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The mobilized virtual gaze in Russian Ark.

According to Walter Benjamin, the flâneur, wandering through urban space in

a daze of distraction - a mood yet to be propagated by motion pictures- was

the quintessential paradigm of modernity. Cinema, arising in the age of

mechanical reproducibility, would diffuse this new mode of perception among

the modern urban dwellers. Thus, the development of cinema and the formation

of the space of modernity became processes closely intertwined. A detailed

study of this historical interrelation leads us to extrapolate this

connection into a hypothesis with regard to Post-Modernism. In other words,

it is unavoidable to wonder if such an entangled relationship persisted

between the Post-Modern paradigm and the cinematic gaze of that period.

This question has been tackled by several authors, among them Anne

Friedberg, whose approach is the object of analysis in this paper.1 In this

regard, Friedberg describes the transition between Modernism and Post-

Modernism as “a gradual and indistinct epistemological tear along the fabric

of modernity, a change caused by the growing cultural centrality of a

1Therefore, for our purpose, we will accept her understanding of Post-Modernism, acknowledging

that it does not necessarily refer to its conventional use in human sciences, literature or

architecture, but with its use within the theory of visual arts. “The debate on postmodernism

has by now produced a vast literature. Roughly, we might distinguish three positions: one

elaborated with reference to the human sciences and literature […]; one concerning the visual

arts [..]; and one related to the discourse of and on architecture.” Giuliana Bruno, “Ramble

City: Postmodernism and "Blade Runner". October, Vol. 41. (Summer, 1987), pp. 61-74

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feature that is integral to both cinema and television: a mobilized virtual

gaze.” 2

According to Friedberg’s theory, it should be feasible to identify this

mobilized virtual gaze (and to diagnose the symptoms associated with this

definition of Post-Modernity) within a visual text of this period.

Conversely, it should be possible to point out the marginality of those

symptoms in equivalent visual texts belonging to the modern epoch.

Consequently, this paper will consist not only in a dissection of a fragment

of Russian Ark, but in a comparison with other analogous modern precedents

(Voyage in Italy, La Jetée), in order to demonstrate how Friedberg’s

mobilized virtual gaze is fully manifested in the post-modern production,

whereas only germinal in the modern condition.

To begin, it is necessary to dissect the idea of a mobilized virtual gaze: a

compound concept essentially formed by the association of two

phenomenological experiences of cinema. Firstly, it refers to the mobilized

gaze as the perceptional mood of the cinematic eye, epitomized by the

flâneurs and closely related to the experience of modernity. Secondly, it

introduces Friedberg’s understanding of cinema as a virtual threshold that

transfers “the isolation produced by the plate glass window onto a virtual

register”3, implying that through cinema we experience a space and time

embedded in the plane of representation, perceiving a mediated reality that

actually is a “delimited virtuality”. Combining these two ideas, Friedberg

2 Friedberg, Anne. “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition”, in Williams, Linda, 1946-.

1995. Viewing positions : Ways of seeing film. Rutgers depth of field series. New Brunswick,

N.J.: Rutgers University Press. P. 60

3 Friedberg, Anne. 2006. The virtual window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press. P. 138

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defines the mobilized virtual gaze as “a gaze that travels, in an imaginary

flânerie, through an imaginary elsewhere and an imaginary else-when” 4

This idea of an imaginary drift is, as a matter of fact, essential to the

conception of Russian Ark. In this film the gaze of the spectator - embodied

in the narrator’s character - strolls the salons of the Hermitage along

different periods of Russian History. The spectator becomes, inadvertently,

a virtual flâneur who travels space and time through the rooms of the Winter

Palace. That is to say, via the virtual threshold of the screen, the

spectator’s mobilized virtual gaze detours5 in a virtual museum, in a

virtual time sequence.

