The Long Take

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The task is simple, but it might lead to a few useful complexities. Our purpose is to explore the long take through the lateral, the circular, the endoscopic, the still and the craning, and its role both quantitatively and qualitatively. It will keep in mind Brian Henderson’s well-known essay on the long take, undeniably reflect on the long take's importance in Andre Bazin’s work, and acknowledge David Bordwell’s remarks on it as a feature, too, one he explores in Figures Traced in Light. Finally, we will also acknowledge an important distinction Paul Schrader makes between motivated camera movements, unmotivated camera movements, and illogical camera movements.

David Thomson once remarked, “When [Peter Greenaway’s] camera makes its rapid sideline tracking movements from space to space it resembles a rat in the skirting boards…” (The Biographical Dictionary of Cinema) In The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the takes aren’t always so long, but their lateral nature is often pronounced. In a moment when the thuggish central character and his wife pass through the kitchen of the restaurant, where they usually dine, the camera laterally follows at an aloof distance as the gangster insults and grabs a boy washing dishes, before lifting him into the air. In another scene, the gangster yanks his wife out of the dining room chair and pulls her from the room and through the kitchen into the car park, with the camera pausing for a moment in the midst of the single take, while he yells at her in the kitchen, and then punches her in the stomach. The camera does nothing to emphasise this atrocious deed, and after it continues its lateral movement when they continue to the car park and get into the car. Of all the long take movements we are investigating, the lateral can often give the strongest impression of indifference. Jean Luc-Godard knew this well and offers a very famous example in Weekend, and another in Tout va Bien. In the first, the camera follows inexorably a lengthy traffic jam, taking in various sights, including animals in a couple of zoo trucks, a horse and cart with the horse’s shit amassing on the road, a person in one car throwing a ball to the boy in another as they play it back and forth, broken down cars, a Shell lorry bumper to bumper with a car trying to move in the opposite direction, and ends on the bloody spectacle that created the traffic jam in the first place: a car accident with bodies strewn on the road and a lot of blood. In Tou va Bien, Godard laterally tracks in one direction and then back in the other as he shows a number of checkouts in a huge supermarket, with the film’s main character, Jane Fonda, reduced chiefly to an extra. Both scenes in the Godard films, in different ways, are critiquing capitalism, and even more are examinations of consumerism. In Weekend, the film adopts in its title a commonly used anglicism that reflects the thirty glorious years in post-war French society, where people began to have spending power and a weekend away was one approach to show one’s conspicuous consumption. That so many have similar ideas on their minds is partly why, even on the quiet road the main characters are travelling along, an accident can lead to a huge log jam. In Tout va Bien, Godard shows the labour that goes into accommodating consumerism, and above all, the repetitive movements of the checkout workers that Godard insists we cannot ignore, even if we often have Fonda in the frame as well. The camera movement screen right, and then its return screen left, isn’t a metaphor of the worker’s boredom; it is just the most appropriate way to capture it.

This might seem like a useless distinction, but comments by Stanley Cavell can help with the nuance. Speaking of a pan back and forth in Godard’s Le Mepris that resembles a little the lateral track in Tout va Bien, Cavell says, this movement is “clearly enough an acknowledgement of the camera’s presence but by that fact they are also statements from the camera about its subjects about their simultaneous distance and connection, about the sweeping desert of weary familiarity.” (The World Viewed) Cavell’s point is that if the film doesn’t find an intrinsic purpose for the shot it offers, then it will be an arbitrary deviation of cinema’s potential, rather than an innovative announcement of its possibilities. It must give the “illusion of saying something.” A bad film will also say something too, but in so categorical a way that it reiterates rather than invigorates the form. When, at the end of a work, the camera leaves the characters and pulls up into the sky, what once might have been a new way to end a movie becomes an expected one. It might originally have been viewed as the arbitrary finding the appropriate, with filmmakers seeing this as a useful way to give a film finality. It could also hint at the power the medium has not only to tell the story, but also to transcend the tale and leave the characters to live their happy life in the camera’s absence. It might ‘symbolise’ the soaring heights of their love, but it also isn’t simply a metaphorical claim about the characters. It is also one about the film as an object that can retreat from its own diegesis. Now, such a shot can seem very tired indeed.

