Russian Ark · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The film begins blind. A voice in the dark — just dead, unsure how it died — says it has no body now, only eyes. Then the eyes open onto a side door of the Winter Palace where laughing officers and fur-wrapped women are climbing down from carriages into the snow, and we are inside, and we do not get out again for ninety-six minutes. No cut. One camera, one breath, three centuries. Before any theory arrives it is worth saying that plainly, because everything Deleuze can tell us about this film grows out of that single refusal to stop.

Start with the oldest idea underneath it. Bergson thought the past does not pass — it piles up, coexists with the present, waits whole to be re-entered. Deleuze gave the cinematic version of this a name: sheets of past, the past not as a dated flashback we cut to but as an order we move through, the way you move through the floors of a building looking for a memory. Most films can only gesture at this; they cut, and the cut chops time into before and after. Sokurov found a structure that is the idea. To walk from one Hermitage room to the next is to walk from Catherine the Great's century into a present-day gallery of museum visitors and then into Nicholas II's family at dinner, with no seam, because there is no seam anywhere in the film. The palace is the Bergsonian cone made walkable. The European, modelled on the Marquis de Custine, keeps trying to ask when he is; the question has no answer, because all the whens are here at once, stored and simultaneous. That is why the long take is not a stunt grafted onto a costume drama. It is the only form in which sheets of past can be shown rather than narrated.

The camera itself is the second concept. It does not belong to any character. It drifts, hesitates, turns back, eavesdrops, and is occasionally spoken to directly by the people it passes. Deleuze would call this a dicisign — an image in which we feel the camera perceiving, a perception that has come loose from any human eye and become a presence in its own right. And because that presence flows, gliding through doorways and crowds without ever planting itself, it tips into what he called the reume: unanchored, currentlike perception, vision as drift. Tilman Büttner's Steadicam (he had already done the running long takes of Run Lola Run) gives the whole film the gait of a ghost who can only look. The narrator never acts, never intervenes, can only watch and ask. He is a pure seer — the figure Deleuze put at the centre of modern cinema, the one to whom things happen as spectacle because action is no longer available to him. He is, after all, dead.

So what is being seen? An ordered, aristocratic world rotting from inside — Deleuze's crystal in decomposition. The film builds toward the great ball: hundreds of dancers, three live orchestras, Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky inside the shot, a mazurka swelling through the gilded halls. It is overwhelming and it is already a ghost, because we know what 1913 does not — that this is among the last of these balls, that the revolution is a few rooms away in time. The crystal-image is Deleuze's name for the point where the present and its own image, the living moment and its memory, become impossible to tell apart, like a thing and its reflection in a mirror. Here the whole palace is that crystal, and we are watching it glitter as it dies. When the doors finally open at the end onto nothing but grey Baltic fog and water, the crystal seals: a world with no outside, floating off, an ark carrying a vanished culture across time with nowhere to land.

What did the film do to filmmaking? It collapsed the distance between a film's duration and ours. With montage gone, there is no compression of time, no last-minute cross-cut, no rescue by the cut — the everyday weight of passing minutes becomes the medium itself, time presented for its own sake, a chronosign. And it could only exist because of a hardware shift: 35mm holds a few minutes per magazine, so an unbroken feature is physically impossible on film. Russian Ark fed an HD signal to a hard drive carried with the operator, engineered so the recording would never stop. It is the first feature to take digital's removal of the reel-length ceiling to its logical end.

It has a long lineage and it settles a long argument. Hitchcock's Rope faked the feature-as-single-take by hiding reel changes in pans into actors' backs; Welles choreographed a bomb across a border town in one crane move in Touch of Evil; Mizoguchi's gliding crane in Ugetsu and the impossible descents of I Am Cuba proved the camera could travel continuous impossible paths; Tarkovsky's Mirror made duration itself the subject. Every one of them either cheated the cut or accepted it eventually. Sokurov does literally what Hitchcock could only pretend to do, and in doing so he turns the long take from a virtuoso flourish into a philosophy of time. Watch it again knowing the camera never blinks. You are not watching a film about memory. You are walking through one.