In order to study and systematize this parallelism we can analyze, for

example, the scene in the neoclassical sculpture salon. In this particular

moment of the derive, the unseen protagonist (/camera/spectator) follows

“the European” into the salon of XIX Century sculpture. The “subjective”

protagonist, embodying the gaze of the camera (/spectators), tracks the

“objective” protagonist, the European, who directs the mobilized gaze. As in

the rest of the film, there are no visible cuts delimiting this scene,

otherwise clearly demarcated by the spatial structure of the museum. The

first aspect to point out is that, while in the beginning the European

monopolizes the frame, he promptly shares the composition with the

sculptures, only leaving the centrality of the frame to allow the mobilized

gaze of the audience to wander over the pieces of art.

4 Friedberg, Anne. “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition”, in Williams, Linda, 1946-.

1995. Viewing positions : Ways of seeing film. Rutgers depth of field series. New Brunswick,

N.J.: Rutgers University Press. P. 60. Although these imaginary temporal and spatial

dimensions refer to the virtual window, it is not difficult to point out the connection with

post-modern theory: if Foucault’s heterotopia is the space of post-modernity, the mobilized

virtual gaze is the mode of strolling through it.

5 Here we refer to the Situationists, to whom we will return later.

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Shared framing

The pronounced use of the zoom and the changes of field of view (the lens-

angle) accentuate an odd dreamlike sensation, as the camera follows the

European meandering between the statues. After approaching Antonio Canova’s

Three Graces, he disappears from the image, while the camera tours across

the masterpiece. This revolution around the statue conveys to the spectator

a particular spatial reading of Beauty, Charm and Joy –the graces of the

classical myth. Interestingly enough, Canova’s other version of the statue –

owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Galleries of

Scotland – has a rotating pedestal designed to convey the same effect

registered by the camera. The singularity of this moment is further signaled

by the dramatic lighting used to render the sculpture – as opposed to the

predominant emphasis on the natural illumination of the museum.

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The Three Graces.

The cinematographic recording of sculpture puts this scene into dialogue

with Rossellini’s visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Voyage in

Italy. In both films, across the threshold of the screen, the gaze of the

spectator wanders around a gallery of statues. Thus, through the artifice of

cinema the embedded spatial diegesis of the sculptures becomes apparent,

assuming protagonism in the scene.

Blind woman.

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Nevertheless, the contrast between those two scenes is noteworthy. The

haptic condition of the experience in Russian Ark takes the topic of “art in

film” to a dimension absent in Voyage in Italy. The introduction of the

character of the blind woman (who is “reading” a statue) immediately after

this fragment, emphasizes the intentionality of this sensorial quality.

The use of a single point of view moving through the gallery, as well as

other minor issues6, confers a “tactile” expressiveness to the The Three

Graces (and to the space of the Hermitage). Hence, the mobilization of the

gaze introduces a further degree of complexity in the distortions of

perception produced through the “virtual window”, making the eyes of the

spectator seem to function like organs of touch. The diegesis overcomes and

deflects the visual spectatorship, involving a tactile, corporal way of

relating with the space in the virtual window. The mobilization of the gaze

and its effects (this haptic activation of space) reflect the change of

paradigm from modernism to postmodernism.

Ironically, where Rossellini could play with elements such as the montage,

the length of the takes, etc., in order to manipulate the narration of the

sculptures, Sokurov faces the same challenge with one only shot, but

supported by digital recording. Whereas the technique of montage is

quintessential to cinema of the modern period – i.e. Voyage in Italy -, the

“single shot” used in Russian Ark apparently excludes it.

Nevertheless, if we leave aside the technical resource and tackle the idea

behind montage from Eisenstein’s point of view - as the narration of a

sequence through space – then we could claim that Russian Ark not only

6 The digital effects added in post-production (in particular the changes of the field of view

and the zooms), the rhythm and slight oscillation produced by the Steadicam, the framing,

lighting and the narration.

