Long Takes Aren’t All the Same

A video essay about long takes and why they are not all of equal worth.

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Whenever tracking shots are discussed the consensus always falls on the usual suspects: Goodfellas' Copacabana shot, the Boogie Nights intro, Children of Men's car scene, anything by Brian De Palma, and Sinners' time-bending song has now joined the club. Though these are indeed impressive technical feats, they are not as fluent in film language as you would imagine.

Such showy displays of a free moving camera (as you can also find in Birdman and The Studio) are what I call Loose Shots (to borrow the exact literary term), defined by most angles being independent from each other, connected artificially by fast pans and wasteful moments of characters walking to bring the camera to a new position.

In opposition to the Loose Take, I recommend viewers to appreciate the invisible beauty of the Periodic Shots of classical directors. Masters like Otto Preminger, William Wyler, Max Ophüls and Billy Wilder made long takes in which the angle changed through the elaborate reorganization of actors onscreen. The camera would keep up and never steal the spotlight. It would be impossible to cut their long takes into multiple shots because the change of angle is part of the story.

00:00 Long Takes Aren't Built the Same
07:35 Periodic v. Loose
12:36 The 5 Invisibility Rules
18:37 Composition
22:07 Staging
25:18 Why?
27:12 That Sinners Shot
29:10 Cut

Some useful quotes:
David Bordwell on Birdman (Following Riggan's Orders)
The result was virtuosity, but with an alibi. Long takes are flashy. But…they can save money. (All those script pages covered fast, no need for editing.) They can be justified as realism. (The action can build over “real time.” Besides, don’t we see reality in a “continuous shot,” not cuts?) They can be motivated as subjective. (By staying with a character over a stretch of time, we become identified with him or her.) Regardless of these reasons, or excuses, there’s an undeniable bragadoccio associated with the protracted camera movement. Your peers in the industry will recognize what you’ve done, and cinephiles will applaud your bravado.
The Movie Brats seized on the virtuoso camera movement and long take as a mark of prowess. A new competition sprang up between Scorsese and DePalma, encompassing Raging Bull, Bonfire at the Vanities, Goodfellas, and Snake Eyes. Even a straight-to-video heist movie like Running Time (1997), choosing to hide its cuts in the Rope manner, has a bit of playground swagger. (Bruce Campbell is in it too.) No wonder that Christine Vachon remarks that shooting a whole scene in one is a “macho” choice.

André Bazin, The Evolution of the Language of Cinema
In [Jean Renoir’s] films, the search after composition in depth is, in effect, a partial replacement of montage by frequent panning and entrances. It is based on a respect for the continuity of dramatic space and, of course, of its duration.
To anybody with eyes in his head, it is quite evident that the one-shot sequences used by Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons are in no sense the purely passive recording of an action shot within the same framing. On the contrary, his refusal to break up the action, to analyze the dramatic field in time, is a positive action the results of which are far superior to anything that could be achieved by the classical “cut”.

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