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If we keep in mind Paul Schrader’s useful distinction between the motivated, the unmotivated, and the illogical camera movement, film has, for much of its history, moved the camera without strict adherence to the story it tells. Schrader believes “there are two types of camera movement: motivated and unmotivated. Motivated camera movements are direct responses to the action on screen: you move, I follow you. A character walks across the room and the camera tilts, pans, or physically moves by hand or on tracks.” But he also talks about “unmotivated camera moves [which] are used for emphasis of one kind or another, be it emotional or supernatural, by the storyteller. You stand still, I approach—that’s unmotivated.” (Film Comment) But there are also two types of unmotivated camera movement. One that tells the story with the camera emphasising certain moments all the better to engage the viewer in the diegesis: the phone rings and the camera moves towards the phone rather than the character moving towards it (Lost Highway); in on the bag of money over following a character looking into it (Psycho), or a high angle crane that dips to locate a key in a character’s hand (Notorious). In the first, the camera is motivated by the story; in the second for the story, and perhaps nobody more than Hitchcock worked the two in conjunction. But often Hitchcock’s instances of the latter can seem arbitrary until a moment later, when he locates the purpose in some detail within the tale. When he offers a high angled-shot in Shadow of a Doubt, we might wonder why the camera is where it is, only to discover that Joseph Cotton’s character is on the roof looking down at those chasing him.

Yet what happens if a filmmaker expands that moment into a proper crisis for the image, where the camera is no longer deviating from the story for the story, but risks obliterating it with arbitrariness? This would be the illogical camera movement, with Schrader speaking of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist. But he also discusses Godard: “Godard’s notion was that even if there are only two people in a scene, there is a third person in the room, watching them: the camera. His innovation was to make the camera’s perspective just as valid as that of its subjects.” (Film Comment) In the motivated and unmotivated, but logical camera movements, the filmmaker serves the story; in the illogically unmotivated, the story is at the service of the camera. We see this in the two long lateral takes in Weekend and Tout va Bien, and see it again in a circular lengthy shot in Weekend. Here, someone (Paul Gegauff) plays Mozart on the piano in a farmyard, and the camera circles round in a 360 shot that doesn’t so much capture the action; it contains it in the rigour of the shot. While many films in the forties and fifties offered long takes, Brian Henderson sees that they were contained within a broader aesthetic intention and could include breaking into the take without fetishising the shot itself. Henderson says, his article “takes its chief emphasis from the fact that the long take rarely appears in its pure state” (Film Comment), and sees that the notion of the long take as a long take is chiefly a more modern phenomenon, giving Miklos Jancso, the Hungarian director of the sixties and seventies, as a prime example. Jancso became famous for the elaborate development of his mise en scene, within single takes, and around the same time that Sam Peckinpah offered 3,643 shots in The Wild Bunch, Jancso used only 31 shots in The Confrontation. The Jancso film Henderson invokes, Winter Wind, has only 13.

