Francofonia, le Louvre sous l'Occupation

A spectacular and unique essay film. At once a philosophical rumination on the connection between art and power, a history of the Louvre- particularly during the Vichy regime, and a surprisingly powerful and human narrative of the French civil servant and German aristocrat and Nazi officer who collaborated to save the collection from plunder.

Unflinchingly, the film equates art with plunder. As any serious study of the Louvre must, by definition, be this is a tale of Napoleon, invasion and imperialism. The Emperor is himself a character in the film, haunting the halls of his museum and reminding the director/narrator that all of the paintings are of him, for none of it would be there without his power.

The point is also made that Paris was sparred the devastation of the war in no small part because the leading Nazis loved classical art and wanted the Louvre's collections for Germany and themselves. In a real sense, then, the film must uneasily acknowledge, the German regime was responsible for the preservation of much European cultural treasure. The Louvre, though to a degree the very phenomenon of the art museum, is made to seem like a place where humanism, the preservation of the human image, and sheer political force, come together.

Sukarov's imagery is characteristically spectacular. The amazing, painterly light that he most often brings to the human face he here brings to the urban face of Paris. This film includes some of the best uses of crane shots that I think I've ever seen.

This is the last Aleksandr Sokurov movie I'll ever see. I'm sure this guy means well, but his cinematic instinct isn't very entertaining, even though someone with money clearly thinks otherwise.

I recently visited the Louvre. It is far more impressive than you would think seeing this movie which attempts to avoid responsibility for showing it to you by purporting to be an brief account of it during the German occupation. It fails even at that rather small ambition.

There are a few flashes of adequacy but they're so few and far between that it's not worth sitting through it all. Watching this was a big waste of time.

Director Sokurov eschews the usual form for this type of film, which would be documentary, in favor of a sort of historical drama. It switches back and forth from the present era to WWII to the 18th century. It is an attempt to explain the history of The Louvre by integrating several different phases in its existence; The acquisition of much of the artwork by Napoleon in his conquests, transporting it out of harms way before the Nazi occupation, and a contemporary recap of the logistics and hazards involved in each phase.

Can I be frank? I found the whole exercise somewhat confusing. I would get the gist of a particular scenario, only to have the director switch gears and move to another era and another circumstance, and having to readjust my focus and concentration on this new problem (where are we now?, I kept asking myself). I enjoyed glimpses of the Great Hall, the Mona Lisa and several other treasures that go to make The Louvre the epicenter of western culture. All I was asking was a little clarity.

Maybe he just could have made it a documentary.

Revered Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's paean to the Louvre Museum and mankind's art treasure is an inventive genre-buster but also a bemusing underachiever. Reconstructing the scenarios of Louvre under Nazi occupation during WWII, Sokurov blots out the distinctions between documentary and fiction filmmaking: archival documents and vintage photos, recurring shots of an anonymous apartment at present where video footage of a struggling cargo ship amid the choppy ocean is playing on the computer, interlaced into a lax narrative re-enacting the story between Jacques Jaujard (de Lencquesaing), the director of the French National Museums and a Nazi officer, Count Franz Wolff-Metternich (Utzerath), predominantly, their so-called Kunstschutz (art protection) movement during WWII, which has spawned a feeble Hollywood dramatization, George Clooney's star-studded THE MONUMENTS MEN (2014).

Yet, the film's overall effort fails to pass muster as a competent infotainment which dissects the cardinal situation where arts and warfare corralled together, Sokurov's platitudinous commentaries breathe with a wisp of solipsistic sentiment, although perambulating inside the Louvre is inherently enchanting, and Sokurov's slick camera-work guides viewer to the ensconced masterpieces with his trademark aplomb and dexterity, not to mention the awesome temporal morphing panorama feat. Personally, the segment where the camera slithers around a mummy exhibit is quaintly numinous. But our tour is often interrupted by a resurrected Napoléon Bonaparte (Nemeth), repugnant and irksome in his boosted egoism, and Marianne (Korthals Altes) repetitively uttering the incantation of "liberty, equality and fraternity", when you have the entire Louvre at your feet, but we are only allowed to glance at such a limited purview, rank dissatisfaction inevitably materializes. Stripped off the "single take" stunt with which he has stunned the world in Russian ARK (2002), this belated pendant work haplessly betrays that Sokurov's ambition and talent has ebbed away significantly, especially when his disaffected grouse can be overtly detected through counterpointing the disparate circumstances between France and his fatherland, a close-minded overtone of editorializing writ large woefully.

After "Russian Ark" (2002) this is Sokoroev's second film about a museum. After the Hermitage in "Russian Ark", this time he meditates about the Louvre.

The film has not a real plot but is build around various contrasts, none of which was very convincing to me.

In the first place the film seems to suggest that while the Hermitage is real Russian (in "Russian ark" Sokoerov used the Hermitage to explain Russian history) the Louvre is not real French, containing too much art from abroad. To accentuate this point there are scenes in which Sokoerov himself has contact with the captain of a ship transporting art. I don't think Sokoerov's point is very convincing. I don't know how much of the collection of the Louvre is foreign in origin but I do know that the Hermitage is very proud to have more Rembrands than the National Museum in Amsterdam.

The second (and in my opinion best) contrast the film makes is the relation between the German Metternich and the Frenchman Jaujard. The order of Metternich is to rob as much art for the Third Reich as possible. The job of Jaujard is to protect the collection of the Louvre. Both men are civil servants in the depths of their soul, so Metternich goes at great length to obey the orders of his (culturally barbarian) superiors as minimalist as possible. In this regard the job of Jaujard is more easy than that of Mademoiselle Villard in "The train" (1964, John Frankenheimer). Mademoiselle Villard also has to protect the collection of a French museum but has in Franz von Waldheim an opponent that was far less understanding. As a result "The train" has far more action than "Francofonia".

The last (and in my opinion most puzzling) contrast is that between Marianne and Napoleon. Both of these prominent figures of Fench history are wandering through the Louvre, but what do they symbolize? It becomes clear that Marianne symbolizes the values of the French revolution. Values that have become worn out over time. Where Napoleon stands for remains a mystery (to me).