← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Faust
Thread ID: 15202 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2004-10-04
2004-10-04 02:41 | User Profile
The State Hermitage Museum
A great website!
The State Hermitage Museum [url]http://www.hermitage.ru/[/url]
2004-10-04 03:29 | User Profile
I'll be stuck at the Hermitage Museum for the next 20 years, 3 millions artifacts?,,,,,,ay mama.
2004-10-19 15:22 | User Profile
If you can find it at your local video store, you guys may want to check out the innovative movie [I]Russian Ark.[/I] I saw it last year over the Christmas vacation, and wrote a review of it at that time for another forum:
[B]Russian Ark[/B] (2002)
To begin with, be warned: If you don't know something about 20th- century Russian history, the Russian mindset, and the way in which God's Chosen used the curse of communism to smash and degrade Russian culture, you will very likely be bored out of your mind by this film. Imagine if you were a foreigner who had never heard of the United States of America, suddenly being exposed to a film showing -- with no historical explanation -- Paul Revere's ride, Abe Lincoln going to Ford's Theater, General George Custer riding off to battle, Calvin Coolidge's resignation and a dozen other unrelated vignettes from amerika's past. That's how lost you'll be if you go into [I]Russian Ark[/I] unprepared.
Alexander Sokurov is a Russian nationalist who wanted to make a film that wallows unashamedly in the glorious history of his people (who are as White as they come), and in the process expose the raw nerve that is the Russian bitterness over the pistol-whipping that their culture was given from 1917 to 1989.
The plot, such as it is, runs like this: A nameless present-day Russian (presumably Sokurov himself, since he does the voice-over) finds himself coming to consciousness just outside The Hermitage. For those who don't already know, the Hermitage (once the Winter Palace of the czars) is one of the world's premiere art museums, second only to the Vatican in the number of precious White art masterpieces in its collection. The Narrator isn't quite sure how he got here; he makes vague allusions to "the accident," so he may be a ghost, or perhaps some kind of psychic time-traveller.
The time at which the film opens seems to be in the mid-19th century, and the Narrator quickly discovers that none of the happy aristocrats disembarking from a carriage in the snow for a party inside the palace can either see or hear him.
He follows the partygoers inside and very soon meets a crabby and elitist French Marquis (the Marquis de Custine, an actual historical figure) who [I]is[/I] able to see him. The Marquis has no idea how [I]he[/I] got here either, though unlike the Narrator, he is able to make himself visible to the inhabitants of the palace, and occasionally interacts with them as the two time-travellers meander through the halls on a rather liesurely tour.
Time, they quickly discover, has become extremely fluid, and as they move from room to room, they enter into different periods of Imperial Russian history, where they eavesdrop on the antics of historical personages (some famous, some fairly obscure). The various historical periods don't unfold in chronological order, so at one moment they may be watching modern Russian tourists ogling the art treasures, and the next moment peeking at Peter the Great as he hectors some palace functionary. They even wander into one bleak corridor where the precious paintings are being preserved by the museum staff during the German siege of WWII (though, interestingly enough, the film expresses no rancor toward the Germans at all).
From a purely technical standpoint, this film is a real tour de force. It was shot digitally (using a digital HD motion camera feeding a monster portable disk drive) on location in the Hermitage. The museum directors have very strict rules to protect these art treasures, so the film crew was permitted only 24 hours in which they could have the building for shooting. That meant that the entire film had to consist of one single scene in one single realtime take. That is, at the beginning of the shoot, the digital camera began rolling, following the actors (and over 2000 extras) through the palace, and the camera wasn't turned off until 96 minutes later when the director yelled the Russian equivalent of "cut!" If there had been any technical glitches during that time, if any of the extras had blown his lines or stumbled, if any of the lighting rigs had failed, the whole thing would have had to start over again, right from the beginning. It's a triumph of White technology, cooperation, artistic vision and skill from beginning to end.
Of course, technical accomplishments don't make a good movie by themselves (remember [I]Return of the Jedi[/I]?), so the film has to have content to justify itself. It does, but not in the way most American audiences are accustomed to finding content. There's almost no "action" per se, except for the Marquis and the invisible Narrator making their way from room to art-filled room. The dialogue is mimimal, subtle, oblique and indirect (occasionally verging on the obscure, in Your Editor's opinion). The Marquis, we quickly see, is representative of Europe itself, with its ambivalent admiration/contempt attitude toward Russia.
The lack of scene cuts feels vaguely uncomfortable at first. We're all so accustomed to them that it seems somehow that something is wrong. But once you get used to it, the film unfolds with the steady, nonlinear progress of a dream -- which is the whole idea. The glory of Imperial Russia [I]is[/I] a dream, a dream that was contemptuously smashed by a gang of hate-choked kosher madmen. Sokurov wants his audience to slowly enter that dream, in order to experience the full pain as the time sequence veers closer and closer to the Armageddon of 1917.
