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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Russian Ark

08:19 / 12.11.03

Having found no other threads on this, I'm curious as to whether anyone else has yet seen Alexander Sokurov's film.

Produced in one single continuous take (a major technological feat in itself), Russian Ark is a journey through the last four centuries of Russian art and history, in which we meet a number of characters of the past, including Pushkin and Catherine the Great.

The incredible feat of making a single take film aside, I found Russian Ark a film of extremes, with long dry moments flanked by periods of excitement. It took a little while to adjust to Sokurov's style, as my Hollywood conditioned brain was expecting a cut right from the beginning, but I have to say that after a quarter hour or so I found myself thoroughly absorbed, and even through the slower periods you really feel swept along with the camera. I think on reflection the style of the film - which is essentially a guided tour through the Hermitage in St. Petersburg - helped enormously in making the single take approach feel natural.

So, has anybody else seen it and care to venture an opinion?

11:04 / 12.11.03

I've seen it.

Technically, it's wonderful - so carefully done you don't even worry about the technical difficulties of it. The one-take approach also adds to the sensation of a passage through time.

I think the most amazing thing is the location, to be honest; there are some wonderful sequences where a door opens and suddenly there's just this wonderful art and stuff that all these characters are interacting around. I'd love to visit the Hermitage Gallery sometime.

I felt the actual concept was hit andmiss. Sometimes, it worked, and when it did it was wonderful; I found the guide-character a bit irksome at times, and at others wasn't sure what the script was trying to acheive. At the same time, the feeling it produces is exactly what Sokurov was hoping for, and I thought the concluding dance-sequence - if a little long - was wonderful, the camera just wandering in and around this huge crowd of faces, people, ideas, dancing and interacting, before they're let off into the world.

It was pretty hard work to watch, I have no doubt of that, and at times felt like a triumph of style over substance - and yet there are wonderful moments throughout, and it's a remarkable history it's telling. Essentially, it's a curiosity.

(One thing I definitely noticed - because of that one-take thing, the 96 minutes feels more akin to 120, 150 at times).

wembley can change in 28 days

15:21 / 22.11.03

I saw it at the Helsinki DocPoint festival last year, and while it felt at times as though my brain were sinking in something very, very slow, on the whole I was blown away. The ballroom scene was a real feat in itself, not to mention the one-take thing.

My favourite particular part was noticing the few times when actors would be improvising, having forgotten their lines. I'm sure I spotted it at least twice. And the lady who danced in front of paintings.

All in all, a beautiful building. And I like the sound of Russian.

02:44 / 25.11.03

I saw parts of it a couple days ago wandering in and out of a room; and then watched the making of feature the next day (called something like a movie in one breath). It was much easier to concentrate on the doc, but it left me wanting to buckle down and watch the whole movie. At some point.

By "I found the guide-character a bit irksome at times" who do you consider the guide character? The marquis or the camera-perspective figure? I didn't get a great grasp on what the narrative structure was.

12:19 / 25.11.03

What I found interesting about the single uncut take was that it made everything feel very claustrophic -even when the camera went into an outside courtyard, the fact that the camera hadn't cut meant that the impression that the viewer was still inside the building was unbroken.

The one-take approach also adds to the sensation of a passage through time.
This was something I enjoyed about it as well -I only know Russian history in really specific periods, so liked the longer view that the film gave. Halfway through, I started wishing that I knew far more than I do about the earlier history...

Does anyone know whether the original idea was to film in one take, or whether that was just done because the director was only allowed limited time inside the Hermitage, and thought that a single take would be the best way to do it?

01:41 / 27.11.03

additionally, does anyone know how it was done? I thought that reels of film were only 11 minutes long. but it certainly doesn't look digital....

nedrichards is confused

15:34 / 27.11.03

No it's not digital, a specially adapted camera I belive because yes reels are only 11 minutes long. Also a very clever stedicam man.

15:59 / 22.12.03

i thought i'd bump up this thread because i was thinking about the movie for some reason today.

i found it profoundly moving. i think it brilliantly captured a certain ambiguity about Russian "high culture"- there's a certain longing for the romance of the court, but it's tempered and complicated by the horrors lying under the veneer. those horrors cast the beauty of the court in an ugly light - how can the final dance scene exist in the same building as the coffin-maker from WW II in a just world? - but at the same time, there's a sentimental love of the pagaentry and such.

i also love the fact that the centuries in between the time of the guide and the time of the narrator are filled with brutal revolutions, wars, and periods of repression and genocide. it puts the viewer and the narrator at a curiously priveleged distance from the guide, as in "we know some things you don't know, and boy, are they not pleasant things to know..." you're left in the position of wishing you could un-know the things you know about Russian history, that you could forget how fragile the world of the court is and just lose yourself in the pomp. but you can't, and it's all tainted and melancholy as a result. it reminds me of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, where the bliss of the chronologically earliest scenes (shown last) is overshadowed by the shocking brutality of the chronologically latest scenes (shown first). in both films, you know how fleeting the happiness is, whereas the characters involved do not.

all this floats on a very classically Russian sense of fatalism, a sense that history is something that moves people, not something they shape and control. overall, it's a stunning achievement.

04:37 / 13.02.04

I'm guessing that the camera used two reels at a time. It's filming on one reel and, when a sensor senses that the reel's going to end soon it makes the camera start recording on both the first and second reel. then the first reel ends but the camera's now filming using the second reel. Meanwhile the crew replaces the first reel.

07:43 / 20.02.04

Technically speaking there were not two reels.

They shot it on HiDef - dumping continuously to a Hard-Drive unit that trailed the DP.

This would not be possible on film.
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I liked it a lot. It feels weird after about 45 min. Then weirder. And by the time you're in the ballroom I really felt like something happened.

I don't recommend it to everyone-- and I don't recommend it on the small screen.