Frequently Bought Together
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Product details
|
Reviews
Amazon.co.uk Review
Product Description
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
54 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
St Petersburg as an Ark of Russian Culture,
By
This review is from: Russian Ark [2003] [DVD] (DVD)
Aleksandr Sokurov has created a unique, wondrous masterpiece of a film in his great homage of Russian history and art and the Hermitage Museum. Four years in the planning, a cast of thousands, exquisite reproductions of costumes that span the three hundred years of Russian history, and brilliant cinematography by the German Tilman Buttner, Sokurov has condensed the essence of Russian culture in a 90 minute non-stop 'live' filming within the halls of the Hermitage museum (all 5 palaces known as the winter palaces of the Tsars). The result is an enchanting, bewitching, meandering tour of Russian from the time of Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Pushkin, the Romanovs - Nicholas I and II - to the final ball in the palace the night Tsarist Russia ended. Our tour guide is the off camera voice of Sokurov in conversation with a French Marquis and assorted ghosts of the past as we seamlessly view glimpses of Russia's past, scenes like an actual play that Catherine the Great wrote and watched, the writer Pushkin, the Romanov family at their last supper in the palace and the grand ball that culminates this stage of the glory of Russia. The ballroom scene is resplendent with vast numbers of costumed actors dancing a mazurka to the music (Glinka's mazurka from his opera 'The Life of the Tsar') provided by the Maryinski Orchestra conducted by no less than Valery Gergiev! As the guests finally leave the Hermitage museum the camera focuses on an open window overlooking the sea on which the city of St Peterburg floats. We then know that we have been on an ark of Russian culture for the past 90 minutes - an immeasureably beautiful and sensitive document that has captured all the mystery of Russia's history, presented with tenderness and finesse and with the extraordinary facility using the newest of digital camera technology. This is a magnificent epic film and deserves a wide audience on its own. The additional information provided by a 30 minute "How the film was made" on the DVD is equally informative and graceful. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Russkij Kovcheg (Russian Ark),
By A Customer
This review is from: Russian Ark [2003] [DVD] (DVD)
This Alexander Sokurov feature is one of the most staggering technical achievements in the history of cinema - a single shot lasting 95 minutes while moving through 33 rooms in the world's largest museum, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg (which also encompasses the Winter Palace). Part pageant and museum tour, part theme-park ride and historical meditation, it covers two centuries of czarist Russia as smoothly as it crosses the Hermitage and even periodically moves outside of it, with the offscreen Sorukov engaged in an ongoing dialogue with an on-screen 19th-century French diplomat (apparently suggested by Adolphe, marquis de Custine).Sokurov used close to 2,000 actors and extra and three live orchestras in making what may be the world's only unedited single-take feature as well as the longest Steadicam sequence ever shot. (Reportedly only one previous take of the sequence was even attempted, after lengthy and detailed rehearsals of all the participants, and it apparently failed due to the subdegree temperature outside.) Russian Ark is also the first uncompressed high-definition film recorded on a portable hard-disk system rather than on film or tape before being transferred to 35mm, and, along with Sokurov's earlier innovative experiments with optical distortions and perspective in features such as Whispering Pages (1993) and Mother and Son (1997), it marks him as a kind of 19th-century modernist - a filmmaker who, like Manoel De Oliveira in a very different way, combines an acute sense of the past with a very up-to-date sense of how to convey it. As one critic has suggested, Russian Ark is an anti-October, challenging Sergei Eisenstein's reliance on montage while using the Winter Palace as a gigantic set. All of which is to say that we are only just starting to grasp the dimensions of this formidable achievement, although it is worth adding that the surprising and virtually unprecedented commercial success of this film in the United States strongly indicates that Sokurov's technical mastery is not merely an achievement to be enjoyed by specialists of cinema or Russian history.
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Russkij Kovcheg (Russian Ark),
By
This review is from: Russian Ark [2003] [DVD] (DVD)
This Alexander Sokurov feature is one of the most staggering technical achievements in the history of cinema - a single shot lasting 95 minutes while moving through 33 rooms in the world's largest museum, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg (which also encompasses the Winter Palace). Part pageant and museum tour, part theme-park ride and historical meditation, it covers two centuries of czarist Russia as smoothly as it crosses the Hermitage and even periodically moves outside of it, with the offscreen Sorukov engaged in an ongoing dialogue with an on-screen 19th-century French diplomat (apparently suggested by Adolphe, marquis de Custine).Sokurov used close to 2,000 actors and extra and three live orchestras in making what may be the world's only unedited single-take feature as well as the longest Steadicam sequence ever shot. (Reportedly only one previous take of the sequence was even attempted, after lengthy and detailed rehearsals of all the participants, and it apparently failed due to the subdegree temperature outside.) Russian Ark is also the first uncompressed high-definition film recorded on a portable hard-disk system rather than on film or tape before being transferred to 35mm, and, along with Sokurov's earlier innovative experiments with optical distortions and perspective in features such as Whispering Pages (1993) and Mother and Son (1997), it marks him as a kind of 19th-century modernist - a filmmaker who, like Manoel De Oliveira in a very different way, combines an acute sense of the past with a very up-to-date sense of how to convey it. As one critic has suggested, Russian Ark is an anti-October, challenging Sergei Eisenstein's reliance on montage while using the Winter Palace as a gigantic set. All of which is to say that we are only just starting to grasp the dimensions of this formidable achievement, although it is worth adding that the surprising and virtually unprecedented commercial success of this film in the United States strongly indicates that Sokurov's technical mastery is not merely an achievement to be enjoyed by specialists of cinema or Russian history.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
