Russian Ark (Alexander Sukurov, Russia | Germany | Japan | Canada | Finland | Denmark, 2002)

Alexander Sukurov’s Russian Ark has everything to excite an aficionado of time travel movies: a spectacular temporal enfolding; a vast array of characters, fictional, fictionalised and real; strange situations and baroque settings, both historical and imaginary; ravishing beauty and permeating unease; mystery and revelation; self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and an inventive filmic process at once spontaneous and rigorous. An unnamed twenty-first century Russian filmmaker – (Sukurov himself?) – arrives in the past from our present. Hooking-up with a fellow traveller in time, the nineteenth century French aristocrat Marquis de Custine, together they wander the St. Petersburg’s Hermitage – Winter Palace of the Czars, grand museum of Mother Russia. Leaping this-way and that-way in time, the Unnamed and the Marquis encounter a cascade of moments spanning some 300 years of Russian history: the founding St. Petersburg; the (renamed) city under threat of destruction during the Second World War; Nicholas II, Anastasia and family on the morning of revolution. Russian Ark abounds in many such cinematic pleasures. Yet the film not only celebrates the possibilities of time travel in the movies; it also disrupts the genre through an ungrounding.

The general principle of time travel concerns an immediate encounter with temporal paradox. No longer is time merely chronological: a past begetting the present begetting a future. No longer is time simply homogenous: a chain of presents – the present a now preceded by a now that has passed, to be superseded by a now to come. Rather, the present interfolds with pasts and futures; pasts and futures interfold with the present. A traveller jumps from one time to another (from a present to the past or the future; from the past or the future to a present) disturbing homogenous chronological time with non-chronological relations, generating temporal paradox. In this way, the as-it-was or yet-to-come are reconfigured or revealed, in turn transforming the as-it-is. Time travel, in other words, creates or averts a temporal crisis – sometimes even averting the very crisis it created. Thus the tendency of the narration: to mend time, put time back together as it was or reconstitute it as it should be. To re-impose order upon the chaos that has arisen. Yet Russian Ark neither creates nor averts a crisis. The travellers are witnesses, seers – sometimes of a relative past, sometimes of a relative future. They do not intervene and what they witness will not transform their relative presents. We encounter here a fascinating reversal. Russian Ark does not disturb chronological time with non-chronological relations. The film rather considers time as fundamentally non-chronological. Temporal paradox is not introduced into the narration through time travel, but is exposed as being the essence of time. An always there; and being so, irresolvable. Chronological time is a ruse, mere appearance, a chimera. Time is – as Deleuze puts it in Cinema 2 – a time-image and composed of sheets of the past.

Sheets of the past: ‘[b]etween the past as a pre-existence in general and the present as infinitively contracted past’, writes Deleuze, there are ‘all the circles of the past’ (C2:99). In this way, temporality is captured from the perspective of pure pastness (rather than the past being a function of the present, as in the movement-image). With the time-image the now is effaced and pasts appear as moments of coexistent singularity arranged non-chronologically. There is no cause and effect, just events that resonate with each other, backwards and forwards. These sheets of the past are seen in exemplary fashion in Russian Ark...

To read the extended exploration of Russian Ark through the Deleuze's sign of the 'sheets of the past,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

To read the full exploration of Russian Ark through the Deleuze's image of the chronosign, and signs of the 'sheets of the past,' 'peaks of the present' and 'powers of the false,' see the essay 'Time travel and temporal paradox: Deleuze, the time-image and Russian Ark' in Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games edited by Matthew Jones  and Joan Ormrod (McFarland, 2015)... and there are loads of other great essays by some really wonderful writers...