Over the past few weeks I’ve bene thinking about long takes.
Recently we were all amazed by ‘Victoria’ a movie that was staged as a single
tracking shot, we’ve seen this format before such as ‘Birdman’ of Alfred Hitchcock’s
‘Rope’, but never before as a genuine, start to finish, tracking shot that
doesn’t rely on any visual trickery to achieve this. It really is 138 minutes
of footage in an unbroken and continuous shot, all filmed exactly as it
appears.
So now that ‘Victoria’ has proven that a long take movie can
be accomplished should we expect to see a massive influx of them? In simple
terms, probably not. I expect to see some other indie filmmakers trying to
imitate the technique and maybe one or two major studious will use their
resources to try and push it even further, but if you’re expecting some kind of
revolution you may be disappointed.
It is linked to some of the inherent flaws of long takes. At
the end of the day is serves as a great way for a filmmaker to show off.
Hitchcock himself often referred to the use of tracking shots as a simple “stunt”.
In fact he always expressed a disdain for the finished product that was ‘Rope’.
The main thing that excluded from tracking shots if of course, editing. Editing
may be the purest way to tell a story, a la the Soviet montage theory. If you
use editing to flip from one image to another you find the audience subconsciously
drawing parallels between them. A classic example is Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Strike’
that parallels the slaughter of a bull with the crushing of union strikers by
the government. Even more famously is ‘The Godfather’, as Francis Ford Coppola
cuts from Michael Corleone being baptised as a godfather to his sister’s new-born
child and being baptised as the new mafia godfather by eliminating the competition.
The parallels are endless, Michael is bathed in holy water in one image then
the blood of his enemies in the next, one sermon cleanses his soul and the
other cleanses the leadership of the mafia, just as Michael vows to renounce Satan
we see dozens of people being slaughtered in his name and on his orders. The
symbolic connections are established purely through editing, this is something
a long take simply could not do.
At the same time editing can also be used to draw emphasis
to one aspect of a film, say for example you want to convey that one character
is lying or has something to hide, then the camera would pay specific attention
to his reactions and draw attention to his motifs. Or how about creating a
sense of tension? Then you would use your camera to quickly jump between each
aspect of the scene, emphasising a heightened sense of awareness and pace.
Tracking shots almost prohibit this, you have to search for
more creative ways with which to draw emphasis to any one specific aspect of
the scene. It’s also difficult to switch between formats such as close-ups or
wide shots and furthermore the camera has to manoeuvre around each element of
the scene rather than forego any obstacles through editing and reverting to
cutting between an action and a reaction. In essence, most tracking shots are employed
to convey large amounts of information on a visual level, not small and
intimate moments.
This may be why so many tracking shots are employed to open
a movie. Consider the opening shot of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Boogie Nights’ as
it sets up every major character and their relation to one another, setting the
stage for the story to unfold. Or how about the start of Robert Altman’s ‘The
Player’ another shot that serves to establish every subplot and side story in
one glorious sweeping shot that subsequently satirises and pays homage to every
classic Hollywood auteur to do the same. Speaking of which what about ‘Touch of
Evil’, Orson Welles set up the entire shot, firstly as a middle finger to
studios applying pressure top him (Welles didn’t tell the studios how he was
going to stage the shot so when they heard that he had spent an entire day
rehearsing they sent someone to investigate only to find Welles far ahead of
schedule and budget, having taken one shot to do what it would have otherwise
taken days to accomplish) but also provide a wide view of the plot.
In fact ‘Touch of Evil’ may be an appropriate exception to
the tension rule. Welles manages to raise tension by starting the shot with the
panting of a bomb and shows it being carried away by a courier. We don’t know
the destination but the bomb frequently crosses paths with characters as they
are introduced throughout the shot making the viewer highly anticipative of the
end result. At the same time though ‘Touch of Evil’ also introduces the viewer
to an environment, which is something else long shots are great for. You can be
transported to the beaches of Dunkirk with the tracking shot of ‘Atonement’,
the glamour of a gangster lifestyle with the Copacabana shot from Scorsese’s ‘Goodfellas’
and then of course there’s the burning barn from ‘The Mirror’ as Andrei
Tarkovsky excels at environment building like no one else.
However these long takes all require scrupulous amounts of preparation
and frequently come about by accident. Martin Scorsese was forced to revert to
a long take when he wasn’t allowed to use the front entrance of the Copacabana
Club and instead moved his camera through the back entrance, corridors,
kitchens, storerooms and bypassed the queues of people in order to arrive at the
same destination. As for the beach scene in ‘Atonement’ while impressive it was
staged due to the budget not allowing director Jo Wright to hire all of the necessary
extras for a shoot lasting multiple days so he quickly carved out a path
through the beach and then sent the cameraman onto the back of a golf cart,
then on foot, up a ramp disguised as debris before reaching a rickshaw that
carried him the rest of the distance to finish the shot.
Few things look as amazing as a fight sequence performed as
a long take, but they also require a ridiculous amounts of preparation. Instead
of serving to minimise budget and time performing a scene in this style can
only increase both the former and the latter. In ‘The Protector’ Tony Jaa
fights his way up four flights of stairs in this scene and it took four days
and eight attempts to get the shot they were happy with, as well as having a
hire a completely new camera crew when the first couldn’t keep up with Jaa.
That’s a lot of effort for just four minutes’ worth of film. Then you have the
hospital shootout from ‘Hard Boiled’ in which the entire set had to be rebuilt
mid-way through the shoot. As two characters destroy one floor of the building they
enter an elevator and though we think they’re going up one floor, they’re actually
just waiting while the crew reassembles and redresses the same set for them to remerge.
Not all directors have this much time and frankly not all of
them work well with the style. It takes a certain amount of choreography and an
intent upon what to move the camera towards what they want the audience to pay
attention to. The best tracking shots resemble directed chaos, while the worst
just look like chaos. But as I already said, this is much easier and sometimes more
effective with editing. Going back to Hitchcock, the ‘Psycho’ shower scene is a prime example in which
the editing is used to deceive the audience into thinking that they’ve just
seen something far more violent and sexual than what they really have.
When utilised appropriately long takes can be one of the
most spectacular things a filmmaker can do, but they are limited in their
storytelling ability, both visually and thematically. Providing a wider field
of vision for a viewer can have its advantages and disadvantages but ultimately
it all depends on what a director is trying to convey and the best method for
which to achieve it.
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