Russian Ark is an amazing achievement. It is a tribute by director Alexander Sokurov to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The entire film is one single shot. It’s a hundred minutes, which is the most they could fit on the biggest hard drive they could get to record to. The film features more than eight hundred actors. Perhaps most amazingly of all, they only actually had four hours in the museum to do the take. They apparently rehearsed for four months beforehand.

To watch, Russian Ark is dreamlike, the steady movement of the camera back and forth lulls and involves you. It follows a French Marquis and a ghost as they move around the salons of the museum. Constantly shifting in time and space, we glimpse a Russian upper class at it’s most lavish and ornate as well as more modern figures. It is a beautiful act of choreography that also manages to communicate a lot of Russian history through the living record that is the Hermitage. The Hermitage, also called the Winter Palace, is sumptuous and gigantic, it’s interiors were created by the Tsars and today house a vast repository of objects. In a hundred minutes the museum barely hints at having an end, indeed the spaces get progressively more vast and incredible. The final scene shows the progression of hundreds of people in sumptuous costume down a gigantic staircase and along a corridor that must half a mile long.

It really has to be seen to be believed.