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Russian Ark [DVD] [2003] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]
 
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Russian Ark [DVD] [2003] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

DVD ~ Sergei Dontsov
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)

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Region 1 encoding (requires a North American or multi-region DVD player and NTSC compatible TV. More about DVD formats.)

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Russian Ark [DVD] [2003] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]
87% buy the item featured on this page:
Russian Ark [DVD] [2003] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC] 3.8 out of 5 stars (22)
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Product details

  • Actors: Sergei Dontsov, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy, Mikhail Piotrovsky, David Giorgobiani
  • Directors: Aleksandr Sokurov
  • Writers: Aleksandr Sokurov, Anatoli Nikiforov, Boris Khaimsky, Svetlana Proskurina
  • Producers: Alla Tyaglova, Alla Verlotsky, Andrey Deryabin
  • Format: Anamorphic, Colour, Dolby, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
  • Language Russian
  • Subtitles: English, French
  • Region: Region 1 (US and Canada DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: Unrated (US MPAA rating. See details.)
  • Studio: Fox Lorber
  • DVD Release Date: 9 Sep 2003
  • Run Time: 99 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B00009NHAT
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 47,539 in DVD (See Bestsellers in DVD)

Reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review

Russian master Alexander Sokurov has tapped into the very flow of history itself for the flabbergasting Russian Ark. Thanks to the miracles of digital video, Sokurov (and cinematographer Tilman Buttner) uses a single, unbroken, 90-minute shot to wind his way through the Hermitage in St Petersburg--the repository of Russian art and the former home to royalty. Gliding through time, we glimpse Catherine II, modern-day museumgoers, and the doomed family of Nicholas II. History collapses on itself, as the opulence of the past and the horrors of the 20th century collide, and each door that opens onto yet another breathtaking gallery is another century to be heard from. The movie climaxes with a grand ball and thousands of extras, prompting thoughts of just how crazy Sokurov had to be to try a technical challenge like this--and how far a distance we've travelled, both physically and spiritually, since the movie began. --Robert Horton

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Customer Reviews

22 Reviews
5 star:
 (10)
4 star:
 (7)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:
 (4)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.8 out of 5 stars (22 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Russkij Kovcheg (Russian Ark), 14 May 2005
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.

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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Russkij Kovcheg (Russian Ark), 9 Jun 2005
By John Corbett - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
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.

Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars St Petersburg as an Ark of Russian Culture, 16 Sep 2003
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
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!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Technical Achievement - OK as spectacle
I bought this film as it seemed an intriguing concept. The whole 90 or so minutes shot continuously without editing. Read more
Published 6 months ago by FelixP

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful to look at, just a little shallow
Russian Ark has been promoted as a milestone in cinema history, as the first movie to have been made in a single shot. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Andres C. Salama

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and beautiful
There's been enough said about how this film is shot in one take, and Sokurov justifies this by saying that the film is like one breath, taking in 300 years of Russian history,... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Ian Shine

2.0 out of 5 stars Well, it's different...
Sorry , but I didn't rate "Russian Ark" particularly highly. This film merely consists of two people wandering at random around an ornate St Petersburg museum colliding with... Read more
Published 20 months ago by L. Davidson

4.0 out of 5 stars A Glimpse of Russian Art, Culture, and History
This awe-inspiring film by Alexander Sokurov was filmed at the Museum of the Hermitage, former palace of the Tsars in St Petersburg, Russia. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Erika Borsos

5.0 out of 5 stars A unique, great film
A 90-minute movie centered on St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum, filmed in one unbroken take by a digital steadicam, didn't send a lot of Americans racing to buy tickets when it... Read more
Published on 15 Aug 2007 by C. O. DeRiemer

1.0 out of 5 stars Poetry that stuttered
This has to rank as one of the most pointless films in cinematic history. Okay , I agree a single take is amazing but the content and the dialogue is bizarre. Read more
Published on 15 Jan 2007 by Michael Dun

1.0 out of 5 stars Russian Ark
Although this film was recommended by a true movie buff and an old friend, my husband, a Russian speaker with long experience of the country, watched it with me for half an hour... Read more
Published on 1 Jun 2005 by Barbara Ambrose

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb.
I've never seen a film like this. One take, a cast of hundreds, phenomenal scenery, and a huge amount of planning matched only by the ambition of those behind the camera. Read more
Published on 9 May 2005

4.0 out of 5 stars Watch this only if you are fully awake :)
Filmed in a single take, this movie allows the Hermitage to speak about Russia, specially its culture and history. Read more
Published on 21 Feb 2005 by bel_78

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