Ransom Riggs
The Long Take: What’s the Big Deal Already?
by Ransom Riggs - February 21, 2008 - 9:59 AM

Ah, the long tracking shot — cinema’s most pretentious device. Sure, they can be fun and flashy, but like a loud and insecure extrovert, they also tend to draw a lot of attention to themselves. Isn’t the point to get lost in the story?

As a young cinephile, of course, I loved them. They’re the fastball of cinema language, and when used well, they can be masterful: in The Shining, for instance, when Kubrick follows young Danny at knee-level as he rides his Big Wheel through the hotel (one of cinema’s first Steadicam shots, by the way), it draws us in, creating an almost unbearable amount of suspense. Classic examples abound, like the opening shot of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (feel free to skip past the text at the beginning):

Of course, Evil is a classic, and it’s tough to aspire to classic-hood. Another famous tracking shot, the long and hilarious opening of Robert Altman’s The Player, works beautifully because it references Welles’ shot directly without being pretentious — instead falling somewhere between homage and parody. (Apologies for the French subtitles here; YouTube has been pretty scrupulous about axing popular-but-copyrighted content lately):

In a very real way, young director P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, this year’s magnificent There Will Be Blood) inherited the mantle of Robert Altman — Anderson’s complex ensemble scenes, where the camera roves between different conversations and people talk over one another in a more or less natural way, recalls Altman’s best work (Nashville, for instance), and when Altman was directing what was to be his final picture, A Priarie Home Companion, he was in such failing health that he elected P.T. Anderson to be something like his Vice-Director, with the understanding that if Altman died during the shoot, Anderson would finish it. Which is a long-winded way of saying, Anderson is a guy who loves long takes, and he does them well, and if Altman thinks the kid’s alright, then I do, too. (Insert smiley here, however inappropriate in the text of a blog.) Blah blah blah — check out the opening shot of Boogie Nights, which sets the mood perfectly, introduces most of the film’s important characters, and gets your foot tapping to boot, and you’ll see what I mean … it’s Altman, Scorsese and I Am Cuba all rolled into one. (More iconic tracking shots can be found by clicking the links above.)

I know, I know. I’m supposed to be writing about how annoying tracking shots can be, but I’ve just spent three paragraphs extolling them. The trouble is, if you’re going to do one of these shots, you have to do it really well, or it can become a spectacular, attention-grabbing failure. Coppola said something while he was making Apocalypse Now, that if you strive for greatness, the danger is that you’ll fall just slightly short of your goal and end up making something that’s just pretentious. Pretentious wants to be great, but isn’t. I would put the “famous” long tracking shot in this year’s Oscar contender Atonement in that category: pretentious, distracting and kind of pointless — it stops the story in its tracks while the director shows off. Here’s a clip of it (with the sound replaced, thanks YouTube, sigh):

In sum, I think the tracking shot is a dangerous proposition, but one we’re seeing more and more of, in part thanks to the increasingly lightweight nature of cameras — but just because you can shoot for 60 minutes without cutting doesn’t necessarily mean that doing so makes you a cinematic genius. Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter — and please keep in mind that this brief list above is by no means meant to be complete!

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Comments (26)

  1. Not a tracking shot, but my favorite long take is the opening scene of Slapshot! anybody?

    posted by Ben on 2-21-2008 at 10:08 am

  2. I actually loved the aforementioned shot in Atonement. I thought it really immersed the audience in the horror of the war, the characters’ loneliness among so many others, and their dwindling hope of survival. I read an interview somewhere in which the director said it wasn’t planned, it just happened that way.

    posted by TMo on 2-21-2008 at 10:12 am

  3. Editing is where it’s at. Long tracking shots are devoid of any shift in perspective, which (to me) is where the magic is. You’re right about it being distracting; it pulls you out of the illusion and you’re suddenly scrutinizing the frame to see what’s going on, instead of getting lost in the story.

