How long is long?

Last week, Filmbrain received correspondence from a film critic in Norway who pointed out a rather glaring mistake he found in Filmbrain's review of Café Lumière. Though Hou Hsiao-hsien made the film as a tribute to Ozu, Filmbrain stated incorrectly that Hou's long takes are influenced by Ozu, when in fact Ozu rarely used them. (He's better known for continually cutting between characters as they converse.) Filmbrain still seems to recall long shots in Days of Youth, but as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out in this essay, the average shot length in I Was Born But... is a mere four seconds while in Tokyo Story it is only ten. Though Café Lumière felt like an Ozu film, it was more for its subject matter and dramatic structure, rather than its lengthy takes, which is more Hou than Ozu. After this realization, Filmbrain got into a discussion with a friend about long takes in general. What constitutes a long take, and has the definition changed over time (at least since the MTV-influenced 80s)? When we think of directors who regularly use long takes -- Tarkovsky, Hou, Angelopoulos, Mizoguchi, Tarr -- there's no question, for they have scenes that go on for several minutes. But what about directors who use them less frequently -- Scorsese, Welles, Kubrick, Altman, DePalma -- at what point can a shot be considered a long take? Forty-five seconds, one minute, one and a half minutes? (Altman and DePalma's long takes aren't always at noticeable because they keep the camera moving.) For example, there's a wonderful lengthy close-up shot of Nicole Kidman's face in Birth -- but can it be considered a long take? Is there an agreed upon minimum length? This of course got Filmbrain thinking -- what are some of the lengthiest and/or best long takes? At the far end of the extreme there are examples like Sokurov's Russian Ark, which is one ninety-six minute take, and Warhol's Empire, which is an eight hour shot of the Empire State Building. Bela Tarr's Satantango (pictured above) contains some of the most powerful long takes, and the roof-to-pool shot in Mikheil Kalatozishvili's I Am Cuba is one of the most impressive. Then of course there are the famous ones -- the opening of Touch of Evil, the Copa scene from Goodfellas, the extended tracking shot in Godard's Weekend, and the ten shots that make up Hitchcock's Rope. Filmbrain would love to hear some thoughts on this topic -- how would you define a long take, and what are some of your favorites?

Comments

[blooperreel]

Great topic. Some memorable long takes for me...

Sokurov's "Mother and Son," especially the outdoor scenes which suggest much greater passage of time, like sleight of hand.

The opening 20 minutes of DePalma's "Snake Eyes" an otherwise silly movie, but what a stunt!

Most every take in Tsai Ming Liang's filmography.

The long, long beach scene in Polanski's "Cul de Sac" which required the precise timing of a plane flying overhead. Be sure to listen to the audio commentary on the DVD (region coded.)

The eye-popping stuff in "I am Cuba."

The surveillance-cam style pans of Gene Hackman's apartment in "The Conversation."

The long takes of Bill Pullman vanishing into the darkness of his hallway in "Lost Highway."

[cjk]

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE yet, another film composed entirely of long (mostly static) takes.

[Paul Doherty]

Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Russian Arc, I Am Cuba. All top shelf, as always I will look into other films listed here.
PD

[dvd]

Now that it's been brought up, I'm surprised I didn't think of Stranger Than Paradise either. Perhaps the reason for this has something to do with what Michael mentioned a few posts up in his explanation of long takes: that what makes a take 'long' in many instances is its context. Stranger Than Paradise being nothing but a series of scenes consisting of single set-ups, its very nature excludes it from consideration alongside other films that have one or two standout 'long take' sequencse amongst other more traditional montage.

[wayne]

I'm going to betray my low-brow tastes and say one of my favorite long takes is during the hospital shoot-out in John Woo's "Hard Boiled." The long shot involves Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung clearing out one floor of baddies, getting on an elevator, and then taking out a bunch more on the next floor.

My favorite non-tracking long shot is at the end of Koyaanisqatsi, where the camera focuses on a piece of debris from an exploded rocket as it falls from the sky. Yeah, the metaphor is a little clunky, but it still gives me chills.