It is this question of a shot’s rigour that can help us understand that though we can talk about the differences between types of long shots from the circular to the lateral, the fixed frame to the endoscopic, all these can fit into a quantitative relationship with film. Equally, the very notion of the long take does too, and both Barry Salt and David Bordwell have often paid attention to the specific length of a given take. These quantitative factors aren’t unimportant, and we are well aware that a thirty-second shot has a different feel than a four-minute one; that an endoscopic extended shot functions differently from a lateral take. When Martin Scorsese pulls the camera through the back entrance of a nightclub in Goodfellas, or Paul Thomas Anderson pushes the camera through the front entrance of one in Boogie Nights, we might wish to say the former is colonoscopic and the latter endoscopic. But our taxonomies are varied enough without adding pedantry to the mix. The one term can cover both. What Goodfellas and Boogie Nights offer in these scenes is consistent with Hitchcock’s approach, one that wishes to tell the story without the camera imposing itself on it. There is perhaps a still greater flamboyance in the shots than in Hitchcock, but the principle holds: the filmmakers find sophisticated ways to relay information, using simultaneously the longer take and the unmotivated camera movement. In Boogie Nights, the camera offers a combination of Welles’ famous lengthy take in Touch of Evil, with Scorsese’s Goodfellas shot, as the camera cranes along the street before entering the nightclub, with Anderson introducing us to the various characters who will then be central to his film. Andre Crous notes: “The first shot of Boogie Nights (1997) – a combination of Steadicam and crane work – is astounding in its complexity and is unmatched by any of Anderson’s previous (or subsequent) work.” (Senses of Cinema) In Goodfellas, Scorsese starts across the street and follows the two characters as they pass through the kitchen and the corridors and into the restaurant. The flamboyance of the shots is matched by the constant revelation of info as both films retain the viewer’s curiosity, while the directors insist on their own technical virtuosity. This is true of many an endoscopic shot, perhaps the most informationally rich and virtuoso of long takes. It could call attention to the director’s brilliance, as Crous makes clear, but it might not quite call attention to the form. This may sound paradoxical, yet the point of such a shot is often immersive, and immersion hardly works if the viewer is too aware of the scene they are watching. In contrast, the lateral track is much more likely to make the viewer aware of the camera movement: when Bertolucci offers complex tracks in The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, they aren’t revealing very much information. This absence is partly what makes them more ‘formal’ and sometimes conspicuously so, especially if containing a reflexive dimension that unavoidably makes us aware of the film as an object of contemplation. When we see in The Cook, The Thief… Helen Mirren is dressed in white in the white bathroom, and the camera tracks through a wall and picks her up again in the next room, which is red, where she is now wearing a red dress. While Scorsese and Anderson offer immersion with their endoscopic extended takes, Greenaway’s often shorter ones insist on making the viewer well aware of what they are watching.

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Yet while we might note that some types of the long take are more immersive than others, based on the type of shot it happens to be, that would be to risk quantitative, cause and effect reasoning. It would mean saying that if the filmmaker wishes to use a long take for absorption, they should go endoscopic; if looking for distance laterally track. Such an approach would be almost as reductive as its arbitrary use would be redundant, and we are inclined to agree with Cavell when he discusses the importance of the form, in modern film, while insisting on a purpose for the device used. What matters is how it should appear inevitable only after it has been adopted. Few watching the traffic jam scene in Weekend or the nightclub scene in Boogie Nights will think there would have been a better way to shoot them, but that isn’t the same thing as saying there is a necessary style they needed to utilise. It is partly that there are other options which can make the choice all the more astute. When Godard pans back and forth in the scene in Le Mepris, he takes a typical shot/ countershot and invigorates its use all the better to register the tedium in a marriage. Yet this isn’t saying it is a metaphor, which would be more obviously registered, for example, in a cut to a clock, as we hear the tick-tocking make clear the emptiness of the couple’s domestic life. In Bazin’s terms, this would be a lesser method for conveying the marital enervation because it would rely on an edit. But the problem would also rest more on the assertiveness of the metaphor over the nuance of the pan. Whether a classic Hollywood filmmaker pans to the fireplace or cuts to it after a couple kiss, the metaphor is equally clear, and nothing new is gained from the pan over the cut. The problem rests on its metaphoric assertiveness, while Godard’s shot relies on the arbitrary and the appropriate in conjunction. A film that cuts to the clock or pans to it possesses the undeniably appropriate to the point of cliche, while a shot that finds no appropriateness risks arriving at the arbitrary. The filmmaker who finds the appropriate out of what would seem initially arbitrary has arrived at innovation.

Sometimes a shot can be innovative initially and become no less so in future use. When Hitchcock allows the camera to pan around the room in Rear Window, in a shot shy of 360 degrees but close enough, he introduces us to the central character’s world by telling us visually what he does and what has happened to him. He is a photographer who has picked up a broken leg while taking a difficult shot. Five Easy Pieces and Taxi Driver similarly go around the room. In Five Easy Pieces, Bobby is playing the piano with a high degree of competence, and the film shows us photographs of the family as he plays, as it makes clear his musical heritage. As with Rear Window, it starts with the protagonist and starts to show us the content of the space. In Taxi Driver, it starts with the room and arrives at the protagonist as we see how empty Bickle’s life is, as Bobby’s family life has been full. All three shots from Rear Window, Five Easy Pieces, and Taxi Driver aren’t quite 360 degree shots, and none are that long, but they work off the long take principle where the camera gains authority in its presence.

