Russian Ark

Russian Ark (Русский ковчег) is a 2002 movie by Russia director Alexander Sokurov. It was filmed using a single 90-minute Steadicam sequence shot. An unnamed narrator, unseen by the audience and voiced by the director, wanders through the Winter Palace (now the main building of Russian State Hermitage Museum) in St. Petersburg. The narrator implies that he has died and is a ghost drifting through the palace. In each room, he encounters various real and fictional people from various time periods in the city's three-hundred-year history. He is accompanied by a companion, "the European" (played by Sergei Dreiden), who represents the nineteenth-century traveller the Marquis de Custine, and who is visible to the audience. The fourth wall is repeatedly broken and re-erected; at times the narrator-director and the companion interact freely with the other performers, and at other times, they go completely unnoticed. The film begins on a winter's day with the arrival by horse drawn carriage... full article at wikipedia