Mythopoetic Cinema

On the Ruins of European Identity

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231544108
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In Mythopoetic Cinema, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli explores how contemporary European filmmakers treat mythopoetics as a critical practice that questions the constant need to provide new identities, a new Europe, and with it a new European cinema after the fall of the Soviet Union. Mythopoetic cinema questions the perpetual branding of movements, ideas, and individuals. Examining the work of Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Sokurov, Marina Abramovi?, and Theodoros Angelopoulos, Ravetto-Biagioli argues that these disparate artists provide a critical reflection on what constitutes Europe in the age of neoliberalism. Their films reflect not only the violence of recent years but also help question dominant models of nation building that result in the general failure to respond ethically to rising ethnocentrism.

In close readings of such films as Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002) and Godard's Notre Musique (2004), Ravetto-Biagioli demonstrates the ways in which these filmmakers engage and evaluate the recent reconceptualization of Europe's borders, mythic figures, and identity paradoxes. Her work not only analyzes how these filmmakers thematically treat the idea of Europe but also how their work questions the ability of the moving image to challenge conventional ways of understanding history.

1

FLOATING ON THE BORDERS OF EUROPE

Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark

On the table, in the glow of the wax candle, stood the tiny bronze Europa riding a galloping bull. Baločanski took the tiny figurine in his hand, and began to examine it under the light holding it close to his eyes, so that he seemed to be sniffing at the little Europa like a dog.

—Miroslav Krleža, The Return of Philip Latinowicz

Miroslav Krleža’s vignette encapsulates the complex relationship of Europe to what Étienne Balibar has called its double borders—lands that are both within and outside of Europe.1 Like many films from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (Russkij kovcheg, 2002) examines identity and national politics that emerge from such desirous orientations toward Europe. Yet rather than represent this sniffing as a form of pure adulation of the figure of Europe by liminal or non-Europeans, Sokurov’s mythopoetic cinema reveals the instability of geographical, historical, and cultural points of reference. Europe’s view of the East does place Russia or Eastern Europe in the proverbial backwaters between Europe and Asia (or the Orient). By looking toward Europe he examines the placement (or self-placement) of the “East” in Europe’s master narratives (of progress, civilization, and development) wherein “Easterners” must struggle for national and ethnic identities that conform to notions of European statehood and culture. Central to Russian Ark is the spread of Enlightenment thought, the rise of the nation-state, and the explosion of discourses about nationalism and nostalgia that have accompanied it—first its emergence from under the tutelage of the Russian Empire and then its ferocious return after the fall of Soviet-styled socialism.

Despite the many studies devoted to tracing its genealogy, the term “nostalgia” proves to be just as unstable as the myth or idea of “Europe.” Nostalgia’s meaning changes slightly depending on how the Greek algos and Latin algia affixes are interpreted. While the ancient and modern usage of the noun nostos (“homecoming” or “return home”) seems to have remained the same, algos and algia have been read as both “pain” and “longing.” Although the variance between being “homesick” and “longing to return home” may seem subtle, it presents radically different orientations toward historical time for one who suffers from nostalgia. “Longing to return home” opens up the possibility of a future return to a home that still exists as it was in the past, thus maintaining a utopian aspiration to restore or immerse oneself in that past. At the same time, “homesickness” offers no such consolation, or any hope of convalescence; it functions only as the constant presence of a sense of time’s irreversibility—the incessant experience of separation as lost time.

The reviews of Russian Ark have been mixed, but they all seem to agree that the film exudes nostalgia and an anxiety about the irreversibility of time. Some have criticized the remarkably ambitious shooting of a ninety-six-minute digital film in a single take as a gimmick or a “ludicrous artistic venture”2 that “fashions itself after history in that there can be no montage, no cut and paste, no changes, additions, subtractions, [or] do-overs.”3 Others see this unblinking gaze that captures glimpses of three hundred years of history as “an exercise in czarist nostalgia.”4 In contrast to those who see Sokurov’s film as an expression of Russian nationalist sentiment, others read it as “an attempt to move away from the revolutionary lineage of Russian cinema and an attempt to reinforce its links with non-Russian artistic traditions.”5 Dragan Kujundžić disagrees with these critics. He does not take Sokurov as blindly promoting Russian nationalism, yearning for a non-Russian European identity, or simply relying on some cinematic magic that can capture the presence of the past. Instead, he argues that not all nostalgia is the same and that the nostalgia of Russian Ark is self-conscious, critical, and full of holes. Unlike Noah’s ark or the Ark of the Covenant, Sokurov’s is a leaking ship.

