They demand a very quiet attention towards them. Cinema, although it has a history of more than a century (and St Petersburg itself is only 300 years old), seems to have no sense of history, of its own history. You lose yourself, cut free from linear time into something more oceanic. Rembrandt makes us aware of what Sokurov says is the essence of painting. It is reverently displayed and enraptures the museum's Russian visitors. His dislike of modernism flavours the film and its route. Every review of "Russian Ark" begins by discussing its method. Some extraordinary ones, too. In Alexander Sokurov's vision, Russia is a great interpreter and preserver of European high art, the last place where it is still respected and loved and protected. Everyone's first, mounting reaction to Sokurov's film is suspense; a huge cast, complex crowd scenes and intricate dialogue - what if someone coughed or fell over? And of the clock in the small dining room of the Winter Palace, frozen at 2.10, the time the provisional government was arrested in this room on the night of November 7 1917, when the Bolsheviks stormed the building in the decisive act of the Russian Revolution. A century is not nearly long enough. As if to get close to this life distilled in paint, Sokurov films paintings from the side, in normal lighting, so that reflections - as they do - obscure one part of the picture and make the texture of its surface visible. Paintings by Watteau and Chardin have been here since her time. "Some start as cleaners and then by steps become curators.

It seems to me that those artists who are considered modern classics are to be tested by time yet." Bad experiences with feature films. Then he says it means commercialism - the pressures the Hermitage is under to survive in a market economy. Sokurov's film has a deliberately awkward sense of awe before paintings. The Hermitage has perhaps the best collection of Rembrandts in the world - The Return of the Prodigal Son and The Descent from the Cross are among many bought by Catherine; she bought Tintoretto's Birth of St John the Baptist and Giorgione's Judith; as a patron of the Enlightenment, she bought contemporary art from the leading enlightened nations, France and Britain. The light is low in Sokurov's study; the acclaimed director of Mother and Son (1996), Moloch (1999) and now his stunning celebration of the Hermitage museum, Russian Ark, recently had an eye operation. Russian Ark is a fluid dream-epic with no special effects. It took that hour and a half to film (after two years of preparation) and takes the same time to watch. Russian Ark isn’t the worst way to spend an hour or two. And then there is the collection. "Death to the two-headed eagle!/Sever its long-necked head/With a single stroke!" In front of El Greco's St Peter and St Paul, the French traveller abuses a young Russian for not knowing the scriptures. After the Rembrandts, the Hermitage's most celebrated paintings are Matisse's Music and the Dance, expropriated from the great Shchukin collection after the revolution. But if you’re looking for plot or dialog or a consistent time period, nope, not gonna get that. We are much closer to our past than Englishmen are to Victorian times. As well as sniffing the paintings, people go so close as almost to touch them, and a blind visitor - in real life a gymnast called Tamara who lost her sight when she was 12 - explains Van Dyck's Rest on the Flight into Egypt. In Sokurov's Russian Ark, nothing is cut, nothing is moved, nothing is reinvented or added at the whim of the all-powerful director. He's saying this at a time when the Hollywood remake of Tarkovsky's Solaris is showing in St Petersburg. I ask Mikhail Piotrovsky about the conversation he has in the film with his father, who warns him about coming catastrophe. Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the museum, appears in it as himself, having a conversation with his dead father, who was also the director of the museum, and with another deceased director, Iosef Orbeli, responsible for saving the museum's treasures during the three-year siege of Leningrad. Great paintings and statues are, so to say, scared of brightness and glare. Russian Ark was recorded in uncompressed high definition video using a Sony HDW-F900 camera.

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