Elegy, Eulogy, and the Utopia of Restoration—Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark

Abstract

A bedridden child watches the ceiling of a barren hospital room, in some remote corner of a huge empire—the Soviet empire. He has no other contact with the outside world, or any other means of distraction, than the radio station in the room, playing classical tunes he will develop a great love for. The child is afflicted with bone tuberculosis, and soon a chunk of his leg will be removed. In the meantime he lets his mind wander, away from his sick and painful body, carried by the music, to depths and heights unsuspected. In spite of the limp incurred from the surgery, the sad and thoughtful child will live and grow, and soon become one of the world’s most celebrated and adventurous cinematic auteurs. His oeuvre is deeply informed by the life-branding clinical ordeal as well as the gloomy loneliness of a long convalescence, brightened, like a spark in the dark, by the mellifluous tunes of the great masters of what, to him, is the only “real” music.¹ And, some 40 odd years later, in the winter of 2001, in spite of his limp, after years of walks through museums all over the Soviet Union, but also western and eastern corners of the world, driven by his endless love of high art (not only classical music, but also the great painters, especially Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco, Van Dyck), he will walk across the many halls of a great museum and produce the first ever single-take feature film in cinema history. The utopian dream of a child who might easily have died or never walked again led to one of the great utopias in the history of the cinematic medium.

Bce знают будущее, прошлое все забыли..

(“Everyone knows the future. It is the past everyone has forgotten.”)

—Alexander Sokurov