I'm a sucker for plays and movies and novels that deal in any way with time travel. And looking back on my childhood cultural diet it's no wonder: when I was six the movie based on H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" came out, when I was eight "A Wrinkle in Time" was published, and when I was twelve the TV series "Time Tunnel" premiered. I loved them all.

So it's no wonder that the film I've been urging everybody I know to see for the last year is "Russian Ark." There's no time machine in "Russian Ark," no dialogue about warps in the space-time continuum. The movie doesn't even really have a plot. Instead, the two protagonists, a bewildered modern filmmaker and a cynical 19th century French diplomat, wander through time as they wander the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. We follow along as they stumble across a dozen different tantalizing loose ends from the last century and a half of Russian history.

"Russian Ark" is fascinating and strange and moving and gorgeous, staggeringly rich with sound and image and ideas. It is literally -- to use the overused current epithet -- awesome. The filming in St. Petersburg was itself an extraordinary technical feat. For starters, it wasn't "filmed" at all, but shot digitally, on a computer hard drive. And the entire 90-minute movie consists of a single, continuous, unedited, incredibly elaborate shot. On one December day in 2001, the director Alexander Sokurov said "action," and 90 minutes later, when he said "cut," his amazing movie was done.

Sokurov's SteadiCam glides though 33 different rooms of the Hermitage, among more than 2000 actors and extras, every one of them dressed in ball gowns and uniforms and cloaks and frock coats from three different centuries.

We see the actual masterpieces hanging in the museum's galleries -- the Michelangelos, the Rembrandts, the El Grecos and Rubenses. Actors playing czars and czarinas briefly appear -- Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Nicholas the 1st, Nicholas the 2nd not long before his execution. The most mind-boggling scene of all is a re-creation of the last of the Great Royal Balls in the Winter Palace in 1913, complete with full orchestra and hundreds of waltzing dancers. It's all like some magnificent, ghostly dream. "Russian Ark" is a wonder.

It's also, I was embarrassed to realize, the first Russian film I'd ever seen in its entirety. But not the last. It led me to rent "Man With a Movie Camera," a silent Russian documentary made in 1928, at the height -- and near the end -- of the great period of wild, radically modern Soviet art. Like "Russian Ark," it's also gorgeous and uncanny and technically brilliant -- but its dreaminess is of an almost opposite sort. "Man With a Movie Camera" is manic and funny, an incredibly dense and unbelievably fast-paced montage of Russian urban life, full of crazy hope about the 20th century, just as "Russian Ark" is drenched in a melancholic remembrance of things past. Again I was blown away.

Both of these films reminded me how beauty and wit and sadness co-exist, as they nearly must co-exist in great narrative art. And they reminded me too of the rare pleasure of stumbling across works of art that haven't been marketed to within an inch of their lives -- and then being astonished.

"Russian Ark" is newly available on DVD.

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