An obvious companion piece to Aleksandr Sokurov’s most well-known feature, Russian Ark, Francofonia is an examination of the cultural and political significance of art dressed up as an ode to the Louvre. Sokurov films the French museum as if it were a temple, elegantly curving through its exhibits and hallways with reverence, regarding the paintings and sculptures less as a collection than as artistic tributes to its own grandeur, like the frescoes and stained glass of cathedrals. “Might it be that this museum is worth more than all of France,” the director asks in a voiceover, his tone leaving no doubt as to the rhetorical nature of the question.
And yet, the Louvre’s art is the product of acquisition and deals, something that Sokurov explores as a microcosm of European expansionism. A recurring image of the film concerns a container ship filled with an entire civilization’s collected art, bound over treacherous seas that regularly send waves spilling over deck, a present-day metaphor for the long history of packaging and shipping art from around the world to glamorize European institutions. Sokurov takes this point further by regularly finding the ghost of Napoleon (Vincent Nemeth) stalking the halls of the Louvre by night, posing as the ultimate curator of the museum for how much he put there as the result of his conquests and deals. “It’s not human, dragging art across the oceans,” Sokurov muses while watching streaming footage of the container ship, but that does not mean it has not happened for centuries.
The director ties the historical war and pillaging that effectively built the Louvre as a public institution to the efforts of Germany in WWII to loot the museum for its own glory. Flickering, box-framed shots of a recreated Paris under occupation have the feel of official war footage of the Germans negotiating their acquisitions, particularly in meetings between Franz von Wolff-Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath), head of the Kunstschultz in France, and Louvre director Jacques Jaujard (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing). Though Sokurov mostly speaks for the two men via voiceover, the 8mm replications lend a sense of surprising intimacy to the film’s philosophical exercise, and it adds a personal angle to the two men’s unexpected camaraderie as Jaujard attempts to misdirect the Germans and protect French art.
The grounded nature of Jaujard and Wolff-Metternich’s semi-friendly relations extends to Sokurov’s musing about the history of the museum, especially when he contrasts the relatively respectful treatment that the Germans extended to French museums ,even as they looted them, to the absolute devastation they wrought on Russian galleries. In Paris, Wolff-Metternich risked his life to ensure the protection and preservation of art, while the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg was gutted and left to be nothing more than a field hospital for the incalculable wounded Russians too preoccupied with survival to mourn the loss of culture. Compared to the flightier Russian Ark, this blunt historical framing of how art is subject to political reality makes Francofonia one of Sokurov’s most accessible, tactile films.
That is not to say that the director does not spend a great deal of time abstractly musing, however. The film kicks off with a digital effect of a door opening up onto a photo of Tolstoy, whom Sokurov positions alongside Chekhov in the portentousness of their deaths at the turn of the 20th century, both fathers “falling asleep” and leaving their children to wander, lost. Paintings are filmed in such a way that the walls on which they hang seem to disappear into blackness, leaving only the object to focus the eye. At times, the camera moves into close-ups that document the physical aspects of the paintings: the topographical ridges of thickly applied brushstrokes, the faded colors, the cracks that have formed with age (even portraits get wrinkles). They cease to be something to look at and instead imbibe some essential quality of the people depicted and of the cultures that produced them. These are literal surface pleasures, but as Sokurov considers them, they become symbols for the best, and the worst, of philosophy, creation and collection. Blood is spilled to protect art, Sokurov argues, but it is also spilled to acquire it.