And we do! We and the time-travellers watch the Tsarinas giggling up the hallway in gauzy Grecian gowns, then settling down to the last dinner of Nicholas and Alexandra and their daughters. What gives this one its poignancy is that the commie hordes slaughtered the lot of them the following day. Episodes like this are why I say you have to know a little about Russian history to understand what Sokurov is driving at. Unless you know that the civilized and charming royal couple and their beautiful young daughters were butchered by a pack of greasy kosher malcontents the next afternoon, the scene has little emotional impact.
The final scene is by far the longest and most elaborate of all. It is, in fact, a complete recreation of the last Imperial ball in the Winter Palace before God's Chosen radical hordes destroyed Imperial Russia forever. The time-travellers (and the tireless digital camera) weave seamlessly in and out of the crowd, among the dancers, roving over the orchestra, wandering around the room just as you or I would if we had access to a time machine. In fact, this point-of-view camerawork is as close to actually being there at an Imperial ball as any of us are ever going to get. The experience is absolutely remarkable. Even the sarcastic Marquis himself chooses to remain behind in the ballroom while the Narrator continues his time-quest throughout the Palace.
Last and most chilling of all, the ball comes to an end, and we march with the glittering partygoers exiting from the Palace in a stately procession through which the camera caressingly sweeps as though savoring every last second. For we, the audience, know what these magnificent and cultured people do not: Their world is within hours of being smashed, shattered and crapped upon by a loathsome clot of dirty-handed scum who would lead Russia into bankruptcy, totalitarianism and degradation for the next 80 years. It's like watching your own family being led to their execution, and Sokurov drags the beautiful death march on to the last possible minute, making sure we get the message.
And when they have all left the palace, the invisible Narrator makes his own way to one of the exit doors and looks out into a nightmare icescape that is symbolic of the cold horrors imposed upon the Russian people -- and from which they have only barely begun to recover. The Hermitage, he suddenly realizes, is like a Russian Noah's Ark, sailing through time with its precious cargo of Russian culture, preserving it through revolution and war and totalitarian dictatorship against the day when Russia, the [I]real[/I] Russia, will emerge and live again. Thus the Russian Ark is the repository of the soul and culture of the Russian people, its caretaker until Russia can regain her true heritage once more.
[I]Russian Ark[/I] isn't for everyone. There's nearly no "action" (this isn't [I]Terminator 3[/I], lads), the dialogue is spare, and you have to read it in English subtitles (though it would have been a very easy film to dub in English). And to even begin to understand the impact of this film on Russian audiences, you've got to spend a little time with an elementary introduction to Russian history from Peter the Great to 1917. If you're going to watch it, be prepared for 90 minutes of a slow, meditative journey through the mindset of the Russian people themselves, without an explosion, gunshot, CGI effect or "hip-hop" soundtrack anywhere in sight.
[I]Russian Ark[/I] is 100% White, without a single darkie anywhere, either in the huge cast or the production crew. This film is a White accomplishment from beginning to end, and even the most fervent White nationalist will find nothing here to offend.
The world of [I]Russian Ark[/I] is the world from which Your Editor's great-grandfather was exiled by the slimy kosher spawn of karl marx, so there's no denying that this picture has some personal signifiance. But any White man or woman can watch this story with pride in the accomplishments of our race, of which [I]Russian Ark[/I] itself is one. It takes some effort, but once you've seen [I]Russian Ark[/I], you'll have no trouble understanding why David Duke's book [I]jewish Supremacism[/I] has been a runaway publishing phenomonon in Mother Russia.
--Arkady
More information here: [url]http://www.artificial-eye.com/russianark/main.html[/url] [url]http://www.russianark.spb.ru/eng/index.html[/url] [url]http://www.wellspring.com/movies/text.html?movie_id=3&page=synopsis&PHPSESSID=3b21ce47f73aa9a237e44103eda3d433[/url]
Trailer available here: [url]http://www.russianark.de/trailer.htm[/url] [url]http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/russian_ark.html[/url]
2004-10-20 20:49 | User Profile
arkady,
Thanks for post. I will try to see that film.
:cheers:
[QUOTE]Russian Ark is 100% White, without a single darkie anywhere, either in the huge cast or the production crew. This film is a White accomplishment from beginning to end, and even the most fervent White nationalist will find nothing here to offend.
The world of Russian Ark is the world from which Your Editor's great-grandfather was exiled by the slimy kosher spawn of karl marx, so there's no denying that this picture has some personal signifiance. But any White man or woman can watch this story with pride in the accomplishments of our race, of which Russian Ark itself is one. It takes some effort, but once you've seen Russian Ark, you'll have no trouble understanding why David Duke's book jewish Supremacism has been a runaway publishing phenomonon in Mother Russia. [/QUOTE]