Russian Ark
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Russian Ark - A unique journey through time through the Hermitage |
| Original title | Русский ковчег ( Russki Kowtscheg ) |
| Country of production | Russia / Germany |
| original language | Russian |
| Publishing year | 2002 |
| length | 96 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 0 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Alexander Sokurov |
| script | Anatoly Nikiforow Boris Chaimski Svetlana Proskurina |
| production | Andrei Derjabin Jens Meurer Karsten Stöter |
| music | Sergei Yevtushenko |
| camera | Tilman Buettner |
| cut | Sergei Ivanov Patrick Wilfert Stefan Ciupek Betina Kuntzsch |
Russian Ark - A unique journey through the Hermitage (original title Russki Kowtscheg , German Russian Ark ) is a German-Russian film from 2002. Director Alexander Sokurov made the film in only one setting turn.
content
In Russian Ark an unnamed and not shown narrator wanders through the Winter Palace (now a Hermitage building ) and encounters numerous real and fictional characters from the last three hundred years of Russian history . The narrator is accompanied by the Marquis de Custine , a French nobleman who actually traveled to Russia in 1839.
Technical background
The film consists of a single ninety minute with Steadicam filmed setting , in the thirty-three rooms of the museum happened and become life-staged over two thousand actors, most of them extras.
Filming permission for the Hermitage had not been granted since the days of Sergei Eisenstein . The Hermitage normally only closes one day a year at Christmas, Sokurov and the producers persuaded the museum management to interrupt visitor traffic for another day, December 23, 2001. During this time, the rooms had to be lit in a way that was suitable for films and extensive redecorations had to be carried out in order to cover modern installations. The dismantling took almost as long as the assembly. The time window for the entire shoot was therefore no more than two hours.
In order to master the great technical challenge of being able to record the film in one shot and without interruption, a special hard disk recorder (df-cineHD) was used, which was connected to the camera (Sony HDW-F900) by cable (HD-SDI) . The df-cineHD was developed by the Cologne company director's friend and individually adapted and made portable for the shoot (see illustration). At the time, there was no other system that could meet the requirements. (The Sony HDW-F900 camcorder could record a maximum of 45 minutes on tape). The data was written on eight hard drives (Raid 0) at the same time so that the high data rate could be achieved. One risk during the recording was the strain on the hard drives from the constant movement, since if one hard drive had failed, the entire film would have been unusable.
When the cameraman Tilman Büttner interrupted the recording three times after about five to ten minutes each due to various errors, the next attempt had to be successful, because the battery life of the camera was only sufficient for one further attempt at this point. The eight-person filming team wandered through the army of extras who had no opportunity to rehearse their set-up on the original set. They covered a distance of more than one kilometer. Extensive and, in some places, highly demanding dialogue scenes had to be done right from the start. The likelihood of further breakdowns therefore seemed very high.
The HDTV recording from Russian Ark is the first recording of a feature film directly on hard drive in film history.
The sound recording was made after the fact, as a simultaneous recording was classified as too risky.
Awards
Russian Ark won a total of eight film awards and received nine nominations.
Web links
- Russian Ark in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Official English website ( Memento of January 1, 2007 on the Internet Archive )
- Interview with the cameraman Tilman Büttner ( memento from January 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive )