Grasping Russia's past

Round the Hermitage Museum in 99 minutes flat. Doesn't sound too revolutionary? Believe me, that's not how it plays. Russian director Alexandr Sokurov takes us on the most brilliantly devised tourist path that the new technology can provide - in one single, uninterrupted take via high-definition digital video.

What marvellous preplanning, precise choreography, endless patience and nearunbearable breath-holding this must have taken.

Stanley Kubrick used to say to me that the art of cinema, like the art of war, lay in getting your armies on to the field of battle: what you did with them then was easy.

Sokurov is a Napoleon of cinema in this sense: 900 actors, 1,000 extras, three orchestras, all on a labyrinthine battlefield of 1,300 metres.

The final sequences of Russian aristocracy crowding out of their grand ball into harsh daylight (and, it's implicit, their own extinction as a class) are like the emptying of history's stadium.

I have never seen anything like it before. It beats all the vaunts of Imax for size, yet it is frequently on a scale of intimacy only a camera that can move from a tour d'horizon to an intimate close-up in one easy movement could accomplish.

Sokurov's alter ego is a French marquis, a 19th century diplomat, a time traveller who ends up in St Petersburg's Hermitage Mus eum, a one-time palace of the tsars.

He wanders through its glories, historical and contemporary, meeting people ancient and modern, genuinely perplexed at first, as if moonstruck by his soft landing on this bizarre planet, but soon finding his bearings, sometimes remaining invisible and sometimes engaging with officious guards, friendly visitors, pedantic curators and aristocrats off to the last grand soirée of Nicholas and Alexandra.

HE also talks back to the unseen film-maker and occasionally proves an awkward, eccentric outsider: snuffling and sniffing the pigment or running his fingers over great paintings by Van Dyck, Rubens or El Greco; quizzing the rows of Canova sculptures and finding them not up to scratch.

He impulsively flirts with a lady, intrudes on a vast showpiece-of imperial pomp and pageantry at which the Shah of Persia's grandson makes formal apology to the Tsar for the murder of some Russian subjects in the emperor's capital, and finally joins joyously in the dashing mazurkas with their heady stop-go rhythms and galloping bursts of speed.

At first, you are watching how it is done, how Sokurov directs the advance and retreat of the Steadicam under Tilman Buttner's control. Then you forget technique and go with the flow. Film has been called "a ribbon of dreams". Never has the description been so apposite.

As for the title, the final shot doesn't return us to the street where we entered. Instead, through the great doors we see only the blackness of night and an ominously turbulent winter seascape.