They are all fine examples of Schrader’s unmotivated camera, but they find their logic in the information they provide. They are very good instances of orienting shots, while often the full 360-degree pan can prove disorienting, as we find in Taxi Driver and Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem. In the former, Bickle is in the car pool, and the camera leaves him behind before going around the garage and picking him up once more. In The Spiders’s Stratagem, the shot picks up a character knocking on a door before travelling to the right and showing another character entering the shot, as the first character enters the shot too. It creates a deliberate confusion as one that simply panned left from the character knocking on the door to the woman nearby wouldn’t have.

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This question of orientation is often what distinguishes the virtuoso long take from the rhythm of the shot: from the quantitative to the qualitative. Whatever the brilliance of those endoscopic shots in Goodfellas and Boogie Nights, they retain an informational richness that needn’t leave us asking any questions about the image. It is also true in the lengthy takes that mix the lateral, the crane and the endoscopic, as in 1917 and Birdman: they may be immersive, but they aren’t quite rhythmic, if we think of Andrei Tarkovsky’s claims in Sculpting in Time. He sees the importance of nature unfolding without human agency, with the rhythm coming from the presence of wind, snow, fire, and fog. A Tarkovsky take isn’t always that long, but it can feel so because nature, rather than the human, dominates. In a scene where a burning dacha is on fire in Mirror, the purpose isn’t to follow the characters dealing with the catastrophe, but to observe the fire as an elemental detail, just as the rain that accompanies it adds to this elementalism. If the mother in the scene is indifferent to the fire, this isn’t because of practical reasons — if she realised the fire would be extinguished by the rain. That would be a practical solution, while Tarkovsky seems to be asking ontological questions: what are the forces of nature and time in the scene as we question its status as an image. Is it a reflection caught in the partiality of memory that has no need of rational coordinates, and can thus be recalled for the beauty of its representation, over the necessity of its action? Tarkovsky insists, "it is above all through sense of time, through rhythm, that the director reveals his individuality. Rhythm colours a work with stylistic marks. It is not thought up, not composed on an arbitrary, theoretical basis, but comes into being spontaneously in a film, in response to the director's innate awareness of life, his 'search for time’.” (Sculpting in Time) He afterwards adds, “the person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world), and becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your 'own', and others remain strangers; and I think this is not only perfectly natural, but, alas, inevitable.”

Anderson and Scorsese are not asking us to fall into their rhythm, but to follow the forcefulness with which they convey information. They earn the right to their long takes by making sure new details emerge in the process of the shot, linked to the viewer’s general curiosity. In Goodfellas, had it only been Henry Hill going through the back of the club, passing through the hall and into the kitchen, the shot would have been equally virtuoso. But it gains much of its interest from the unfamiliar meeting the familiar. Henry has clearly done this on numerous occasions, as we realise when he says to a couple of workers necking in the corridor that, every time he comes there, they are getting physical. But for his girlfriend, this is a new experience, and it is her surprise and wonder that we are identifying with as he gives various employees he passes twenty-dollar bills, and she asks him what he does. He says he works in construction. She feels his hands and proposes that it doesn’t seem like he works in the industry. In Boogie Nights, it is the beginning of the film, so we don’t know that we are being introduced to most of the films leading characters but, as they are played by Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Heather Graham and others, it wouldn’t be a bad guess. There is no meditative dimension to these shots, and perhaps consequently little need for the viewer to ‘fall into’ the filmmaker’s rhythm as a beseeching request. The directors do not ask us for our patience; they satisfy our curiosity.

A good example of this required patience can be found in The Weeping Meadow, perhaps not one of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos’s finest films, but with undeniably very fine sequences. In one, a funeral procession on the river is filmed in two shots. One is a lateral track as the mourners take the body on a raft, with numerous people grieving on small boats by the land looking on, before the film then cuts to a frontal view of the raft, and all the other small boats also in long shot, as they move towards the camera. The shots aren’t so long quantitatively — three minutes in total — but qualitatively, they possess the rhythm Tarkovsky invokes as almost nothing happens curiously within the scene. We know the person died in the previous day, and we are following the process of his funeral. Both Angelopoulos and Tarkovsky are from Christian Orthodox countries, and both are drawn to the temporality of the religious, without necessarily proselytising for theological specificity. What matters more is the time as faith, while American cinema focuses usually on time as pragmatic, a can-do temporality that is exemplified in the ticking-clock scenario. In both Mirror and The Weeping Meadow, this could have been activated given the nature of the scenes (a burning house; a flooded village), but the directors prefer to focus on them as scenes of nature. They demand the restfulness of contemplation, not the anxiety of anticipation. The prayer they allude to isn’t the type one offers in a moment of terror, which is really a request to save the body from its potential torments; it is a slower burn attention to the needs of the soul.

