RUSSIAN ARK (2002). Shot (by steadicam operator Tilman Büttner of Lola rennt fame) in a single take without cuts, Aleksandr Sokurov's film raises æsthetic and philosophical issues, such as the deleterious effect of Eisensteinian montage on the modern consciousness. Visiting St. Petersburg's vast Hermitage Museum, the former Winter Palace, the unseen protagonist (Sokurov in voiceover) has slipped into a limbo where the vivid, elaborately costumed ghosts of three centuries of the Russian past haunt the rococo corridors and ballrooms in a kind of Last Year at Marienbad made for the History Channel. There he encounters a kindred spirit: a 19th-century French marquis (Sergei Dontsov) with whom he can communicate and who becomes his testy Vergil in this netherworld. Together the pair witness historical episodes both famous and obscure: Nicholas I (Yuli Zhurin) accepting an apology from ambassadors of the Persian shah for the killing of a Russian emissary, Catherine the Great (Maria Kuznetsova) rushing through the snow looking for a place to pee, and an unknown carpenter constructing coffins for the invisible stacked dead of the Great War. In the film's grand finale, a re-creation of the Great Royal Waltz from 1913, it makes a difference that the hundreds of extras all hit their mark and that when hundreds of dancers whirled and spun, it was all filmed in one take, just as it happened. Cinema, Sokurov seems to be arguing, is not the manufacture of jolting stimuli but the recording and preservation of time, of reality, a reality that in this case is already a work of art. In Russian with English subtitles. (96m)

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