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comprises but emphasizes it. The aforementioned fragment, for example,

contains a specific version of the statues’ spatial diegesis, registering a

particular sequence of the many possible. A person visiting the Hermitage

would have multiple alternative paths to walk through and read the

sculptures. He would have to analyze each group in order to decipher it,

whereas in the virtual nature of the cinema screen Sokurov already has

chosen a particular choreography in space. Thus, the elements underline the

“link between mise-en-cadre and mise-en-scène”, gathering “a certain

sequence into a single meaningful concept; and these diverse impressions

pass in front of an immobile spectator.”7

Moreover, in Russian Ark the transition between rooms substitutes part of

the narrative role of montage, while the digital post-production replaces

montage as a technical centerpiece. For example - only during the scene in

the statues room - the aggressive modifications of the field of view of the

camera (paying with a wide-angle “lens”) and the extensive use of zoom

create a noteworthy visual variation.

7 Bois, Yve-Alain, and Eisenstein, Sergei. 1989 “Montage and Architecture” Assemblage, No. 10

(Dec. 1989), pp. 121

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Zooming at the threshold.

Manipulation of field of view/ lens.

The use of a Steadicam and the absence of cuts suggest that those effects,

repeated during the scene, in combination with the travelling of the camera

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around the statues, have being added in post-production. In this sense, the

use of digital technology does not lead to a lack8 (but to a different kind)

of editing. Thus, the absence of a modern montage-based coding produces a

distinct visual language. If Post-modern cinematic spectatorship “changed,

in unprecedented ways, concepts of the present and the real”9, then Post-

production –an editing method relieved from the use of discrete fragments of

time and space – reflects this mutation, as a new mode of composing visual

language.

From another point of view, in Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,

Friedberg dissects this unprecedented change of the concepts of the present

and the real. She identifies the “most profound symptoms of the postmodern

condition” as the disappearance of a sense of history, entrapment in a

perpetual present, and the loss of temporal referents.

In this sense, it is not hard to identify that “disappearance of a sense of

history” in Russian Ark, with a narration shifting between disjointed

historical times without apparent difficulty. For instance, only within the

context of the sculptures salon we notice the transition from the current

time, before entering the room, and 191310 after leaving it. Another example

of this distortion of the temporal line - within the same fragment - is the

European’s claim that Canova almost married his mother at the time of

sculpting The Three Graces. A fact obviously impossible, were it not for the

virtual window, given the span of time between 2002 and 1814, when Canova

8 As Sokurov may have wanted to claim.

9 Friedberg, Anne. “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition”, in Williams, Linda, 1946-.

1995. Viewing positions : Ways of seeing film. Rutgers depth of field series. New Brunswick,

N.J.: Rutgers University Press. P. 60

10 This is the date of the last grand ball of the Tzars, which took place in the same ballroom

of the recording. This event is present both in this scene –when the guests are entering the

Winter Palace – and, later in the movie, the final ballroom dance itself.

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made the sculpture. This post-modern disappearance of a sense of history,

only implied in Voyage in Italy11, is explicitly expressed and incorporated

into the visual language of the film throughout the whole length of Russian

Ark.

In addition, the “entrapment in a perpetual present” is also embedded in the

figure of the European, a character that, for an unknown reason, travels

through time caught up in an enduring present in which the meaning of past

and future collapse.

The “loss of temporal referents” as a result of the two previous points, is

clearly part of the spectatorship experience of the film. The continuous

shift of the temporal timing of the narration, while the spatial placement

and the works of art –the Hermitage- seem to be perennial, introduces a

sensation of discordancy among time and its referent, the space of the

action.

Moreover, not only are all of Friedberg’s symptoms of post-modernity

encompassed in the film, but there are a number of other references that we

can evaluate that also support the direct presence of the Post-Modern

sensibility in Russian Ark. In his essays12 Frederic Jameson establishes an

analogy between schizophrenia (as a language disorder caused by a break in

the relations of signifiers) and post-modern subjectivity, which he

characterizes by “the collapse of temporality, the failure of the ability to

locate or fix events historically, and the mise-en-abîme of referents lost

in the labyrinthine chain of signifiers”. Jameson’s understanding of

11 Katherine comments that the men that existed two thousand years before were identical to the

men of today, and that one would understand them perfectly

12 “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism”.

