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Russian Ark
Русский ковчег
2002 · Film · 99 min
Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov
A ghost and a French marquis wander through the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, encountering scenes from many different periods of its history.
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12 comments on Hacker News
So in the context of this specific goal—shooting a feature film in a single unbroken shot—digital was a pain in the ass, but this was close to impossible to do on film, and Russian Ark was the first to ever do it, on any medium.
Simply shooting a feature film digitally was not that complicated by this time, or at least it didn't have to be. The Sony CineAlta F900 was the camera developed to shoot the Star Wars prequels, and was revolutionary at the time, became the gold standard for years, and very convenient relative to film. Tons of things started to be shot in 1080p around that time, and it was very nice to work with. Collateral was insane because they wanted to shoot raw and at high frame rates. Russian Ark needed a single unbroken shot in a form factor that one human would be capable of holding for that long. Aside from very specific and/or boundary-pushing needs, the arrival of the F900 in 2000 was effectively when digital was more convenient than shooting film while also meeting the technical requirements of high-end production (though it was many more years before most cinematographers agreed that the image quality was comparable)
I saw Russian Ark! Definitely a piece of art made by film buffs for film buffs; impressive to see, but far more impressive when you understand the amount of work that went into it.
I'm wondering why people would have chosen to do early digital if it was so inconvenient. When did the cost and flexibility advantages start to really kick in?
Collateral was not the first fully digitally shot feature film. In fact, Collateral was not even fully digital. (The first major, all-digital, HD feature film was Attack of the Clones, but there were other fully-digital feature films before that, just not as major, and/or not always HD. Robert Rodriguez' Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001) was fully digital.)
But you are right that Collateral did do something very new/unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in higher frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates in a film. (This might not sound like much, but until this time, pretty much every film was 24fps for the previous eighty years and it had a very specific look that everyone's eyes/brains were conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.)
And the other thing that was very interesting thing about it (though not something very visible to a viewer) was that it was shot on the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera[1], which was the first major attempt at shooting not just digital, but very close to "raw". It was also a huge pain in the ass. The camera itself was massive, but due to the bandwidth, it recorded to an external storage array that had to be pushed alongside it at all times, and that was itself about the size of a shopping cart. (This device was hilariously referred to as the "Director's Friend.")
In 2002, my friend and I, both cinema nerds in high school, drove an hour away to the nearest theater showing a film called Russian Ark[2]. Why were journeying to to see a strange little Russian film where a never-named character walks the viewer through Russian history? Because just like each episode of the recently-released Netflix show Adolescence, this entire film was a single, very long, very complicated, unbroken shot. One shot. No trickery, no cuts that were just hidden to the audience, one shot, through streets, buildings, snow, ballrooms with a couple hundred choreographed actors, it was crazy. This is easy now compared to how it was back then.
As we've now established with Collateral (and this film predates it by 2 years), digital cinematography existed, but the storage was a real problem, the power was a real problem. Since this film was one shot, it needed almost 100 minutes of both, unbroken. And since it was a very complex moving shot, it had to be operated handheld. So essentially they had an incredibly ripped director of photography who operated the camera on a steadicam the whole time while a giant array of daisychained batteries and hard drives were lugged behind him. And they did it something like 100 times until they had a few takes where there were no mistakes.
None of this really means anything to anyone anymore, but at the time, to cinematography nerds at least, this stuff was all absolutely insane!
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040103133953/http://www.thomsongrassvalley.com/products/cameras/viper/pdf/viper_ds.pdf
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark
I'm not really into experimentalism, I want to be entertained and that's about it. So said, I watched Dogville and appreciated it as an experiment, though I'd not want to watch it again.
If you like pushing boundaries then Dogville, and may I also suggest Russian Ark; an odd film done in one take.
A little cheer for Russian Ark. I liked it. Done as said, in one take.
Spot the bit well into the film where the guy nearly drops the book, you can feel the oncoming-but-narrowly-averted pain.
I think this is an exaggeration. Short/Long takes are an artistic decision. We have recent movies that are a few long takes (sometime pretending to be a single take) 1917, Birdman, Russian Ark (true single take) all shot in recent years. Same with TV: True Detective has a famous long take scene, Mr. Robot, BCS.
The most spectacular single shot film I’ve ever watched is Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov. I have the dvd but it’s worth seeking in any available format.
There's also entire movies of one take, Russian Ark for one.
«The film’s sheer scale and ambition elicited gasps of awe upon its release in 2002. Four years in development, it was the first feature to be shot in one continuous, HD Steadicam shot covering more than one and a half kilometres. Utilising more than 850 professional actors, 1000 extras and spanning three centuries of Russian history, the film is set in a museum which holds several million artworks. Russian Ark was, as Sokurov has stated, an attempt to make a film “in one breath”.»
Have you considered looking towards foreign films, which may have a different way of telling a story? Some were popular in the US, like Amélie and Pan's Labyrinth, and of course there's the Academy Award winners and nominees for Best Foreign Language Film.
Less popular ones include those listed at http://the-artifice.com/best-foreign-films-last-15-years/ , like Run Lola Run/Lola rennt, Noi the Albino/Nói albínói, Moolaadé, Second Skin/Segunda Piel and The Celebration/Festen.
No Hollywood film has covered female genital mutilation, which is the topic of Moolaadé, and Festen is part of the Dogme 95 movement,"to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology."
There's also Russian Ark/Русский ковчег, which is a single, uninterrupted, 87-minute take through centuries of Russian history while going through the Winter Palace at the Hermitage Museum. Or any number of other lists of notable foreign films, like http://www.salon.com/2015/01/24/7_must_see_foreign_films_that_didnt_get_an_oscar_nod_partner/ or http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-foreign-language-films-decade-so-far .
That's certainly true. Film buffs and insiders lovelong complex single-take shots (the opening of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is still a high-water-mark of technical craft), but over the length of a whole film (eg Russian Ark, where magazine changes in the camera were done when ducking behind actors or furniture) it become exhausting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark just took that to the extreme and made the whole movie in one long shot. It is interesting to watch just for that effect. The content is only interesting if you care or are familiar with Russian history.