Just got back from seeing Russian Ark, the movie shot in and around the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersberg in one continuous 90-minute take. I'll start by saying the worst thing I can say about this movie, which is that I'm exactly as impressed now, having seen it, as I was when I first heard about it. Which is to say: if you can appreciate the technical obstacles involved in shooting a period film with well over 800 extras in one take through a museum of more than thirty rooms, you can probably skip the movie itself, which doesn't offer much more than a chance to appreciate over and over again how difficult it must have been to shoot. That's a little harsh, actually; it's a beautifully shot movie full of nice art and costumes, and I'm happy to have seen it, but still...there isn't a plot to speak of, so there are long stretches in the middle when you're basically alone with your thoughts and some lovely paintings on the wall.

What did I think about while I was watching it? Well, mostly about the extended tracking shot as a measure of a director's virtuosity. A list of the most famous long tracking shots in the movie history can be found here. It's an interesting list. As usual, Alfred Hitchcock threw down the gauntlet with Rope, basically a filmed play which is nearly (not entirely) shot without visible edits. The opening shot of Touch of Evil is probably the most famous long tracking shot, and perhaps the only one that serves a real narrative purpose: it opens with a closeup of a bomb being placed into the trunk of a car, then follows the car for three minutes through the street, while introducing much of the cast along the way, until the car explodes. Neat. The whole point of the long tracking shot being, of course, that cinematic time coincides for once with real time, which lends itself nicely to a countdown.

The other shots on the list are mostly instances of pure virtuosity, like the famous Copacabana shot in GoodFellas and the amazing long action take in Hard-Boiled (perhaps the most technically impressive of them all, covering as it does two floors, an elevator, a lot of gunplay, a few plot points, several film speeds and the deaths of several dozen Chinese stuntmen). Yet none of them really use a long take to advance the plot, which is really a shame. There are all kinds of beautiful things you can do with a long take that would be impossible otherwise; it would be a wonderful way to shoot a heist scene, for example, given that so many movie heist scenes make a big deal out of split-second timing (like ducking behind the correct pillar just as the guard passes by on his rounds, or dodging a fixed pattern of laser beams). A Gosford Park-type murder mystery would be a perfect movie to film in one continuous take, given that the logic of the shot should make the location of every character in the house fairly clear to the audience when the fatal shot rings out... And so on.