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temporality, past, present, future and memory as elements of a linguistic

category, can be extrapolated to the filmic use (linguistic use) of those

elements in Russian Ark. In this sense, Sokurov produces an etymological

disorder by distorting the natural relation among the historical time of the

scenes of the film, without the introduction of the conventional elements of

cinematographic language to signify it (e.g. in flashbacks). As mentioned

previously, within the fragment of the sculptures room there are two

examples of such an operation13. The result is a schizophrenic temporality

linked to post-modern subjectivity as per Jameson’s analogy.

Once Friedberg’s traces of Post-Modernity have been isolated within the

narrative of Russian Ark, the following logical question concerns its

cinematographic language: Are those traces also embedded in the visual

appearance of the film? And, if they are, how can they be identified in it?

The answer to this issue is, again, easier to pursue by a comparative

methodology - for example counter-posing Russian Ark’s one-shot recording

with Neorealism’s long take. In Russian Ark, the use of a High Definition

digital recording on a Steadicam (personifying the point of view of an

unseen observer) allows an extreme exacerbation of the long take –even if

not unedited. Rather than portraying the realism of Rossellini, through this

operation a dreamlike atmosphere is captured. Andre Bazin depicted

Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy as “a mental landscape at once as objective as

a straight photograph and as subjective as pure personal consciousness”.14

In contrast with that, Russian Ark conveys a purely subjective, almost

surreal, experience of space. The spectator perceives himself immersed in a

state of suspended consciousness, trapped in the gaze of the camera, in a

13 The time period of the scenes before and after the room (2002/1917) and the impossible

relation between Canova and the European’s mother.

14 Bazin, André. What is cinema?. Berkeley,: University of California Press. P. 98

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subjective space and time. Deprived of the alternation of points of view, a

conventional reading of the scene becomes impossible, producing a disruption

in the perception of the time and space embedded in the plane of

representation. Hence, the stretch of the long durée to its technical

limits paradoxically leads to an expression aloof from the fulfillment of

the long take aesthetic. Thus, the tenacious use of the narrator’s point of

view (only suppressed when recording the ball) transforms and intensifies

the distortions of the present and the real through the virtual window.

Nevertheless, the contrast between the scenes with statues in Russian Ark

and Voyage in Italy is not only in the exacerbation of the long durée, as we

can establish, for example, by opposition with La Jetée15.

In that French movie, the length of the takes is reduced to still

photographs16 - as opposed to Russian Ark’s long take -, and yet,

paradoxically, La Jetee’s surrealistic atmosphere is closer to the

perception in Russian Ark than to Voyage in Italy. In La Jetée the mobilized

gaze of the spectator wanders over the mummified images, deprived of the

coding incorporated in the conventional filmic narrative. In Russian Ark,

the mobilized gaze of the spectator wanders over the haptic space presented

through the virtual window. Thus, two completely opposed techniques –

collapsing the montage into one only take, or activating the narration

exclusively through montage cuts - produce a similar effect of semantic

estrangement.

15 Marker, Chris,1921- direction., Davas Hanich, and Hé Chatelain. 1964. La jetee. France:

Argos Films.

16 The same shot counter-shot between statue and character that Rossellini uses in the

Archaeological Museum, is employed by Chris Marker in La Jetee - where he counter poses a bust

with deformed eyes and the protagonist, who is being subjected to experiments.