Debates over the film’s pervasive spectrality recall Svetlana Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgias. For Boym, restorative nostalgia stresses the notion of nostos (homecoming) and “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home.” This image of homecoming is held as an absolute truth. Reflective nostalgia instead “thrives on algia (the longing itself) and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately,” thus “revealing that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection.”6 Similarly, Russian Ark’s symptoms of nostalgia heighten a sense of mortality and an anachronistic yearning to dwell in the past but do not always categorically distinguish pain from longing, or the desire to return from the consciousness that the past is forever barred to us. The film mixes up longing with thinking and drives with doubt. As Kujundžić puts it: “Russian Ark is a ship that leaks and fills itself with the memory of its own loss, which is not least of all the loss of Russia’s supreme, hermetic, ‘iron curtain,’ national or Messianic sovereignty.”7

Yet by combining longing with critical thought, affect, and judgment, such nostalgic reflections disrupt how we order time and make history. Reflective nostalgia suggests an amalgamation of Nietzsche’s three categories of history: monumental, antiquarian, and critical. Monumental history is a history of great men, great times, and great events. It offers models for us to emulate and improve on, but it often results in entire histories being forgotten, scorned, and washed away. In Russian Ark, this monumental past is selected from exclusive and limited canonical spaces and times within Russian history: the Hermitage Museum and the Winter Palace (the main residence of the tsars), and the epoch of Petrine reforms—from the time of Peter the Great (Peter I, 1672–1725) to that of Tsar Nicholas II (1868–1918). By focusing on the tsars and aristocrats who haunt the palace and museum (together with the masterworks of Western European art) the film echoes post-Soviet Russia’s obsession with the pre-Soviet past. In so doing, however, it ironically overlooks the history and images of the thousands of serfs, slaves, and laborers who perished in the building of St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace, and the Hermitage, thereby seeming to repeat the gesture of contemporary historians who, in their attempt to relegitimize a prerevolutionary past, end up downplaying the role of the serfs and the proletariat in building imperial Russia. One iconic exception to this erasure of the Soviet past is the film’s depiction of the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944). In this scene, we see a nameless man building his own coffin out of leftover picture frames from the museum. It is important that this historically referential character is nameless, thus making it impossible to identify him with Russian imperial power. Was he someone involved in protecting the “Russian ark” we see before us by removing the tsars’ treasures during the German siege of Leningrad? This single unnamed character is a stand-in for the one million Leningrad residents who were sacrificed or sacrificed themselves to defend the city (and the museum) from the relentless 900-day Nazi bombardment. But while he stands for the city’s sacrifice, he is not part of the city’s archive. Even in this “monumental” recalling of the heroic resistance of the people of Leningrad, what is venerated is not the heroic individual or even individuals but the city and the treasures of the past that those unnamed individuals managed to save and protect. It is, therefore, the ruins of Russia’s monumental past that haunt and overshadow not just the contemporary visitors who visit the Hermitage Museum but the ghosts of the entire Soviet period.8

While Russian Ark does not give the ghosts of the Russian people (narod)9 a collective cinematic image, it does give them a voice: the invisible speaker, who seems to double for the subjective position of the camera and for the position of the spectator wandering through the Hermitage Museum. This disembodied speaker simultaneously points to its own presence and absence, embodying the subjective point of view of the camera (which captures and directs the cinematic gaze) while doubling as the eye of the spectator. However, this gaze never establishes a unified vision through a shot-reverse-shot that would reveal the identity or location of the subject of the gaze. Instead, the disembodied voice remains “out-of-field,” which Deleuze describes as something that is unseen and not understood, but perfectly present: “[T]he out-of-field designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; … [but] the out-of-field [also] testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to ‘insist’ or ‘subsist,’ a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time.”10 The positions of the subject and the spectator are always “out-of-field” from the spectacle of history—they are both around and yet radically absent from the mise-en-scène of the monumental narrative. The subject or spectator haunts the historical spectacle, pointing to the erasure of the subject from and by most historical accounts. Like those historians who create the effect of objectivity by withdrawing themselves from the historical narratives they tell, the subject of the gaze never reveals itself as an image.

