RUSSIAN ARK [2005]

2,000 Actors...
300 Years of Russian History...
33 Rooms at the Hermitage Museum...
3 Live Orchestras...
1 Single Continuous Shot...!!

Origianl Russian Title: "Русский ковчег"
Movie by Russian director Alexander Sokurov.
It was the first feature film ever to be shot in a single take, filmed using a single 90-minute Steadicam tracking shot.

Plot
A narrator, who is unnamed, and unseen by the audience, and voiced by the director, wanders through the Winter Palace (now the main building of Russian State Hermitage Museum) in St. Petersburg. The narrator implies that he has died, and is a ghost drifting through the palace. In each room he encounters various real and fictional people from various time periods in the city's three hundred year history. He is accompanied by a companion, 'the European' (played by Sergei Dreiden), who represents the nineteenth century traveller the Marquis de Custine, and who is visible to the audience. The fourth wall is repeatedly broken and re-erected; at times the narrator-director and the companion interact freely with the other performers, and at other times go completely unnoticed.
The film begins on a winter's day with the arrival by horse drawn carriage of a small party of men and women to a minor side entrance of the Winter Palace. The narrator (whose eyes are always our point of view) meets one member of this party, 'the European', and follows him through numerous rooms of the Palace. As each room is entered, we find ourselves in a different period of Russian history (but not in chronological order).
The film shows, among other things, the spectacular presentation of operas and plays in the era of Catherine the Great; a formal court proceeding in which Tsar Nicholas I is offered a formal apology by the Shah of Iran for the death of Alexander Griboedov, an ambassador; the idyllic family life of Tsar Nicholas II's children; the formal changing of the Palace Guard; the museum's director whispering the need to make repairs during the rule of Josef Stalin; and a desperate Leningrader making his own coffin during the 900-day siege of the city in World War II.
The climax of the film is a grand ball, with many hundreds of participants in spectacular period costume, and a full orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev, followed by a long final exit with a crowd down the Grand Staircase of the palace.
The narrator then leaves the building through a side exit and in a digitally enhanced sequence, the building is represented as an ark preserving Russian culture, and floating in the sea.

Production
The film displays 33 rooms of the museum, which are filled with a cast of over 2000 actors.
Russian Ark was recorded in uncompressed high definition video using a Sony HDW-F900. The camera used was specifically designed for this film. The information was not recorded compressed to tape as usual, but uncompressed onto a hard disk which could hold 100 minutes. Four attempts were made to complete the shot; the first three had to be interrupted due to technical faults, but the fourth attempt was completed successfully. The shot was executed by Steadicam operator Tilman Büttner. The lighting cameramen on the film were Bernd Fischer and Anatoli Radionov (uncredited). The movie itself was made using a technique called formalism, a technique that makes the film seem abstract in nature.