Isochrony and the Story/Discourse Distinction in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark

In an uninterrupted ninety-minute shot Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) guides the viewer through nearly three hundred years of Russian history and several kilometers of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Assuming entirely the gaze of an unseen visitor, the camera passes through many of the galleries and halls of the massive building, pausing occasionally to inspect the exquisite details hidden among the collections or follow tsars and poets as they move through rooms and historical scenes that still resonate in the national consciousness. But here any linear chronological order between the various historical epochs is completely abolished. The film seems to move randomly through different time periods, and the distant past frequently mingles with the twenty first-century present. Astoundingly, all of this is accomplished without a single cut or deviation from the perspective of the invisible character watching the action unfold before him. Despite the obvious technical difficulties in achieving such a shot, none of the more than eight hundred actors featured in the film ever seem to miss their marks and the graceful, fluid motion of the camera never feels hurried or constrained. Opinions may vary on the artistic consistency or political stance of Russian Ark, but it is undoubtedly one of the boldest cinematic feats of the new century.

The use of a single take or, more accurately, the illusion of a single take, is hardly new, though nothing on the scale of Russian Ark has ever made it to the screen. Before the advent of digital video, which along with the stedicam provided the technological means for realizing Sokurov’s film, the unbroken narrative sequence had been explored earlier by Hitchcock in Rope, (1948) as well as in the experimental films of Michael Snow and Andy Warhol. More recently, Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000) used four synchronized digital cameras to capture ninety-three continuous minutes from the intersecting lives of twenty-eight characters without a single break in the action or pause between scenes. While Sokurov’s use of the technology mirrors that of Figgis’ in the pursuit of an unbroken feature-length shot, there is a profound disparity in narrative subjectivity, one which in Russian Ark seems to dissolve the fundamental distinction between story and discourse, ultimately encroaching upon areas previously considered hypothetical in structuralist narratology.

Unlike Timecode, which divides the screen into four separate perspectives on simultaneous events, Russian Ark is situated entirely within the viewpoint of a single lens, creating the illusion that all information on the screen is mediated by the consciousness of a single character. At first glance this situation may appear to be a textbook example of what Seymour Chatman describes as the perceptual filter, where the narrator manipulates the consciousness of a character to make it seem as if events are being related from within the world of the story (144). Chatman’s theory and terminology will be examined in more detail below but for a general description the term is particularly useful. It is through Sokurov’s character (and the filmmaker himself provides the voice-off when this visitor speaks) that everything we see on the screen passes, as the film makes clear in its first moments. Since the entirety of the film is done in a single shot, the traditional method of establishment through a point/glance shot is impossible and Sokurov is forced to explicitly state that the vision of the camera corresponds to that of the character.¹ Following the sparse opening credits the screen sits in total darkness and the voice begins the film by saying “I open my eyes and see nothing.”—immediately establishing a link between the perspective of the speaker and that of the camera. As the first images appear he comments on the figures he sees before him, officers and ladies dressed in early nineteenth-century fashions, and marks his own movements as he follows them into the enormous Winter Palace. Though the motion suggests he is part of the diegetic world of the story, the figures he observes are unaware of his presence. In the last seconds of...