And I have to disagree with you all about the long shot near the end of Goodby Dragon Inn. I appreciate Tsai Ming-Liang's love for cinema (they were recently showing Jules et Jim and some other French New Wave films in an non-art theater in Taipei because of some strings he pulled), but I thought it was completely self-indulgent. I'm in total agreement with this article in Senses of Cinema. It's a bit disingenous to bemoan the death of local cinema while your own movies are so inacessible to the local audience.

[Alexis]

I attended the Philippine Premiere of Lav Diaz's now 11-hour "Evolution of a Filipino Family" at the University of the Philippine Film Center this past Friday, and I think a number of the digital scenes (which comprise about 60% of the film), may be deserve a place in this long take discussion.

I hope people get to see this film. It had it's North American Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this October, and will be having it's European Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this January.

To everyone who posts and reads filmbrain's journal-- would you watch an 11 hour film?

[Nakul]

There's a wonderful tracking shot at the end of Kenneth Branagh's version of Henry V where Branagh carries a dead Christian Bale across the battlefield of Agincourt. Branagh uses the long take very well in all of his films, in fact.

[rg]

filmbrain, I'm sorry. I don't have any definition. anyway, a few off my list of favorites...

Shadow of a Doubt has a long take with Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotton on a wooden staircase that lasts just over two minutes. It's nowhere near the length of an average shot in Hitchcock's Rope but much more effective.

Preston Sturges Sullivan's Travels. Joel McCrea argues with the two studio bosses over his next motion picture. Four and a half minutes and extremely funny.

Ophuls Letter from an Unknown Woman. The later scene at the opera house. "I know that nothing happens by chance. Every moment is measured; every step is counted."

John Ford's Two Rode Together. Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark sit down and just talk.

Scorsese - Mean Streets, Raging Bull and Goodfellas. Keitel walks into a bar, Deniro walks through the tunnel into the arena and Liotta and Bracco take an alternate route inside a nightclub. In regard to dave's comment, I think it's more ophuls influence than hitchcock. "The fluid visual choreography allowed you to experience Joan Fontaine's every heartbeat..." MS describing the Ophuls style in his great book/documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies.

Spielberg gets away with a couple of very subtle, beautiful long takes in Jaws. Dreyfuss and Scheider try to convince the mayor to shut the beaches, Scheider says goodbye to his wife...

[dave]

Another great one comes to mind - the beating of Candy in Pickup on South Street is really jaw-dropping. The choreography of the action is simply unbelievable.

[Wayne]

It might be worth following Mark Le Fanu in drawing a distinction between two types of long take, namely the 'baroque' (full of movement and ostentatious virtuosity) and the 'intense', (based on simplicity and the "integrity and patient intensity" of the gaze): see his essay 'Metaphysics of the "long take": some post-Bazinian reflections' here.

With the 'intense' long take mainly in mind, I thought I would mention an interesting short text that has just appeared in the London listings magazine 'Time Out’, alongside its critics’ films-of-the-year listings (in case you're curious, the overall favourites were 1) ‘Uzak’, 2) ‘The Motor Cycle Diaries’ and 3) ‘Before Sunset’). Andrews' comments are not restricted to 'intense' long takes, but perhaps they nonetheless point to some of the reasons behind the contemporary importance and pleasures of films characterized by such long takes.

Andrews's comments are not available online, it seems, but here's a transcription of the text:

The Story of...the slow film

While many contemporary Hollywood filmmakers still seem signatories to an aesthetic - which first started to become a stifling ethos in the '80s - of lots of far-fetched plot, big spectacle, loud sound and wham-bam pacing, there's another kind of movie-making - best exemplified this year by Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 'Uzak' ('Distant') - that appears to be attracting and winning over audiences. One might almost dub it the Ozu tradition: small, quiet, de-dramatised 'stories' evocative of daily life and related at a measured or leisurely pace, with no conspicuous cutting, camera movements or special effects. It's an approach that to some degree distinguishes quite a few of our team's films of the year, though some - especially those used only to Hollywood or East Asian genre movies - might think them slow and boring, complaining that 'nothing really happens'.

