FRANCOFONIA EXPLAINS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WAR AND THE LOUVRE
A documentary with live stand-ins and film footage, Francofonia provides film footage of the Nazi takeover of Paris but also creates a film with story and action. Directed and voiced by Aleksandr Sokurov, the timeline jumps back and forth, creating some suspense about what will be portrayed next. After showing the Nazis taking control of Paris and the Louvre, the founding of the Louvre is explained as a palace turned into a museum to house artists and later the repository for art looted from Napoleonic and other conquests. Count Franziskus Wolff-Metternich (played by Benjamin Utzerath), the Nazi in charge of the Louvre, however, is dedicated to protecting art from Hitler, who orders the collection to be shipped to Germany and then fires him as Paris is about to be liberated for not doing so. But even before the Nazis arrive, the art had been relocated to secret chateaux throughout the countryside. The narrator is Russian, not French, and he contrasts France’s “alliance” with Nazi Germany with Russia’s determination to defeat the Nazis, even when Leningrad—from which the art of the Hermitage was also relocated as a precaution—is under siege. But of course the director also tried to recount 300 years of Russian history by visiting the Hermitage in his film Russian Ark (2013). Francofonia rambles in storytelling, but filmviewers learn to enjoy the rambling, which is an art. MH