10 Ridiculous Ways You Won't Believe Films Accomplished Shots

6. Alexander Sokurov Shot The Entirety Of Russian Ark (2002) In A Single 96-Minute Tracking Shot

The single-take movie has apparently been done before - Alfred Hitchcock, for example, was doing it as far back as 1948. But take a closer look at Hitchcock's Rope - actually broken down into ten shots with wily Hitch masking the cuts with sneaky editing, Rope is a masterful film made by a director clever enough to avoid forcing a cameraman to film for 80 minutes straight, and wise enough to gather that an uninterrupted take would be a logistical nightmare (if Jimmy Stewart had put a foot wrong two minutes before the end, it would've been back to square one).

For all his psychological torture and human/bovine comparisons, even Hitchcock wasn't that cruel. We can assume that Russian Ark director Alexander Sokurov, however, is - for his historical drama, Sokurov filmed for 96 minutes non-stop. And this wasn't some static theatre piece, either - Russian Ark was shot in Saint Petersburg's massive Winter Palace, a Steadicam weaving around the building, requiring a heavily orchestrated and minutely prepared cast and crew to follow every step to the detail.

It involved 33 separate rooms of the museum, plus a cast of over 2,000 actors, and it's a wonder DoP and Steadicam operator Tilman Buttner hasn't already received the Hero of the Russian Federation medal for making it through alive.