In Russian Ark, however, it is the subject of the gaze who also haunts the filmic narrative by providing it with an undefined voice and a perspective. This differs in an important way from what we generally find in historical writing, since historians typically do not acknowledge that their narrative structures originate from a specifically situated individual and are addressed to actual spectators or readers, the act of historical narration appears to be almost detached from both the author and her addressees. Russian Ark does not hide subjects or spectators but actively and critically reflects on their absence—on the absence or effacing of the image of a Russian or Soviet subject or spectator. It reminds us that the whole Soviet experiment has been reduced to an “accident” or a nightmare from which contemporary Russians are finally awakening. But this is a strange awakening, one without any of the features that could be used to establish an identity. It is not clear who is waking up from what, and to what. The modern, living visitors that the film depicts in the museum—“Russian awakened subjects”—are no more part of the archive than the nameless ghostly man who stands in for residents of Leningrad during the siege. These visitors are merely the museum’s patrons—people who, unlike the disembodied speaker, are not privy to the spectacle of history or the momentary immersions in the past. They are simply (paying) witnesses testifying to the monumental quality of the artistic collections.

The film establishes a certain hierarchy and politics of ghosts. Much like the Hermitage itself, it conserves, curates, and venerates images, objects, customs, and traditions. And like antiquarian history, the film wanders from one event, object, or period of time to another, exploring different details in paintings, sculptures, decorations, dress, manners, and gestures. Objects, monuments, and historical actors from different periods converge, dissolve, and reappear next to each other: The historical figure of the Marquis Astolphe de Custine—a French diplomat to Russia (1790–1857) and author of the critical travelogue La Russie en 1839—first appears lurking just outside the private chambers of Peter the Great, together with eighteenth-century officers and partygoers, who subsequently disappear from the film only to reemerge almost two centuries later at Tsar Nicholas II’s last ball, held at the Winter Palace on February 23, 1913.

For Nietzsche, the antiquarian venerates the past and disdains any attempt to relate it to anything but itself. In Russian Ark, the attitude of the antiquarian is epitomized by the character of the Marquis de Custine (figure 1.1) who is visibly dismayed by the manner in which Italian Baroque paintings such as Massimo Stanzione’s Death of Cleopatra (1630–1640), Ludovico Cigoli’s The Circumcision of Christ (1590), Carlo Dolci’s Santa Cecilia (1640s), and Francesco Maltese’s Still Life with an Oriental Carpet (1650s) are exhibited. He remarks on how unseemly it is to display them all on the same wall, since they represent a range of incompatible themes and historical periods.11 Clearly disinterested in the meanings these paintings might have for contemporary visitors to the museum, he is disturbed only by their improper thematic arrangement—what matters are the objects and their relationship to the past, not to the present and to present-day museum-goers (whom he almost seems to despise). The order Custine seeks to restore is not the proper chronological ordering of the past in relation to the present but the return to the past as such. In fact, toward the end of the film he refuses to move forward to inhabit post-tsarist Russia.12

Custine foregrounds the film’s own attention to the visual details of the surrounding materials—historical costumes, gestures, settings, and courtly manners. While this rehabilitation or resurrection of monumental effigies from the past produces a reality effect, it also reduces these signifiers of monumental history to an antiquarian appreciation of costume, anecdotes, and historical reenactments. It is this fidelity to the appearance of the past that confuses “the past” with its visual evidence. Within the film, the paintings, sculptures, architecture, costumes, and the performances of themselves are traces of past, but they are not ob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Floating on the Borders of Europe: Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark
• 2. O Megalexandros: Falling In and Out of Dreams
• 3. In Balkan: Marina Abramović and the Politics of the Suffering Body
• 4. Notre Musique: On the Ruins of the Divine
• Epilogue: The Politics of Confrontation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index