Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.
I very much feel like I should have a lot to say about Russkiy Kovcheg (Russian Ark), and I very much feel like I don’t have a lot to say about it. That’s the problem with demanding longer reviews from myself—when I get into a position like writing up a film like this, I struggle for something to say. At its most pure essence, Russkiy Kovcheg is a 99-minute experiment and little more. We walk through an art gallery and encounter various periods of Russian history preserved, as it were, like the art itself.
Russkiy Kovcheg is notable not for its plot (it has none) but for its astonishing technical achievement. The entire film consists of a single take, one long, uninterrupted shot. This wouldn’t be notable if it were nothing more than a static camera, but the camera here is almost never still. As the narrator and audience point of view (voiced by director Alexander Sokurov) wanders through this living museum, he speaks with another ghost out of time known as either the Stranger or the European (Sergei Dreiden). At times, the Stranger interacts with the people they see; at other times, the two wanderers appear to be unobserved observers.