Actually, quite a lot's happening in these movies, if one has the time to look, listen and think about them. The joy of such works is that they give us that time; they don't pummel us with visual and aural information. They don't feel a need to spell everything out; they encourage and enable us to concentrate, ponder, question, imagine - in short, to become involved, not as passive consumers of whatever's served up, but as active participants in the construction of meaning. They invite a complex response to nuance, rather than telling us what to think and feel. They treat us as adults, with eyes, ears, hearts and minds, not as targeted (and paying) Pavlovian dogs. Whether it's 'Before Sunset' or 'Elephant', 'Triple Agent' or 'A Thousand Months', slow movies rock!

-- Geoff Andrews
Time Out, December 21 2004 - January 5 2005 (no. 1792/93), page 86

[Wayne]

Hmm...my link to the Le Fanu essay doesn't seem to have worked. Try HREF="http://imv.au.dk/publikationer/pov/Issue_04/section_1/artc1A.html/">this.

[Wayne]

That didn't work either! But here's the URL: http://imv.au.dk/publikationer/pov/Issue_04/section_1/artc1A.html

[Filmbrain]

Wayne -- thanks for both the quote and especially the Le Fanu article, which brings a lot to the discussion.

[Jurie]

What an interesting topic.

What I found particularly cute about the opening shot of Altman's The Player is that a character refers to the Touch Of Evil opening shot, twice.

It seems there's a difference between long shots, long fancy shots, and a slow movie. How long are those shots in Paris, Texas? A long, difficult shot that calls attention to itself is likely to destroy suspension of disbelief. In the case of The Player, that arguably works for the movie, but the best long shots may be the ones that we're not aware of.

To paraphrase something someone said to me once: George Lucas cuts away just before his audience gets bored, which is why he's often credited as being good at editing. As mentioned above a couple of times, if you don't do this and let the audience become a bit uncomfortable, your shot will probably be perceived as long. They're all just tools in the toolbox.

Finally, please allow me to add my own obscure movie: Robert Montgomery's Lady In The Lake, shot all in first person. To be honest, I don't remember how long the shots were, but I'd be surprised if they were short.

[cjk]

Alexander Sokurov's RUSSIAN ARK (much indebted stylistically to LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD)is a dazzling tour-de-force shot in a single continuous take with the Steadi-cam following what looks like 1000s of costumed extras in and around the five interconnected palaces of The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. The moving camera is meant to represent the point of view of a ghost who witnesses various historical events that actually took place in these locations.

Mike Figgis' TIMECODE also experiments with the 90-minute take. In TIMECODE, the screen is divided into quadrants, and we watch 4 (!) 90-minute takes that were shot with 4 videocameras simultaneously, with the same actors (improvising to a preordained story line) moving from one quadrant to another or appearing in more than one quadrant at the same time. On the DVD, you can pick which quadrant you want to listen to at any given point.

[James Russell]

would you watch an 11 hour film

If it was worth the effort, yes. I've sat through the eight-hour Russian War and Peace (and that wasn't worth the effort).

[Filmbrain]

To answer Alexis' question above -- yes, I would gladly watch an 11 hour film, if (as James points out) it was worth it. I've sat through Satantango three times now, and that's always worth it.

[Daniel F.]

What about the great - and apparently forgotten - Miklós Jancsó? His film Sirokkó (1969) contains only nine, Szerelmem Elektra (1974) ten and Csend és kiáltas (1968) eleven shots.

[don fetcher]

I especially enjoy when the circus arrives in "WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES"
Does anyone know where I can purchase a copy of "SATANTANGO"
I've been searching for a copy for quite some time
Cinema Parallel will not return my emails

please email me with any info:
donfetcher@hotmail.com

[colinr0380]

Brilliant choices. Another one I would add would be Ingird Thulin's five minute speech to camera as Gunnar Bjornstrand's pastor reads her letter in Bergman's Winter Light