Ten years ago, while visiting my favorite bookstore in this city, Magus, I found and bought a used hardback copy of Dickens’ London. Once owned by a woman named Betty L. Kubersmith, the book is a collection of Charles Dickens’s writings on what he saw and experienced during his long walks through famous and neglected sections of the world’s first industrialized city. The chapter “Chinese Junk” stands above the rest. Written in 1848, it concerns a junk called Keying that was docked in London at the time.

When Dickens came across the junk, this is what he saw: “Gaudy dragons and sea monsters disporting themselves from stem to stern, and on the stern a gigantic cock of impossible aspect defying the world… it would look more at home at the top of a public building, or at the top of a mountain… than afloat on the water… But by Jove! Even this is nothing to your surprise when you go down into the cabin. There you get into a torture of perplexity. As what became of all those lanterns hanging to the roof when the junk was out at sea? Whether they dangled there, banging and beating against each other… Whether the idol Chin Tee, of the eighteen arms, enshrined in a celestial Punch’s Show, in the place of honor, ever tumbled out in heavy weather. Whether incense and the joss stick still burnt before her, with faint perfume and a little thread of smoke, while the mighty waves were raging all around. Whether that preposterous tissue-paper umbrella in the corner was always spread, as being a convenient maritime instrument for walking about the decks with in a storm?”

Dickens is amazed at how “the crew of Chinamen aboard” this junk ever imagined “their good ship would turn up quite safe, at the desired port.” But what he finds to be preposterous, the director of Francofonia, Russia’s Alexander Sokurov, sees as the very condition of the national museum. It is a ship, an ark, filled with impractical things that bang and beat “against each other” as the “mighty waves” are “raging all around.”

In Francofonia, which is about the Louvre (how it was made, how it obtained the treasures it holds, and what happened to it during the Second World War when the Nazis rolled into Paris and became her master), a ship traveling across a storm-enraged sea is the film’s leitmotif and a symbol of what the Louvre is. The chaos all around it is, of course, history.

Those who have watched Sokurov’s most famous film, Russian Ark, will certainly see Francofonia as something of a follow-up. The films are about the same thing: art, historical figures and events, and death. Those who have watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror will see that, in terms of form (the mix of documentary footage, film stock, acted scenes, poetic voice-over, fictional dialogue, the present and the past, and so on), Francofonia is an impressive marriage between Russian Ark and Mirror. (Sokurov is, after all, Tarkovsky’s cinematic heir.)

Altogether, Francofonia is a film that shows Sokurov in his element. This is what he does best—philosophical meditations on the highest forms and productions of culture.