While going about their business, great artists often make monkeys of the people who write about them. Look at what happened to one chatterer, who not long ago was playing the critic in the New York Times. "There are two kinds of tough-minded, morally uncompromising artists in today's film world," he wrote, "those who want to make musicals and those who don't.... Pre-eminent among the wallflowers is the Russian master Aleksandr Sokurov."

Unknown to this monkey--me--the Russian master had just shot one of the most splendid ballroom scenes in film history. It's the thrilling climax to Russian Ark, a movie that has absolutely no precedent, except for The Scarlet Empress, Gone With the Wind, The Leopard, Doctor Zhivago, the agglomerated screen translations of War and Peace and all other costume epics. Russian Ark sums up and surpasses these pictures in the sense that it's nothing but feathers and pearls and epaulets and gold braid, music and color and figures out of the past. By cutting these things loose from the moorings of a plot--or even a single time period--Sokurov has allowed his sumptuous pleasures to flow freely, purely, without troubling you to remember which archduke is in debt to whose cousin.

But then, being tough-minded and morally uncompromising, Sokurov has also made Russian Ark into a haunted meditation on the disasters of history, and on our precarious efforts to rescue something from the flood. The melancholy that has pervaded many of his previous films--The Stone, for example, or Mother and Son--also seeps delicately through Russian Ark. It's as if this picture wanted to hold still and be quiet, even as it launches into the longest tracking shot ever made.

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