A long shot, moving 1,300 meters, traversing 33 promenades, presenting 876 characters, with a total time of more than 90 minutes, which constitutes Sokolov’s experimental and innovative work. Great movie.
The picture unfolds in the black and the deep voice of the narrator. The scene has been shown from the noble ladies participating in the court ball held in the Winter Palace, and they, as well as the czar's dignitaries, will be decapitated in the subsequent revolution. The camera follows the crowd through the Winter Palace. The audience can see Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Pushkin, Prince of Persia, Angels, Russian art works in the Hermitage Museum, the Last Supper of Nicholas II's family, and so on. The shot ends at the end of the ball, and through the windows of the Winter Palace, the black and white tones are cold and desolate on the surface of the Baltic Sea. The camera records the last court ball in the Winter Palace, which is installed in Russia's hundreds of years of history.
Long shots are a way of narrating real time, but Sokolov uses real time to express the compressed history, which is so dense that it is suffocating, true and ruthless. If you understand time as how people feel about this being, history is equal to the present, and the present is equal to the future. Everything is just an endless loop, just like Sokolov’s voice-over at the end of the film: "Look, surrounded by the sea, we are destined to drift forever and live forever. "This is Sokolov's sad whisper about the destiny of Russia, or the destiny of mankind. Sokolov said: "This is a sign of Russian hell. No civilization, culture or art can prevent the destruction of millions of people. The Orthodox Church cannot do it. Christ, art, and education cannot do it, and nothing can stop it. The disappearance of millions of Russians."
The long shot of more than 90 minutes ends at the cold and bleak Baltic Sea outside the window. At this moment, the continuous excitement, prosperity and exquisiteness in front are all dissolved in the endless bleakness and desolation.
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