The first movie shot entirely in one take
The technique of stealthily editing together a series of long, unbroken takes to present the illusion of a movie being comprised of only one shot has been around for decades, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that cinema got around to genuinely doing it for the first time.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope stitched together a string of ten-minute takes back in 1948 to give off the impression it was all captured in one seamless motion, with Norwegian drama Utøya: July 22 took a third-person perspective to add further immersion to its one-shot stylings by placing the audience in the midst of the summer camp massacre that shocked the world.
Sam Mendes’ 1917 used its editing trickery to plunge viewers right into the heat of wartime battle, with Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman deploying it to further explore the psyche of Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thomson. They’re all excellent movies, but 2002’s Russian Ark was the one that made cinematic history by unfolding entirely in one take with no cuts whatsoever.
A fantastical historical drama, Alexander Sokurov’s ambitious enterprise tracks an unnamed narrator and protagonist as they walk through Saint Petersburg’s Winter Palace. As he crosses from one room to the next, the character encounters real-life and fictional figures plucked from 300 years of history while he’s accompanied on the journey by ‘The European’, an approximation of 19th-century French travel writer Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, also known as the Marquis de Custine.
Shot entirely on location in the Winter Palace, the fourth wall is only a passing concern as the narrator and the European sometimes stop and talk to other characters but just as regularly continue about their business with nobody acknowledging them. A one-day production schedule sounds like a dream for any cast and crew, but it took precision-engineered planning and pitch-perfect logistics to make it happen.
On December 23rd, 2001, Sokurov weaved throughout 33 rooms of the Russian State Hermitage Museum with upwards of 2,000 actors and a trio of orchestras to consider, and it didn’t happen on the first try, either. The first attempt didn’t make it past five minutes, and after two more failures, the battery on the solitary camera being used on Russian Ark was in danger of running low.
With daylight beginning to run out, too, the fourth and final take captured the entire 87-minute Steadicam sequence, with post-production stepping in to remove visible cables and equipment from the shots, add in a sprinkling of visual effects, colour correct the image, and alter the focus in certain moments.
Recording the sound separately did make matters easier for the crew, but only slightly. Still, it’s an incredible achievement that an entire movie – especially a period piece with fantasy elements – required only four attempts to shoot the whole thing in a single take, securing Russian Ark a place in the history books for good measure.
