2002 experimental historical drama film directed by Alexander Sokurov. An unnamed narrator wanders through the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. The narrator implies that he died in some horrible accident and is a russian ark single take drifting through the palace.
In each room, he encounters various real and fictional people from various periods in the city’s 300-year history. On a winter’s day, a small party of men and women arrive by horse-drawn carriage to a minor, side entrance of the Winter Palace, dressed in the style of the early 19th century to attend a ball hosted by the Emperor Alexander I. A grand ball follows, featuring music by Mikhail Glinka, with many of the participants in spectacular period costume, and a full orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev, then a long final exit with a crowd down the grand staircase. The film displays 33 rooms of the museum, which are filled with a cast of over 2,000 actors and three orchestras. Russian Ark was recorded in uncompressed high definition video using a Sony HDW-F900 camera. In a 2002 interview, Büttner said that film sound was recorded separately.
Every time I did the take, or someone else made a mistake, I would curse, and that would have gotten in, so we did the sound later. The narrator’s guide, “the European”, is based on the Marquis de Custine, who visited Russia in 1839 and wrote a book about his visit, La Russie en 1839, where he depicted Russia in extremely unflattering terms. A few biographical elements from Custine’s life are shown in the film. In One Breath, a documentary about the making of Russian Ark, written and directed by Knut Elstermann, gives more insight into the single long shot tracking techniques and formidable organization behind the making of the film. The film was not a huge commercial success, though as an arthouse film it performed strongly in many territories.
These include the UK, Japan, Korea, Argentina, and especially the US, where the film remains one of the most successful of both German and Russian movies of the last decades. Russian Ark is a German-Russian co-production. You can help by adding to it. Russian Ark received high critical acclaim. Roger Ebert wrote, “Apart from anything else, this is one of the best-sustained ideas I have ever seen on the screen. If cinema is sometimes dreamlike, then every edit is an awakening.
