Comments on: The Long Take: What’s the Big Deal Already?

By: M. Forrest

M. Forrest — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:02:02 +0000

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.

By: Wayne

Wayne — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:45:21 +0000

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

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:51:36 +0000

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.

By: zooey

zooey — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:10:07 +0000

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.

By: chris

chris — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 01:47:09 +0000

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.

By: Josiah

Josiah — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 19:54:02 +0000

“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.

By: Sillstaw

Sillstaw — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:31:24 +0000

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.)

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:02:51 +0000

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.

By: 9075401booze

9075401booze — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:33:02 +0000

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 ;-)

By: Marco McClean

Marco McClean — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:37:27 +0000

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.