Hermitage
Revealed
***
Dir: Margy Kinmonth. With the voices of: Margy
Kinmonth, Tom Conti. 83 mins. Cert: U.
Where Sokurov’s Russian Ark gave us the grand tour of
St. Petersburg’s deathless palace of art, this is rather more prosaic and
school-trippy: a superbly illustrated if slightly dutiful history that picks up
the official guidebook and leads us from the building’s inception under
Catherine the Great to its latter-day rebranding as a highbrow tourist hub.
Writer-director Margy Kinmonth hits paydirt whenever she parts the crowds and
simply allows us to gaze upon a Rembrandt, Titian or Kandinsky, preserved here
with crisp digital exactitude. Elsewhere, the interviews and insights exist on
the level of public-access TV, and there’s something a little meek in the way
Kinmonth keeps glimpsing a shadow history of Russian nationalism without ever
quite stopping to address it. As her genial host, Hermitage director Mikhail
Piotrovsky, lets slip in a joshing aside on his management style: “It’s very
totalitarian – but that’s how it’s always been, and how it always should be.”
Hermitage Revealed screens in selected cinemas this Tuesday.
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