ABSTRACT
Through the critically acclaimed art film Russian Ark (2002), Alexander Sokurov breathes life back into the time-honored halls of Saint Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum by staging and juxtaposing a multitude of significant events, people, and artworks that have marked its rich history. This chapter explores how Sokurov’s enthralling and highly stylized historical performance engages with its historic setting to creatively question and broaden the contemporary understanding of the place. More specifically, it underscores how the cinematographic and storytelling strategies employed by the historian-trained director work together to create original interpretative connections between the Hermitage’s past, present, and foreseen future by harnessing the potential of cinematographic fiction to formulate inventive hypotheses about the premises’ unrecorded but nonetheless plausible histories; by leveraging the Hermitage’s architectural structure and details to ground, thematize, sequence, and integrate its disparate historical narratives and identities; and by articulating an original phenomenological history of the place. While examining the case, the chapter reflects on the implications of the use of fiction and film as alternative modes of historical and architectural knowledge production.
