by Gleb Sidorkin

In the second chapter of his book Gaming: Essays on Logarithmic Culture, NYU Media Studies prof. Alexander Galloway tries to trace the transition between the analog cinema of the past and the all-digital cinema of today’s video games. Noting the increasing use of cinematic “cut scenes” in video games, as well as the film techniques used within many forms of gameplay, he goes on to explore the opposing claim that “movies are becoming more and more like video games.” While I agree with Galloway’s general assessment that “video games and film are influencing and incorporating each other in novel ways”, when looking at specific works of art it is important to step back from the new media euphoria and see the broader historical trajectories in which these formal issues have played out.

Despite the tremendous impact that new forms of media and communication have had on society and the individual, some artists have cultivated ways of isolating themselves from such emerging trends. In many cases, they choose to remain oblivious to the frenetic pace of change and adopt a more conservative posture on the outskirts of “The New.” Other artistic gestures are more direct polemics against new developments in media. In an age where everyone can be classified as either an “early adopter” or a “lagger”, the most interesting artists and filmmakers are not those that channel the latest new media techniques into their work, but those that react against them or simply ignore them. It is in this context that I would like to dispute Galloway’s erroneous characterization of the single-shot film Russian Ark as “essentially a sublimation of the absence of montage in digital poetics.”

Russian Ark (2002), directed by the esteemed Russian auteur Aleksandr Sokurov, is an elaborate set-piece that unfolds within the maze of hallways and ballrooms of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The narrator, who is unseen behind the camera, is led around the museum by the cynical 19^th century writer the Marquis de Custine. Each successive room reveals an elaborately staged scene from another period of St. Petersburg’s history. The outstanding formal feature of the film is the fact that it was executed as a single 90-minute Steadicam shot.

Galloway’s explanation of the Russian Ark phenomenon is, on the surface, quite compelling. He rejects the “technological determinist” view that “the increased availability of long-format recording techniques” is the impetus for making such a film. Rather, such films reflect a desire to emulate the new forms of cinema that are created inside of a “fully rendered, actionable space.” Whereas traditional filmmakers use only bits and pieces of a given environment to shoot their scenes, and often use montage to create spaces from bits of plywood on a soundstage, the game environment is fully constructed. Those working in digital cinema are also liberated from the restrictions imposed by a physical camera; the virtual camera is not tethered to a camera operator or a crane, but can fly, swoop, and zoom at will. The aesthetic corollary to the rendered 3D environment and the virtual camera, according to Galloway, is that “gaming makes montage more and more superfluous.”

Russian Ark does, in fact, resemble Galloway’s description of “gamic vision”. Besides the absence of edits, the film is presented as a point-of-view shot—a camera angle that is, as Galloway shows, extremely common in gaming but relatively rare in cinema. The roving movement of Sokurov’s protagonist and his Steadicam-eye through the vast, fully designed spaces of the museum bears a strong resemblance to first-person shooter games like Doom or Halo. The only thing missing is the gun hovering on the bottom right of the screen. The similarities are there, but they may have more to do with the fundamental properties of cinematic and human vision than any kind of “sublimation of digital poetics.” If instead of viewing Russian Ark as merely an exemplary artifact of the early 21^st century we situate it within the work of an artist with a tradition and agenda of his own, it becomes clear that the inspiration for this formal experiment lies elsewhere. 

Sokurov’s film represents the culmination of an anti-montage movement in Russian cinema that predates the emergence of the seamless digital game-space by decades. Writing in his diary in the early 70’s, Andrei Tarkovsky—the great master of the long, slow tracking shot and Sokurov’s mentor—stated that the project that would most embody his theory of film as “sculpting in time” would be executed in a single, uninterrupted POV shot. Since cinema alone has the potential to make an imprint of actual human experience as it unfolds in the dimension of time, the ideal film would be a single stretch of a time preserved forever on celluloid. Tarkovsky’s dream project would have been a war film—90 minutes of war from the point of view of one soldier. Despite his connection to Tarkovsky, Sokurov claims that the idea for Russian Ark came to him in the 90’s at a moment when he was “sick of editing”, so perhaps there is some sublimation at play here—or at least unacknowledged debt to his mentor.

