Far removed from the razzle-dazzle of Richard Gere’s tapdancing in Chicago and its misleading mini-editing is the splendid artifice of Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark, a 96-minute film shot (by steadicam operator Tilman Büttner of Lola rennt fame) in a single take without cuts. An unprecedented achievement, and not just for Guinness consideration. Rather, Sokurov’s decision to eliminate cuts raises æsthetic and philosophical issues, such as the deleterious effect of Eisensteinian montage on the modern consciousness (issues discussed, for those who saw it, a couple of years ago in Mike Figgis’s film Time Code, which was also shot in one take, from four points of view, though after 15 tries and on digital video).

Sounds daunting, if not onerous, but Sokurov’s tour de force doesn’t pose as much of a distraction to the viewer as the slash-and-blur attack of the aforementioned likely Oscar winner. It is a thoroughly absorbing and uplifting experience, though not as transcendent as some of his darker (this is a wacky romp compared to Mother and Son) works.

Your awareness of the technical achievement soon passes, and the film swiftly draws you into the bewildered consciousness of the anonymous contemporary Russian filmmaker from whose point of view it is shot and whose thoughts, in voiceover narrative, guide it. Visiting St. Petersburg’s vast Hermitage Museum, the former Winter Palace, the unseen protagonist 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. He sees dead people, and his own status isn’t too clear either. He can see and hear them, but they ignore him. A disembodied consciousness, he presses on.

And 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; though a stranger there himself, the marquis has no trouble making himself at home, declaiming opinions that are mostly disdainful of anything Russian or any cultural or political novelties since the Treaty of Utrecht (he’s based on the Marquis de Custine, author of a 19th-century Russian travel book). 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.

War and death loom beyond the walls of the palace, but within this ark the world’s great artworks are preserved from the deluge. The camera caresses a canvas by El Greco of Saints Peter and Paul (with the irrepressible marquis castigating an atheistic contemporary viewer for pretending to understand it) and eavesdrops on a blind visitor’s praises of a Madonna and Child. These artifacts possess both immanence and permanence, and the film’s grand finale, a re-creation of the Great Royal Waltz from 1913, its brilliant gaiety suffused with the melancholy of the empire’s impending doom, is as ephemeral and vital as a breath.

Which is how Sokurov describes the film itself — made " in one breath. " That aspect of Ark may be an innovation, but Sokurov has been toying with similar projects for some time. In Stone (1992), a bewildered visitor to the Chekhov Museum gets acquainted with the ghost of the great man himself; in Oriental Elegy (1990), a disembodied voice journeys to a necropolis; in Elegy of a Voyage (2001), the same voice (Sokurov’s, apparently) travels the world, ending with a stroll through a derelict museum and a close-up of a painting by the 17th-century Dutch artist Peter Slenderer: a moment of time and vision frozen into a work of art.

Ark, though, is not an elegy, it’s the voyage itself. That’s why it doesn’t cut and paste and insert body doubles in the Chicago style. 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. Russian Ark is as genuine and artificial as the Great Royal Waltz of 1913, preserved in all its immediacy for all time.