Russian Ark (Russian: Русский ковчег, Russkij Kovcheg) is a 2002 historical drama film directed by Alexander Sokurov. It was filmed entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum using a single 96-minute Steadicam sequence shot. The film was entered into the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.^[2]

Plot[link]

An unnamed narrator wanders through the Winter Palace (now the main building of Russian State Hermitage Museum) in Saint Petersburg. The narrator implies that he has died in some horrible accident 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 "the European", who represents the nineteenth-century French traveller, the Marquis de Custine (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, they go completely unnoticed).

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. The narrator (whose point of view is always in first-person) meets another spectral but visible outsider, "the European", and follows him through numerous rooms of the Palace. Each room manifests a different period of Russian history; however the periods are not in chronological order.

Featured are Peter the Great harassing one of his generals, a 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 Joseph Stalin; and a desperate Leningrader making his own coffin during the 900-day siege of the city during World War II.

A grand ball follows, featuring music by Mikhail Glinka, with many hundreds of 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 of the palace.

The narrator then leaves the building through a side exit and sees an endless ocean, but does not look back or see the building, which can be interpreted as an ark preserving Russian culture as it floats in the sea of time.

Cast[link]

• Alexander Sokurov as Narrator
• Sergei Dreiden as The European (Marquis de Custine)
• Mariya Kuznetsova as Catherine the Great
• Marksim Sergeyev as Peter the Great
• Anna Aleksakhina as Alexandra Fyodorovna
• Vladimir Baranov as Nicholas II

Production[link]

The film displays 33 rooms of the museum, which are filled with a cast of over 2,000 actors and 3 orchestras. Russian Ark was recorded in uncompressed high definition video using a Sony HDW-F900. The information was not recorded compressed to tape as usual, but uncompressed onto a hard disk which could hold 100 minutes which was carried behind the cameraman as he traveled from room to room, scene to scene. Three attempts were made to complete the shot; the first two had to be interrupted owing to technical faults, but the third (and final chance to complete the shot owing to time constraints) was completed successfully. The shot was executed by Tilman Büttner, the Director of Photography/Steadicam Operator, on 23 December 2001.

In a 2002 interview, Büttner noted 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."^[3] Lighting Directors of Photography on the film were Bernd Fischer and Anatoli Radionov.^[4] The director later drew a distinction between the whole project and the achievements of Büttner by 'rejecting', by letter,^[5] Büttner's nomination for a European Film Academy award, believing that only the whole film should gain an award.

Background[link]

The narrator's guide, referred to as "the European" in the film, is based on the Marquis de Custine, who visited Russia in 1839 and wrote a widely read book about his visit. A few biographical elements from Custine's life are shown in the film. Like the European, the Marquis' mother was friends with the Italian sculptor Canova and he himself was very religious. Throughout his book, La Russie en 1839, Custine mocks Russian civilization as a thin veneer of Europe on an Asiatic soul; in the film, this is why the European makes comments about Russia being a theater and the people he meets being actors. The Marquis' family fortune came from a porcelain works, hence the European's interest in the Sèvres porcelain waiting for the diplomatic reception. At the end of the film, which depicts the last imperial ball in 1913, the European appears to accept Russia as a European nation.

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 organisation behind the making of the film.

Reception[link]

Box office[link]

The film was not a huge commercial success, though as an arthouse film it performed strongly in many territories, such as the UK, Japan, Korea, Argentina and especially the US, where it remains one of the most successful Russian or German movies of the last decades (it's a German-Russian co-production). The film grossed $3,011,013 in the United States and Canada, with $3,674,735 internationally, for a worldwide total of $6,685,748.^[1]

Critical reviews[link]

Russian Ark received high critical acclaim. Roger Ebert wrote about the film: "Apart from anything else, this is one of the best-sustained ideas I have ever seen on the screen.... the effect of the unbroken flow of images (experimented with in the past by directors like Hitchcock and Max Ophüls) is uncanny. If cinema is sometimes dreamlike, then every edit is an awakening. Russian Ark spins a daydream made of centuries."^[6]

Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an 88% "fresh" rating; the consensus states: "As successful as it is ambitious, Russian Ark condenses three centuries of Russian history into a single, uninterrupted, 87-minute take."^[7] On Metacritic, which uses an average of critics' reviews, the film has an 86/100 rating, indicating "universal acclaim".^[8]

The film was placed at 84 on Slant Magazine's best films of the 2000s.^[9] In a poll of 500 films held by Empire Magazine, it was voted 358th Greatest Movie of all time.^[10]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Russian Ark at the Internet Movie Database
• Russian Ark at AllRovi
• Russian Ark at Box Office Mojo
• Russian Ark at Rotten Tomatoes
• Russian Ark at Metacritic
• Russian Ark homepage