    Sometimes it works just fine, though. Boogie Nights is a good example. Anderson used editing to break up a long tracking shot in There Will Be Blood when the priest walks up to Daniel to ask for his money, and the result was much better than it would have been with just the track.

    posted by Johnny Cat on 2-21-2008 at 10:34 am

  4. “Rope” by Hitchcock. The 81 minutes film contains only 10 shots, a few lasting up to the 10-minute mark.

    posted by Jake Le Master on 2-21-2008 at 10:36 am

  5. I really have to disagree on the tracking shot in Atonement. I personally think that it was one of the better shot takes that I’ve seen in a long time. Just thinking of the amount of directing and timing it took to get everything to come out at the right time in that shot is amazing in it’s own right. Whoever says that “it just kind of happened that way,” is full of it and must have misread something. In order to get all of the elements to work like that things had to have been meticulously planned. I find that this scene is one of maybe three that my girlfriend and I are still talking about while we choose which of this years movies deserves best picture. (I like Atonement or There Will be Blood; She likes Juno or Michael Clayton.

    posted by Gary on 2-21-2008 at 11:02 am

  6. What? No mention of Russian Ark? That is an entire feature-length film in one shot. None of Hitchcock’s “cheating” like in Rope, either.

    If you like scifi & Russian film, the original Solaris also has long, panning shots.

    posted by Pica on 2-21-2008 at 11:21 am

  7. And isn’t there a long one, though the kitchen, in Goodfellas? Or one of the Scorcese flicks from that era.

    I personally think that only film nitpickers consciously notice long tracking shots anyway. They add to the mood, but I bet that most filmgoers don’t even notice they’ve seen one. They just feel it, whether well or poorly done.

    posted by Tim on 2-21-2008 at 11:29 am

  8. Yeah, yeah, Russian Ark …

    posted by Ransom on 2-21-2008 at 11:36 am

  9. Oh, yeah Russian Ar–zzzzzzzz…
    Christ, what a pretentious piece of crap.

    posted by Jessica on 2-21-2008 at 11:45 am

  10. Isn’t the long tracking shot just a kind of creative backlash against a culture that is permeated by loud, flashy, attention-grabbing quick cuts? It doesn’t surprise me that the long tracking shot would become a staple of cinema given Hollywood’s current obsession with grit and reality and its desire to distinguish its own brand of art from the shorter attention span of pop culture. I don’t know whether it’s genius or pretentious, but I understand where it’s coming from.

    posted by Anne on 2-21-2008 at 11:58 am

  11. The Goodfellas kitchen shot was quite good, I think. And I enjoyed Doug Liman’s reference to it and subsequent homage tracking shot through the kitchen in Swingers.

    posted by Jason on 2-21-2008 at 12:14 pm

  12. I 2nd the Slapshot opening & 2nd Goodfellas long shot in to the club (that’s what immediately came to my mind).
    When I took film-101 as an elective, one of the most eye-opening things that the instructor said was to count the amount of time for each shot. Maybe obvious to some people but it was intriguing and I still find myself doing it to this day. Don’t try it when watching TV unless you want a headache.

    posted by Brine on 2-21-2008 at 12:14 pm

  13. Hitchcock wasn’t really “cheating.” At the time it was physically impossible to do a one take movie, since reels only lasted around 10 minutes. So he did the best he could, if he had done the movie today it would have all been one take.

    posted by kramertron on 2-21-2008 at 2:19 pm

  14. There is a long tracking shot at the end of “Children of Men” that is incredible.

    posted by Kevin McDonald on 2-21-2008 at 2:21 pm

  15. there were several impressive long takes in the children of men- the one in the car when they get attacked was incredible. there is a great behind the scenes look at how it was all done on youtube, there are no links allowed here but search for “DK1242″‘s videos, they posted it.

    posted by andy cochrane on 2-21-2008 at 3:44 pm

  16. The opening of Halloween (the original, of course) had a great long tracking shot, too. Who can forget that one? It’s specially good because the whole movie was done with such a small budget.

    posted by tw on 2-21-2008 at 6:52 pm

  17. Long tracking shots for a story set in the real world are dead-easy compared to when everything in an environment of any size must be built. The long shot moving throughout the spaceship near the beginning of Joss Whedon’s film Serenity and many scenes in his teevee show Firefly three years earlier were possible because of the (nearly) complete construction in three dimensions of the interior of the ship in soundstages. It always bugged me in other spaceship shows when characters would move to, say, engineering from the bridge by leaving the bridge set and riding a closed elevator then appearing in engineering without giving the feeling of actual distance crossed within an actual ship. Until Firefly I rarely got the /feeling/ of location within a fictional ship. You’d think science fiction producers would learn from this, but no. For example, where in the latest incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, the ship, is the control and battle room in relation to any of the other places? Can you run through the ship, in your mind, and see the various places you pass by and through? No, and it loses a lot because of that.

