Hubert Robert: A Fortunate Life (Роберт. Счастливая жизнь)

The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg requested, to popularize its treasures, Sokurov to pick a work from the enormous list of celebrated names as subject for a film. Sokurov has chosen a very modest on: Hubert Robert, a French painter who worked between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. He painted ruins in landscapes. Sokurov makes the film both about the canvasses and about the fate of an artist possessed by the idea of the search for harmony. The subject creates for Sokurov at the same time a cultural context for his own lyrical confession and places Dostojevsky and Gogol’s reminiscences in his narrative, as well as images of harmonic traditional Japanese theater to dust his thoughts. This short is undoubtedly a fine annex to the masterly ‘The Russian Ark’.