One of the most fascinating cinematic experiences I had in the past year was discovering filmmaker Alexander Sokurov through a mini-retrospective of his work at the Walker Art Center last term. Though Sokurov has directed almost 30 works in the past 15 years, he has gone relatively unknown in the States––due in part, I suspect, to the unpredictable variation within his filmography. Of the six Sokurovs I've seen, all have been provocative viewing, but two have been documentaries, three have been less than an hour in length, and only two were shot on film.

Because of that last statistic, I hesitate using the word film to describe Sokurov's work. Beyond that, his art often seems more inspired by painting and experimental video than it does by narrative filmmaking (as one can observe in the digitally-manipulated panoramas of 1997's Mother and Son). While this makes for innovative cinema, I imagine that it also presents a conundrum for distributors: How do you promote movies that favor awesome, delicate images over storytelling?

Russian Ark, Sokurov's most publicized work to date Stateside, is by no means easier to categorize than anything else in his canon. The dialogue is still used to convey ideas more often than plot, and the visuals often seem to have been chosen for their texture as much as for any symbolic weight they might carry. Yet the film has attracted a national distributor due to its landmark technical accomplishment: As you may have read, Russian Ark is composed entirely of one take, set within the world's largest museum (The Hermitage, in St. Petersburg), and contains well over 1,000 actors and extras. It is also the first film shot entirely on high-definition video, as well as the first shot entirely onto a hard disk system before being transferred to film.

The content––I hesitate using the word plot––concerns a walk through the Hermitage taken by a contemporary Author (Sokurov, who remains off-screen) and a French Marquis of the early 19th century (who is never named explicitly, though is based on the Marquis de Custine, an author and diplomat to Russia). In their wandering, the pair runs into a number of political and cultural figures of the last three centuries of Russian history, apparently bumming around the museum as though living works of art. Despite the prominence of their encounters, however, it is generally the protagonists' musings which illuminate the subjects and rarely the other way around.

It's a detail worth calling attention to, since Sokurov's feature is no more Russian History 101 than it is simply a stunt in long-take cinema. As I see it, Russian Ark is a journey into individual identity above a journey into history––which is not to say that it is a solipsistic work; rather, Sokurov seems to suggest that present individuality is constantly in dialogue with the past. For evidence of how personal this concept is, Sokurov recently admitted in an interview that "Each time I begin work, I feel the … pressure [of working] the context of Russian art [and] Russia, for me, is a colossal cultural space with an amazing past and a vast future."

His message is evident from the movie's first minute, as the narrator doesn't know how to react upon discovering himself amongst 19th century aristocrats. "Is this a dream? Has this been staged for my benefit?" he asks, both calling attention to his position behind the camera and questioning the influence of the old aristocracy upon his own life.

Further, the moment sets in motion two themes, one conceptual and the other aesthetic, which will resound through the rest of the work: First, the questionable current relevance of the Russian aristocracy; and, second, the notion of cinema as dreaming.

The issue of aristocracy rises most explicitly in the banter between the Author and the Marquis, whose dialogue often focuses on cultural history at the expense of the nation's controversial political moves. Sokurov has come under attack in some quarters for glossing over the history of the Soviet Union (In a noteworthy scene, the heroes leave a room in which three intellectuals discuss wire-tapping in order to run down a hallway with daughters of the last czar).

It seems, however, like a deliberate artistic choice; a communist state, the film argues, is simply inconceivable to a culture that delights in ballroom dancing. And to a contemporary intellectual living after the fall of the Soviet Union, an attempt to connect oneself to all of national history makes the communist state as problematic as the classist aristocracy. Epitomizing Sokurov's ambivalence, the narrator scoffs at the film's climactic (or should I say inevitable?) ballroom dance yet expresses regret at having to leave.

The movie's dream-like quality comes primarily as a cumulative effect of its 90-minute tracking shot. As Roger Ebert noted in his review, editing is a process of disrupting the alternate reality of cinema, and Sokurov's technical achievement allows the reverie to go on indefinitely. And while Sokurov has disparagingly referred in interviews to director of photography Tilman Buttner as more of a "steadicam operator" than a genuine cinematographer, Buttner's seemingly aimless movements (which he mainly devised on his own) perfectly recreates the sense of floating one remembers from dreams.

Dreams can also be defined, of course, as something other than visceral occurrence. I often use a definition my grade school arts-and-crafts teacher once told me: that dreams are simply the sum total of our experiences, put into a trash compactor and spat back out at us.

The ability of Russian Ark's protagonists to move freely between three centuries of art and history suggests the temporal unity one only finds in dreaming––and then goes one step further to imply that this particular understanding of time is necessary for self-reflection and national assessment (in this regard, the work is an organic extension of Sokurov's 1996 video Oriental Elegy, which applied similar dream-like effects to questions of mortality).

This idiosyncratic approach to self-evaluation has much in common with Richard Linklater's Waking Life, which did for existentialism and Austin, Texas what Russian Ark does for aristocratic culture and St. Petersburg. And like Waking Life, Sokurov's film has already been criticized––somewhat paradoxically, I should add––as both a purely visceral show-off and as a non-stop barrage of elitist babbling. Regardless, I cannot think of any other films that so beautifully convey the experience of learning: In the case of Waking Life, the steady rush of ideas became an aesthetic in itself, the words interacting with the color palette of the animation; in Russian Ark, the historical details becomes a pageant and, as embodied by the Marquis, a conversation partner. Sokurov has even stressed in interviews that audiences don't need to have a background in Russian history to understand his film, just an appreciation of cinema and an "open heart."

I want to emphasize these movies' sense of learning process, as both Linklater and Sokurov––for all their alleged arrogance––do not attempt to offer any definitive answers in their work; they seem more interested in seeking, exploring the issues along with their audiences. Their love of exploration carries over to innovative aesthetic of both films, which seem to approach cinema as an ever-changing medium. Comparable to Linklater's recent achievements with digital video, Russian Ark uses his high-definition camera to create textures, particularly in the close-ups of paintings, that I've never seen in movies before. It's surprises like these that seem vital to the evolution of Sokurov's art.