    posted by Marco McClean on 2-22-2008 at 5:37 am

  18. No need to sigh on the Atonement one — just a little pairing that came to me while listening to Keane one day (pretty sure there are clips of it with the original score elsewhere on YouTube?)… thanks for linking, though ;-)

    posted by 9075401booze on 2-24-2008 at 2:33 pm

  19. Just watched the movie “Serenity” last week (based on the Sci-Fi TV series Firefly) and realized a couple minutes into the movie that the entire first scene in the ship is done with a continuous shot. Its a pretty elaborate production when you think about the sci-fi nature of the film. There’s shuttles on lifts, multiple floors, a hangar. It must have been a pretty sizable set. Its pretty a long shot too.

    posted by Tim on 2-25-2008 at 9:02 am

  20. Lately, Gus Van Sant (he of “Good Will Hunting,” “My Own Private Idaho,” and the “Psycho” remake) seems to have made movies with long takes that can be rather interesting. Take “Gerry,” one of the movies most guaranteed to annoy people who insist on having things happen in movies; the opening is a shot of a car on the road, there’s a long take of two characters’ heads as they walk through the desert, there’s a long take of a character trying to get down off a big rock… you get the idea.

    “Elephant” also had similar moments. I particularly remember that the movie saw a little instance from three different points of view. More importantly, the last scene (SPOILER) unfolded in one take, starting with a killer sitting down to drink some orange juice, panning to his associate who he kills, then going through a cafeteria’s kitchen and finding a jock and his girlfriend in a closet, trying to decide which one he’d kill first.

    They’re apparently inspired by Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s works, which are basically every stereotype of “art cinema” on film: Black-and-white, long takes with little happening, in a foreign language. One memorable excerpt from his seven-hour [!!] movie “Satantango” on YouTube showed two guys from behind as they walked down the street on a windy day, for two minutes. In addition, his movie “Werckmeister Harmonies” is 145 minutes long, and is made up of 39 different shots–over three and a half minutes per shot on average.

    Slightly off-topic, I wrote about eight sentences above, with 252 words total, for an average word-per-sentence count of 31.5. What better way to simulate long takes in words than with long sentences? (The previous two sentences brought the word count up to 284, bringing the average down to 28.4 words per sentence. I could go on all day.)

    posted by Sillstaw on 3-1-2008 at 4:31 pm

  21. “Children of Men” did a great job utilizing the tracking shot. Its not flashy either, its in a war scene and done in a way you don’t really pick up on it till later. Its use is that it makes it feel like a documentary which plays towards its strength. So I think it would be a good use of juxtaposition to put it next to Atonement to see the difference.

    posted by Josiah on 3-2-2008 at 1:54 pm

  22. Surely there are some Godard fans on this blog. Anyone seen ‘Week End’? One major scene involves a 25 minute tracking shot of a massive traffic jam. Call me pretentious, but that is amazing.

    posted by chris on 3-7-2008 at 7:47 pm

  23. The tracking shot at the beginning of Serenity is actually two shots joined together. There’s a whip pan in the middle that hides the switch.
    It’s still an amazing shot though.

    posted by zooey on 2-22-2010 at 7:10 am

  24. Tim is right . . . the opening continuous tracking shot at the beginning of “Serenity” is very effective, not only because it gives one a sense of place, the size of the ship, etc, it also beautifully works with the writing to get through a massive amount of backstory without overwhelming the viewer who didn’t every watch the much-lamented television show. In other words, rather than “showing off”, it’s a tracking shot that actually works as story structure, which is something rare indeed . . .

    Oh, and it’s too bad nearly every clip you posted has already been taken down.

    posted by Michael on 2-22-2010 at 7:51 am

  25. There was an episode of Mad About You that was entirely one shot/one take. Amazing show.

    posted by Wayne on 2-22-2010 at 1:45 pm

  26. Shoot! Now I’ll start looking for these long tracking shots instead of being irritated by lack of continuity, jump cuts and other nit-picky distractions that disturb me when watching most films.
    ….and a bit off the tracking shot subject, but what about that supposed ‘one take’ of Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940? I guess when it comes to dance numbers they might all be served best in one shot.

    posted by M. Forrest on 2-23-2010 at 1:02 am

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