another Sokurov film that deals with military themes. It contains no dialogue. This film actually came out of the material edited for one of the scenes in part three of Spiritual Voices. Soldier’s Dream was screened at the Oberhausen Film Festival in Germany in 1995 – when Spiritual Voices was still at the editing stage – as Sokurov's homage to the art critic and historian Hans Schlegel, in acknowledgement of his contributions in support of Eastern European filmmakers. Pasquale Iannone in Senses of Cinema: Following on from Goethe’s famous observation that “architecture is frozen music”, Raymond Durgnat has argued that cinema is “unfrozen architecture”: “When the camera moves, the roofline flows past us like a river. The camera tilts rapidly up, and banister and staircase cascade down.” However, the camera, Durgnat argues, “explodes architecture” because of its ability to distort scale. The latter emphasis on the camera almost as mutilator could not be further from the Sokurov—RUSSIAN ARK—3 reverence, the child-like wonder with which Alexandr Sokurov approaches the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the setting of his monumental film Russian Ark/Russkiy kovcheg. The film’s sheer scale and ambition elicited gasps of awe upon its release in 2002. Four years in development, it was the first feature to be shot in one continuous, HD Steadicam shot covering more than one and a half kilometres. Utilising more than 850 professional actors, 1000 extras and spanning three centuries of Russian history, the film is set in a museum which holds several million artworks. Russian Ark was, as Sokurov has stated, an attempt to make a film “in one breath”. The film’s narrative drive comes from the relationship between the off-screen Russian narrator (Sokurov himself) and the on-screen Marquis Astolphe de Custine (Sergei Dreiden), a 19 th century French diplomat. Custine, in his inflexible conviction of the supremacy of Western European art over that of Russia, is the oftencynical guide to the 33 opulent salons of the Hermitage (which, before 1917, was of course the Winter Palace). As the camera moves through the museum, the director recreates critical moments in Russian history, introducing historical figures such as Catherine the Great, Peter I (the founder of St Petersburg in 1703) and Tsar Nicholas II. Charlotte Garson has rightly observed that the film, as an extended plan-séquence, has its aesthetic antecedents in such films as those of Miklos Jancsò, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and the cinema of Max Ophuls. Garson tantalisingly speculates on how, with access to Sokurov’s technology, these directors would have undoubtedly relished the opportunity of composing an entire feature in a single extended sweep of the camera. However, for Sukurov, the technique is no gimmick, no “vain formal feat” or “supplementary aesthetic trump card” – it is the very essence of the film. It could be argued that the key relationship of Russian Ark is not that between the narrator and the Marquis but that between the camera and the Hermitage. The film’s mise en scène is the living culture of Russian and European history. Of the directors cited above, I would argue that camera movement in Sokurov’s film comes closest to the feathery, ethereal glide of Ophuls, indeed many references are made in Sokurov’s film to floating, birds and flying. One passage near the beginning of the film, moving left to right outside a succession of windows recalls the opening sequence of “Le Maison Tellier”, the central story in Le Plaisir (1952), Ophuls’ adaptation of three stories by Guy de Maupassant. Decidedly Ophulsian too, is Sokurov’s frequent subjugation of camera movement to actors. In the densely populated ceremonial scenes or the climactic ball, the movement of Tilman Büttner’s steadicam, whether moving along tightly regimented columns of soldiers or weaving amongst dancers, is never intrusive – characters swirl around the camera unencumbered. However, whilst Ophuls’ camera at times takes flight (and, as Kubrick famously exclaimed, “moves through walls”), Sokurov’s gaze can be more closely likened to that of a child – free certainly, insatiably curious, but also cautious, often coming close to being a Deleuzian seer. On the opening of each salon door, the camera hovers in wide-eyed anticipation. Each opening is a revelation and none more so than the door opening into “1917” and leading to the introduction of Anastasia and her sisters, one of the film’s most joyous, exhilarating passages. The Marquis shoos, then playfully runs after the children. Passing an exhausted Custine, the camera too careers breathlessly after them. As a snapshot of the twilight of the Romanov dynasty, it is
Page 1: Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov Writt
Page 5 and 6: Asiatic tyrant, the Marquis sniffs,
Page 7 and 8: connection is void. Russia is neith

November 20, 2012 (XXV:12 Aleksandr Sokurov, RUSSIAN ARK ...

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?