FILM FESTIVAL-VENICE/FRANCOFONIA-SOKUROV Venice Film Festival's "Francofonia" shows art as fragile world treasure

Record ID: 141160

  • Title: FILM FESTIVAL-VENICE/FRANCOFONIA-SOKUROV Venice Film Festival's "Francofonia" shows art as fragile world treasure
  • Date: 11th September 2015
  • Summary: VENICE, ITALY (SEPTEMBER 5, 2015) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (Russian) ACTOR, BENJAMIN UTZERATH, SAYING ON EXPERIENCE OF ACTING FOR SOKUROV: "Yes, it was completely different. Unexpected things happened. For example, they put me in this Nazi uniform and they knew there was this park where this school has its posts and the kids were all wearing uniforms as well and they crowded the park and they put me right in the middle of all these kids." SOKUROV
  • Embargoed: 26th September 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVABG3FS0AY8TTCXD2B5EG98SS6Q
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Russian director Alexander Sokurov, who won the top Venice Film Festival prize for his "Faust" in 2011, is in the running again with "Francofonia", a tour of the Louvre museum guided in part by Napoleon and Marianne, the symbols of the French republic.
    The film, co-produced with the French museum, is Sokurov's second foray into inventive cinematic looks at the inner workings of a great museum. His "Russian Ark" of 2002 covered the history of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, from tsarist times to the present, with the technical panache of shooting the entire movie, from start to finish, in one take.
    Sokurov's latest movie won generally favourable reviews and as of Friday was the favoured film to win the top Golden Lion award on Saturday (September 12) in a poll of Italian film critics and newspapers published in a daily festival newsletter.
    Sokurov told Reuters in an interview that he was drawn to create movies about great museums because they are repositories of the world's culture, and to the Louvre in particular because "it's a theatre in itself, it's like Shakespeare...it is a wonderful setting for the film".
    Sokurov tells the history of the museum, which was opened to the public under the French Republic in 1793, in part through the eyes of Napoleon, played by actor Vincent Nemeth, who is quoted in the film as saying one of the reasons for his conquests was to get access to art works.
    Napoleon shows up several times in the film, pointing to himself as he is portrayed in various paintings, while Marianne (Johanna Korthals Altes) urges the camera forward while shouting the slogan of the revolution, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity".
    Sokurov said that what Napoleon, and the other great patrons of the Louvre, had realised was that world's art is a fragile treasure that must be protected for posterity -- a theme he emphasises in the film by showing a cargo ship loaded with what are said to be containers of precious artworks, foundering in heavy seas.
    The film does not explicitly mention the recent predations of the Islamic State group, blowing up priceless art works in Syria and Iraq, but Sokurov's cameras do slyly show Assyrian art works in the Louvre, to make the point.
    "Art is a helpless child -- we need it and we created it and it never grows up," Sokurov said.
    "Art has its father and its mother and creators but it's sort of a helpless child that needs to be protected all the time," he said.
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