Alexander Sokurov's one-shot movie, approximately ninety minutes in duration, a digital-video Steadicam snaking through the bowels and galleries of the Hermitage Museum, down its hallways and staircases, out onto its snow-covered grounds, with never a single edit, notwithstanding any reel changes that might manufacture an illusion of a cut: one shot, one movie. There's some narrative content as well: an unseen and apparently invisible narrator (a surrogate for Sokurov?), seeing with the eye of the camera, and accompanying an 18th- or 19th-century (or both) black-garbed figure, sometimes addressed as "Europe," on a peregrination through Russia's distant history -- though in one gallery they surface suddenly in the present day, to the consternation of the overdressed companion. The fictional or science-fictional element (time-travel subdivision) renders the movie all but useless as a tour of the Hermitage ("This seems like the Vatican. Is that where we are?"). Very occasionally an individual painting will be pointed out and commented upon, but even then we will not be accorded a good look at it. The musing, murmuring, muted tone of the discourse tends to discourage and defeat the spectator's attentiveness. And the DV image -- the drabness, the dullness, the murkiness, the mushiness, the smoggy orangey umbery pall -- is not apt to reclaim his attention. In the end, no matter how impressive it may be as a job of planning, scouting, charting, staging, and timing, this single shot -- as trumpeted as any Evel Knievel motorcycle stunt -- plows on so long that you can lose your initial interest in it, forget to notice that it is all one shot, remember to notice again, forget again, notice, not care. The very technology that now enables a one-shot movie to go on for ninety minutes also, unavoidably, devalues it. More literally: the technology that facilitates it makes it facile. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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