It's main claim to fame is having been shot in one long (and truly) unedited take.
However, as I wrote in my review of the film:
Russian Ark (Russkiy Kovcheg) is one of those films more notable for the technical expertise it exhibits (or preens of) than any real artistic merit. It reminds one of Mike Figgis’s 2000 film Timecode, wherein that whole film was supposedly done in four separate single takes, in real time. That claim was debunked by a simple watching of the film, and the film itself was notable for being a screenplay disaster. The four stories, which occupied one fourth of the whole screen the whole time, had volume turned up on one section while the others were backgrounded, and then switched, which made it difficult for the viewer to even stick with whatever tale he preferred. Technically, the film was a mess, and, as there was no real story, just a gimmick, the film bombed critically and financially. Russian Ark, made in 2002 by the infamously somnolent director Alexander Sokurov, has a similar gimmick. While not following four separate stories, it is claimed to have been shot in one continuous take, directly onto a High Definition portable hard drive. It also claims that it was shot over one day, and in real time. While not a technical film expert, I did notice several scenes where the camera passed over black spots, making it the perfect place for an edit to occur, so I tend to believe that the claim of its 87 minute single Steadicam shot are overblown, if not outright false, even though the filmmakers have stated that the completed, unedited film, was done on a fourth attempt by cinematographer Tilman Büttner. It could very well just be a slicker version of Alfed Hitchcock’s more clumsy attempts in Rope.
Like Timecode, it lacks a coherent tale, and is content to just windowshop through Russian history. There is little doubt it is a beautiful and accomplished film. But, it says absolutely nothing and ends on an incredibly pretentious note.
Here is the trailer, which is a bit of a cheat, for it does not really give you a sense of the anomy of the film:
Here is a longer clip that gives you more of a sense of what the film really is. For most it will be bad, sort of like a museum trip with an inexperienced docent as your guide:
All in all, a film worth seeing, I guess, if only to see another way in which a film can go wrong for, surely, no film has ever quite failed as spectacularly, and specifically, as Russian Ark.