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This paradox is closely related to the idea of the mobilization of the gaze,

not only over the virtual plate of the screen, but also on the temporal

dimension. Both Russian Ark and La Jetée have in common an approach to the

dislocation of spectatorship through virtual time and space. Aside from

representing the post-modern loss of temporal referents, this specific kind

of displacement refers to the idea of a Derive. Such a relation is supported

not only by the temporal and cultural propinquity of La Jetée and the

Situationists (both related to the France of the 1960’s), but also by the

drift analogies and the underlying critique of modern society. La Jetée’s

travels in time and the Situationists’ derives alluded to the space of

emotional disorientation of modern life. Analogously, like Guy Debord’s

psycho-geographic map of Paris, Russian Ark becomes a temporal detournement

across the history of Russia and the salons of the Hermitage. Nonetheless,

whereas in La Jetée the historical references of those temporal

displacements are constrained within the modern period –for some reason the

protagonist only travels within that span -, the historical schizophrenia17

registered in Russian Ark directly alludes to a Post-Modern sensibility.

This subtle difference of temporal variation between the films can be

related, once again, to Friedberg’s model of rupture between Modernism and

Post-Modernism.

Regarding this fracture between the modern and postmodern periods, Friedberg

notes how “the cinema developed as an apparatus that combined the mobile

with the virtual. Hence, cinematic spectatorship changed, in unprecedented

ways, concepts of the present and the real.”18 In this sense, and following

17 As understood by Frederic Jameson.

18 Friedberg, Anne. “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition”, in Williams, Linda, 1946-.

1995. Viewing positions : Ways of seeing film. Rutgers depth of field series. New Brunswick,

N.J.: Rutgers University Press. P. 60

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our previous argument, Russian Ark’s persistent emphasis on the mobilization

of the gaze (and not only the exceptional duration of the take) is essential

to the remarkable perceptional difference between Rossellini and Sokurov.

Whereas in Voyage in Italy the gaze of the spectator is embedded

alternatively by the main character and the statues, in Russian Ark it is

restrained to the unseen narrator and his movement through space, thus

stressing the mobilization of the gaze as the essential aspect of its visual

language.

In conclusion, it is possible to identify both Anne Friedberg’s symptoms of

Post-Modernity and her idea of a mobilized virtual gaze in Russian Ark, and

to establish how this presence is only in embryonic in equivalent fragments

of modern films like Voyage to Italy. Not only the extreme long durée or the

“absence” of montage, but particularly the juxtaposition of the mobile and

the virtual are responsible for an increased distortion of perception of the

present and the real, reflected in outcomes as evident as a haptic

activation of space or a temporal schizophrenia. These phenomena endorse

Friedberg’s hypothetical “indistinct epistemological tear between modernity

and postmodernity,” indicating that the mobilized virtual gaze is a central

feature of the Post-Modern paradigm.

Alberto Montesinos

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References.

Bazin, André. 1918-1958. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, “The

Virtues and Limitations of Montage”, “In Defense of Rossellini ” in ed.

(1967). What is cinema? Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bois, Yve-Alain, and Eisenstein, Sergei. 1989 “Montage and Architecture”

Assemblage, No. 10 (Dec. 1989), pp. 110-131

Friedberg, Anne. 2006. The virtual window : From Alberti to Microsoft.

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Friedberg, Anne. “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition”, in Williams, Linda,

1946-. 1995. Viewing positions : Ways of seeing film. Rutgers depth of field

series. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Giuliana Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and "Blade Runner". October,

Vol. 41. (Summer, 1987), pp. 61-74

Harvey, David, 1935-. 1990. The condition of postmodernity : An enquiry into

the origins of cultural change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Ivanov, Sergeĭ, Andrey Deryabin, Jens Meurer, Karsten Stöter, Anatoly

Nikiforov, Aleksandr Sokurov 1951-, Sergeĭ Dont s ov 1941-, et al.

2002. Russian Ark. Special ed. New York: Wellspring Media.

Marker, Chris, 1921- direction, Davas Hanich, and Hé Chatelain. 1964. La

jetee. France: Argos Films.

Rossellini, Roberto, 1906-1977, direction, Bergman, Ingrid,1915-1982, cast.,

and Sanders, George,1906-1972, cast. 1953. Voyage to Italy. United States:

Brandon Films.