Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Russian Ark

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Posted by Gerard S. Cohen (Member # 994) on 02-07-2003, 08:31 PM:

At the Kew Gardens Cinema,Queens, NYC. (Now a 5-plex Art Cinema.)

Shot in a single day in a continuous take with a digital camera on a steady-cam, this Russian/German production explores the rooms of the Hermitage palace and royal art museum. More a pageant/documentary/museum-tour than a feature film, the only linking plot device used the ghost of a man killed in a carriage accident, and the ghost of a French diplomat/writer as our guides through history. The Frenchman is by turns cynical, chauvenistic and admiring of the artistic tastes of the Hermitage patrons. We learn a little of Peter and Catherine's
tastes in Petrograd/Leningrad/Petersburg, and glimpse these historical characters and some more modern ones, such as three generations of Hermitage directors, and evesdrop on their conversation about how they saved the treasures during the siege of Leningrad.

The film begins in the candle-lit basement corridors, and the
dim orange colors give way toward the end to a brightly-lit dance and concert in the Czar Nicholas Great Hall, where seemingly thousands of brilliantly costumed revelers applaud.
The music in Dolby filled the auditorium very well.

I found the film slow-moving but beautiful. However, the lack of a story disappointed me. As a child, I shared the common fantasy of "what if I could become invisible?", and this lends some interest to the antics of the two ghosts, but I never learned if the Frenchman was supposed to be a real, identifiable character or just the ghost of a generic gallic skeptic. The principal ghost represents the viewer. Both sort of disappear at the end, but the real subject, the Hermitage "ark" of cultural treasures and the historical soul of Russia, lingers on in the mind...
Gerard

Posted by John Wilson (Member # 269) on 02-10-2003, 09:19 PM:

Saw a trailer online for this the other day and am very much looking foward to it. How did they get around the end-of-reel thing with it being one shot? Did they do the old Hitchcock 'moving-in-to-an-extreme-closeup-of-someone's-back' deal or something?

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 02-10-2003, 10:00 PM:

Shot with a 24P HD digital camera and special recorder.

Posted by Mathew Molloy (Member # 666) on 02-11-2003, 01:32 AM:

The print we ran had seen multiple Film Done Wrong platters/6k's already and that one long shot looked more like six separate shots due to the missing frames.

Posted by Mark Ogden (Member # 43) on 02-11-2003, 08:11 AM:

I tend to think that the Frenchman, or the ‘Marquis” as he called himself, was most likely a real person, as he interacted with too many other people during the course of the film to have been invisible himself. He was also the only person who could see the phantom of the artist (the POV of the camera). At the end of the movie they wind up at the last ball thrown by Tzar Nicholas before his assassination at the start of the Bolshevik Revolution, and despite his previous cynicism is so enchanted and saddened that he decides to stay behind rather than face the future. Of course the question is, were they moving back in forth through time, or was time moving back and forth around them?

What was also interesting was watching the amount of people who glanced at the camera when they shouldn’t have acknowledged its presence. One actor at the ball actually turns to walk away and almost runs into the lens before backing off. Also, as the guests leave the ball and exit down the grand staircase, look for the actress who trips and almost goes over before steadying herself on the guy in front of her. I guess not everything can go perfectly, but it sure came close.

Russian Ark was shot with the Sony CineAlta in uncompressed HD using specially built hard disk recorders that the Steadycam operator carried on his back during the shoot. Iris and focus were pulled via RF by an assistant who followed him around. Another assistant stayed one room ahead of the camera and radioed f-stop readings back to the camera group. There is a lengthy article on the filming in the January American Cinematographer.

Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 04-14-2003, 08:44 PM:

I was really looking forward to this one. It certainly is an amazing technical feat to shoot a full-length feature in one take. Highest praise must go to the cinematographer and the assistant who carried around the array of hard drives.

This thing is S--L--O--W. I started looking at my watch about 20 minutes into the picture. I kept expecting to be amazed, but I found myself just bored.

I would suggest that, should you choose to see this film, that you do some research on the characters you will encounter along the way. Reading the program notes helped figure out a few things.

I found the "Frenchman" annoying. He floats in and out of reality. There is even a short section in pretend-slow-motion that was very strange.

If you like history, or beautiful art work, you might like this film. If not, I think you might be in for a slow ride.

Posted by Michael Brown (Member # 890) on 05-29-2003, 03:25 PM:

Did I not understand because the plot was too complicated or because there just wasn't a plot?

It's a shame that in all the excitment about the technology, they forgot about a plot and story.

Take a good book with you. [Big Grin]

Ok, you want to set up a single 90 minute shot huh?, but please in the future - point the camera at something interesting.

[ 06-14-2003, 04:00 PM: Message edited by: Michael Brown ]