Trailer
Plot summary
Almost nobody in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg can see the man who wanders its rooms, a man who has just regained consciousness with no memory of who he is. One person does notice him: a man in black, a 19th-century French aristocrat who wrote scathingly about Russia, whom the wanderer takes to calling the European. The European regards the Russians they pass as players on a stage, unable to make beauty the way Europeans do. The wanderer, oddly, carries knowledge of the present day. The pair move through the palace and its grounds, and the rooms around them open onto different periods of the country's history.
Cast
- Mikhail Piotrovskyas Himself (Hermitage Director)
- Oleg Khmelnitskyas Himself
- Artyom Strelnikovas Talented Boy
- Tamara Kurenkovaas Herself (Blind Woman)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Russian Ark (2002)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Russian Ark was attempted four times; the first attempt failed at the five-minute mark, and after two more failures the crew had battery power left for only one final take, with the four hours of daylight also nearly gone.
- The film was recorded in uncompressed high-definition video on a Sony HDW-F900, its material going not compressed onto tape as usual but onto a hard disk that could hold 100 minutes, carried behind the cameraman as he moved from room to room.
- Director Alexander Sokurov rejected cinematographer Tilman Büttner's nomination for a European Film Academy award, believing that only the whole film should gain an award.
- Cinematographer Tilman Büttner said the sound had to be recorded separately because he would curse every time he or someone else made a mistake in a take, and that would have ended up in the film.
- In post-production the single take had cables and film equipment removed, snow and fog composited in, the image stabilised and colour-corrected, and the whole film dynamically reframed and at moments time-warped; editor Patrick Wilfert spent several weeks on it using Discreet Logic's Inferno system.
- The narrator's guide "the European" is based on the book by the Marquis de Custine, a French aristocrat who visited Russia in 1839 and whose La Russie en 1839 mocked Russian civilization as a thin veneer of Europe on an Asiatic soul.
