Heavy Cargo

Alexander Sokurov’s latest film, Francofonia, opens to the sound of crashing waves and the static from a captain’s radio, and a procession of photographs of a dying Anton Chekhov and a pre-war Louvre. We are not at sea, but we are awash in the tempests of time. In a later scene, Sokurov speaks to the captain of a Dutch cargo ship via Skype as his boat gets caught in a storm. The captain nervously explains that he has taken a museum’s container aboard, but it looks like they might have to lose cargo. ‘You should never have accepted it!’ Sokurov cries as the connection breaks down, dissolving into colour-block pixels.

Art is heavy cargo indeed, with many of the objects displayed in Western museums weighed down by a long history of imperialism. A counterpart to, Russian Ark (2002), Sokurov’s sweeping look at the State Hermitage, Francofonia delves into the complex history of the Louvre. A former royal fortress baptized as a public museum in the blood of revolution, the institution was consigned to store Napoleonic plunder shipped from the Middle East. Two pairs of character foils lend the film its loose narrative structure. Napoleon and Marianne – personifications of the French Republic – traipse through museum galleries repeating the same lines. When Napoleon sees himself in an artwork: ‘C’est moi’; when Marianne sees patriotic values: ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’. Aristocratic egos or state ideology – either way, art buttresses those in power. Then come the men stuck in between, whose love of art transcends politics. Franz Wolff-Metternich, the head of the Kunstschutz, Hitler’s cultural preservation team, knowingly hides Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818-19) from his superiors, while forming a friendship with Jacques Jaujard, the wartime director of the Louvre. For two born enemies alike in age and disposition, art is the strongest common bond.

Sokurov’s camera lingers in the museum past closing hours. As it drifts past an Assyrian lamassu, the director declares in a solemn voiceover: ‘Time is a tight knot’. In his hands, though, it slowly unravels: Toyotas whizz past parked Panhards, teenagers skate by Nazi soldiers. Film directors traverse aeons in seconds, museums collapse centuries into single rooms, and through his irreverent treatment of time, Sokurov teases out the transcendental values in art that surpass material detail.

Time lends the crimes of history an inviting patina, with whole empires fading like decomposing images, leaving abstract, melancholy traces behind them for archeologists to ponder. And yet, everywhere in museums like the Louvre, from spotlit alcoves to polished pedestals, the lurking spectre of history reminds us that we cannot afford to forget.