Russian Ark (Русский ковчег, 2002)

Russian Ark opens with a black screen and the voice of an unnamed man explaining that he's just regaining consciousness after some mysterious accident. Unseen by the audience and voiced by the director, he wanders through the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

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 a companion, "the European", who represents the nineteenth-century traveller the Marquis de Custine and who is visible to the audience. 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.

The film contains Aleksander Sokurov's visual meditations on the history of the Russian people and the lives of their descendants today, an amazing voyage through war, revolution and social upheaval, which has left in its wake all the landmarks of a great culture. Like the biblical Ark, the Hermitage (Winter Palace) has steered a difficult course through the adverse currents of time and tide. A treasure-house of life and art, it is also a testament to the buoyancy of the human spirit.
The Hermitage is to be seen in a new and revealing light in a forthcoming film. In the popular imagination the Hermitage is a living entity, a fabric that breathes Russian history and culture. Generations of the Romanov family actually lived, loved and, in some cases, died in a place they called 'home' for all its rare splendour.
The film was recorded in uncompressed high definition video using a Sony HDW-F900. The information was not recorded and compressed to tape as usual, but uncompressed onto a hard disk which could hold 100 minutes. Four attempts were made to complete the shot; the first three had to be interrupted due to technical faults, but the fourth attempt was completed successfully.
Russian Art is a purely cinematic movie which allows us to take a trip throughout the museum and throughout the history of Russia's last three hundred years.
You can buy Russian Ark: The Masterworks Edition.