Filming a long, complicated scene in a single take isn’t a task most directors are up to. After all, it can take hours or even days of rehearsing just to get ten unedited minutes of screen time right. Getting a whole feature-length movie done in just one shot, if one can even imagine such a feat, is even harder. But, even though most films allegedly shot in one take are actually edited to achieve that look, there are still some filmmakers that have managed to make it. However, there aren’t many actual unedited single-shot films out there, and the first one to actually do it without any kind of editing is, in fact, a lot more recent than most people expect it to be. Released in 2002, Russian Ark is the first entirely unedited film to be shot in one single, continuous take.

Directed by critically acclaimed Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov, Russian Ark came out in an era in which digital filmmaking made things easier for directors wanting to achieve the one-shot look with little to no doctoring in the editing room. The movie is the culmination of decades of experimentation around filming tricks and the absence of editing that began all the way back with Alfred Hitchcock. Like most pioneers, Russian Ark had its way paved for it by other adventurers before it. Still, most of the films that precede it are in some way altered to either achieve some other effect or to hide discrete cuts.

‘Russian Ark’s One Long Take Works As a Trip to the Museum

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Shot entirely inside the Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg, known for being the ancient winter palace of the Russian czars, Russian Ark is a trip through the history of both a building and an entire country. The movie is shot as if from the first-person point of view of a mysterious character, played by Sokurov himself, who is displaced in time after an unexplained accident. In the company of a 19th-century diplomat with a very low opinion of Russia and its people, the Marquis de Custine (Serge Dreyden), the narrator takes a trip through different moments of Russian history, from the 18th-century reign of Peter the Great (Maksim Sergeev) to the siege of Leningrad, in World War II. Occasionally, the two main characters jump to the 21st century and talk to people admiring the works of art and the architecture of the museum.

The unedited, first-person POV of Russian Ark makes the movie feel like a virtual tour of a museum chaperoned by the world’s most unappreciative guide: the visits to the Hermitage’s many rooms are often accompanied by the Marquis offensive remarks about Russians. With the museum’s doors opening to scenes like imperial balls, royal family moments, and soldiers taking shelter from combat, the film is also a virtual trip to history itself. In the museum, Sokurov tells us, the past and the present coexist, and walking through the halls of the ancient building is akin to walking through bygone eras. In the final scene, the director's thesis is encapsulated in the image of the museum floating in a stormy ocean: the Hermitage is the ark that safely carries Russian history throughout all the turmoil taking place on the outside.

‘Russian Ark’ Took Four Years To Develop, but Was Shot in Just One Day

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It is a beautiful vision that is well-accomplished by the single-take, first-person approach, that all but places the viewers inside the movie. Achieving this result, as one most likely imagines, was not at all easy. After all, the shooting of Russian Ark involved a group of about 2,000 actors and extras that had to be in perfect sync for a 96-minute take that would see absolutely no editing work apart from the addition of dialogue and a tad bit of doctoring here and there for the digital removal of objects and color correction.

Shot by just one camera operator, director of photography Tilman Büttner, with a special Steadicam system, the film was recorded uncompressed to a hard drive, taking up about one terabyte of space. According to Büttner, he spent seven weeks inside the Hermitage and walked the route of the camera merely five times before it was time to shoot. The filming itself took place in one single day, in which the crew had just four hours of battery power to get it all right. Besides, the museum needed to reopen its doors to the public as soon as possible. Thus, despite having to start over about three times due to mistakes along the way, there was no double take. The weight of the equipment, says Büttner, also stopped them from redoing the shoot: "Because of my physical endurance, I could only do one take. The system I was carrying weighed 35 kilograms [77 pounds]."

Related: Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rope' Is More Than Just Its One-Shot Gimmickry

To transform the Hermitage into the setting it needed to be, with 19th-century ballrooms and 20th-century barricades, the crew had just 36 hours. However, neither this nor the fact that the movie was shot in just one day means that Russian Ark didn’t take time to get ready. The movie’s development, in reality, took about four years, starting all the way back in 1997. Interviewed for the film’s making-of, producer Jens Meurer reveals that he first believed the project to be a lot simpler than it turned out to be. The use of digital technology and the one-day shoot, he recalls, made it seem like a field day for producers. The reality of things, however, couldn’t be more different: "It turned out to be not just a small documentary of life in the Hermitage Museum, but a full-blown feature film," he explains.

Which Movies Paved the Way to ‘Russian Ark’?

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

Perhaps Meurer should’ve taken a clue from the fact that the feat Sokurov was trying to achieve had never been done before. Not only is coordinating entire crews and groups of actors to work in an almost clockwork manner for an hour and a half unimaginably difficult, there are also physical barriers to shooting an entire movie in one take. Said barriers were even higher in 2002, when digital filmmaking was just taking its first few steps. Before the duration of camera batteries posed a problem to Tilman Büttner, the short length of film rolls meant that directors couldn’t do such long takes.

One of the first and most famous experiments with one-shot filmmaking, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 masterpiece Rope, was actually filmed in ten-minute intervals that were later patched together in the editing room. The cuts were hidden on dark spots on the backs of actors or behind pieces of furniture, and performers and crew members had to engage on a delicate ballet to ensure that everything would work out seamlessly on set. Likewise, Andy Warhol’s famous eight hour-long 1964 experimental film Empire, which shows the top floor of the Empire State Building for the span of a night, has a cut every 33 minutes, when the film rolls had to be changed. These cuts are marked by a flash of light on the black-and-white image.

Most movies that are usually thought to be one-shot, such as Birdman and 1917, are actually, just like Rope and Empire, simply edited to look like they were done in a single take. However, this doesn’t mean that Russian Ark is completely alone in its tier, nor that it is 100% unprecedented in what it achieves. In 2000, director Mike Figgis released Timecode, a 93-minute-long movie divided into four real-time, unedited segments that are shown on-screen at the same time. Sound mixing is used to indicate which part of the screen the viewers should be looking at. But while the segments of Timecode are unedited, the movie itself is only made possible by an editing technique that allows the four sequences to play on-screen simultaneously. Furthermore, the dialogue in Timecode is largely improvised, unlike Russian Ark, which is entirely scripted.

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