10 Mind-Blowing Long Takes

To include Russian Ark almost feels unfair to the other entries; they hardly stand a chance. Director Alexander Sokurov and cinematographer Tilman Büttner's radical experiment with period cinema yielded a singular achievement in filmmaking; the entirety of Russian Ark takes place over one, ninety-six-minute long shot. Following a spectral narrator floating through the Winter Palace, Russian Ark ambitiously condenses different periods of Russian history into one shot as he encounters those, both real and fictional, who lived through them.

Filmed in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum through thirty-three different rooms and with over two-thousand extras, Russian Ark's tracking shot took four takes for Büttner to get it right. After three failed takes, dwindling battery power on the camera, and the available daylight hours passing by, Büttner successfully shot the entirety of Russian Ark on the fourth and final take.

Russian Ark is comprised of crowded, complicated scenes, heavily choreographed ball sequences, and more. To coordinate such a sequence in a regular take is a challenge all on its own, but to do so all in one shot with ninety-six minutes of other material to grapple with in all one shot is an entirely different beast. This shot is less mind-blowing than it is absolutely insane.