Indian Slums vs. Russian Aristocracy

This New Year I spent a lot of time watching movies. In among the piles of DVDs, VHS Tapes (old school, bitches) and cineplex screens a couple stood out from the pack.

Russian Ark

In 2002 Alexandr Sokurov made film history in one single, 90 minute shot. Russian Ark is a flowing, dream-like exploration of Russia’s heritage. Shot in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg on a specially-developed hard disk system, the film drifts around the timeline of culture, painting an intimate portrait of a place, and a country.

Two choices most vividly create a sense of awe at this spectacle of a film. Firstly, the sheer visual grandness is beautiful, and of course the choice to create an endless stream of cinema without editing has a massive impact. With no cuts to manipulate pace it gives you no time to breath, leaving you as exhausted as if you had walked the circuit of the museum yourself. The second is the way the story is told. As the viewer, you exist sometimes, it seems, as a massless onlooker, and other times feel like an intruder. When my ninety minutes were up I was overwhelmed, filled with a real, tangible melancholy and disorientation.

Slumdog Millionaire

The fact that this film was labelled ‘feel-good film of the decade’ says something sad and true about our post-9/11 media situation. To say it was a feel-good film would be to sleep through the first 100 minutes.

Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) is a director who’s been getting a lot of deserved attention in the last twelve years. An English director, Boyle’s latet film is set in Mumbai, mixing modern British cinema with elements of Bollywood, an unknown (native) cast and a documentary treatment of the slums of suburban India. I wasn’t too excited after I saw the poster, walking in as always with little to no knowledge of the plot, but luckily the poster was lying and what I saw was a very impressive and captivating film.