The impetus for Sokurov’s anti-montage gesture can be traced all the way back to the early experiments and masterworks of montage cinema produced in the first two decades of Soviet cinema. The legacy of Eisenstein’s technical accomplishments and his erudite theorization of montage were so prominent in Russian cinema that when Tarkovsky set about carving a space for himself as a revolutionary genius of cinema in the 1960’s, Eisenstein became the obvious target for his polemics. Whereas Eisenstein, Kuleshov, Pudovkin and Vertov saw montage as the fundamental property of cinema, Tarkovsky promoted the opposite view. In his “sculpting in time” model, the unbroken flow of images experienced by a human eye is exactly what cinema can and should emulate. Montage breaks the emotional and metaphysical truth of cinema, and should be avoided as much as possible.

Though couched in art-historical rhetoric about medium-specificity, Tarkovsky’s (and Sokurov’s) anti-montage tendencies can also be read symptomatically. What distinguishes these two directors, above all else, is the desire to slow down, to force the viewer to contemplate a single image for a long time. In Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, we watch a man carry a candle for over seven minutes. In Russian Ark, Sokurov lets the camera hover in front of a single painting for several minutes, forcing us to experience the image in isolation rather than in frantic juxtaposition with other images. Tarkovsky and Sokurov are not emulating some new montage-free digital space, but rather fighting against the growing dominance of montage in the modern world and the visual space of new media.

For Eisenstein and Vertov, the montage technique reflected the gloriously frenetic pace of the industrialized modernity they saw exploding around them in the 1920’s. Like the high-speed railway journey that first spliced together disparate geographical elements for the viewer-passenger, montage was able to carry the spectator on a dazzling journey through a variety of spatially and temporally discontinuous images. Playing on the congruence between montage and train travel, Vertov’s sent his cameramen out on “cine-races” in which they traveled by train across the continent to collect images for him to edit into virtual montage-journeys. In Man With a Movie Camera, Vertov’s visual orgy of rapid montage and high-speed modernity, he makes an explicit connection between the regulated “cutting” of traffic in a large city and the montage technique.

Tarkovsky and Sokurov’s long, slow shots represent a rejection of Eisenstein and Vertov’s aesthetics, as well as the frenetic pace of modernity that they fetishized. This gesture is even more important today than it was in the 60’s, as our visual space becomes more and more fragmented by a proliferation of montage-based media. The average cuts per minute in mainstream cinema has increased at a steady rate (as attention spans have decreased) to a point where MTV video editors speak of their work in terms of cuts per second. The experience of walking through an urban center today is similar to watching a commercial block on TV: one image after another, completely unrelated to each other, streamed into one’s visual space in a barrage of montage.  Video games of the FPS genre do offer a radically un-cut visual space, but most of the time we spend staring at a screen is extremely montage-heavy, such as multi-window browsing and multitasking on the web. For every person playing Halo there are ten more watching Wolf Blitzer sitting in front of a bank of ten video monitors, all showing different images. The seamless, unbroken “fullness” of the FPS gaming space is cold comfort for a modern subject drowning in a sea of montage.

Sokurov’s slow, contemplative, anti-montage films would be far less interesting as aesthetic objects if they were simply reflecting a trend in “digital poetics”. Whereas Doom creates an edit-free experience purely for the optimization of first-person gameplay, Sokurov and Tarkovsky do so as part of a coherent artistic strategy. They willingly step out of the strong current in Russian cinema—as well as contemporary visual culture—that is obsessed with the ability of media to juxtapose many images in quick succession. Since the advent of easy digital editing, many artists have jumped on the bandwagon and become montage-obsessed curators, mining and mashing up vast quantities of images. It takes a strong artist like Sokurov to toss aside the digital scissors and shift the focus back to mise-en-scene and the power of a single image viewed in isolation.

Screenshot from Sokurov's slow, painterly "Mother and Son"

Many of the Soviet and European avant-garde movements of the 1910’s and 20’s took pride in their status as “early adopters”—futurists ready to toss aside all that was old and create a new art from the raw material of factories, steam engines, and steel. But today, as Mr. Galloway himself pointed out, in our age of new media and ubiquitous communication, the true avant-garde act is not launched from the vanguard of whatever new revolution is hitting the newsstands, but from a position outside: a radical withdrawal and disappearance from the network. When he makes his camera hover for minutes in front of a single painting, Sokurov is not sublimating the 3D world of games, but regressing into a 2D, pre-montage era of painting. He is logging off, shutting down the editing suite, and asking us to return to a world where one image at a time was all that was necessary.