It's very much not black and white. Visually it's gorgeous, in large part because, well, it's filmed in a building which was built for tsars to live in and which now houses one of the best art collections in the world. There's a lot to look at. It was filmed in high-definition digital video, and is some of the best-looking DV I've seen.
As Charkes said, there's a lot of music. There is, it seems to me the next day, not that much dialogue, or at least not much that matters. Often you're just sort of drifting through history. This isn't to say it would work as a silent; the dialogue that's there is important, to key us into historical context and objects of contemplation.
When I referred to lecture, I didn't quite mean that somebody actually orates at length. It's more that the on-screen traveler will make brief but emphatic pronouncements about the nature of Russian art, and then the camera will linger on a painting; or he will explain to us what court function we have stumbled into, and then we'll just watch the event unfold for a while. It sometimes has the feeling of a "highlights of the museum" documentary.
But it also is thought-provoking, at times highly critical of Russia and Russians, sometimes extremely creepy, and, I guess I've decided, really good.
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Date: 2003-02-24 08:45 am (UTC)The official running time is 96 minutes.
It's in Russian, with subtitles.
It's very much not black and white. Visually it's gorgeous, in large part because, well, it's filmed in a building which was built for tsars to live in and which now houses one of the best art collections in the world. There's a lot to look at. It was filmed in high-definition digital video, and is some of the best-looking DV I've seen.
As Charkes said, there's a lot of music. There is, it seems to me the next day, not that much dialogue, or at least not much that matters. Often you're just sort of drifting through history. This isn't to say it would work as a silent; the dialogue that's there is important, to key us into historical context and objects of contemplation.
When I referred to lecture, I didn't quite mean that somebody actually orates at length. It's more that the on-screen traveler will make brief but emphatic pronouncements about the nature of Russian art, and then the camera will linger on a painting; or he will explain to us what court function we have stumbled into, and then we'll just watch the event unfold for a while. It sometimes has the feeling of a "highlights of the museum" documentary.
But it also is thought-provoking, at times highly critical of Russia and Russians, sometimes extremely creepy, and, I guess I've decided, really good.