The qualitative dimension to the long take is a spectatorial demand as readily, if not more than, a directorial flourish. The takes in Mirror and The Weeping Meadow are far shorter than in Goodfellas and Boogie Nights, but they can seem longer because very little is going on narratively, no matter the potential extremity of the event. Often, the quantitatively focused long take registers urgency, and we can contrast the ostensibly similar Atonement with The Weeping Meadow. In both Joe Wright’s and Angelopoulos’s films, the purpose is evacuation, with the scene in Atonement showing troops retreating from France. Zack Sharf might say that, unlike the immersive tracking shots used in films like Gravity and Goodfellas, ‘’long takes that pull you into the setting alongside the characters, the “Atonement” one shot is far more removed and observational.” (IndieWire) But by our reckoning, this is still closer to the quantitative works. It reflects the despair of the central character as he passes along the beach. We witness various moments, including horses that are no longer useful being shot in the head, troops happy they will be returning to the UK, as they play on the fairground rides still on the beach from the time before the war, and car engines put out of action — a variation on the horses’ deaths, as the soldiers don’t want to leave behind anything that would aid the Germans. These moments with the horses and the vehicles fit into the pragmatic approach to the event: the viewer may wonder for the briefest of moments why they are murdering horses, and destroying their own cars and lorries. But one can quickly find a practical purpose for the deeds. They remain quantitatively purposeful rather than qualitatively indeterminate. In The Weeping Meadow, the village is flooded and finally the couple we are following manage to get access to a boat, but rather than Angelopoulos hurrying to show us their escape, after the husband takes their children offscreen to safety, the film holds the shot and focuses on the wife, with the director determined to register not the saving of lives but the loss of a way of life, as she is resistant to leaving her home.

There will inevitably be choices made in films that show what one can save and discard in a moment of escape. It is there in the idle questions asked over what you would save if your house were on fire. But the more the question rests on the life you are leaving behind, over the lives you are saving, the more likely the shot will register the qualitative over the quantitative. It is there in a very different way in Badlands, after Martin Sheen burns down the house his young lover, Sissy Spacek, was living in, and in The Sacrifice, when Erland Josephson burns his house down after a pact with God. In Badlands, the takes are very short as director Terrence Malick shows the numerous objects in the house burning. But the point holds — there is no ticking-clock aspect to the fire, and it has the contemplative dimension to be found in the burning house in Mirror — or the exploding house at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point. Our general purpose is clear: there is no reason why a long take needs to indicate slowness by virtue of its length; only because of the relative absence of information it might seem to contain.

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Nevertheless, certain generalizations about shot choices and how the shot might function aren’t without merit. It would seem the endoscopic is very good at conveying a lot of information, while the lateral track can suggest the indifference Thomson sees in Greenaway’s shots that resemble a rat in the skirting boards. The lengthy fixed frame often conveys well the blank stare, somewhere between tedium and fascination, between becoming almost a gag on the lack of information a shot might contain or offering an abundance of information we cannot quite comprehend. Tsai Ming-liang’s work sometimes offers an approach close to the former and, in a different way, Roy Andersson. The latter approach is often found in Jacques Tati’s work and Michael Haneke’s, even if Tati has far more similarities in terms of sensibility with Andersson than with Haneke. In Playtime, Tati offers an 80-second high-angle shot of office cubicles as Monsieur Hulot initially darts between them, and then occupies a place on the edge of the upper right of the frame. “The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today,”Greg Miller notes in Wired. Even the takes that were at their longest were still a lot shorter than Tati’s here. We can add to this observational shot length the fractional feature of a character within the frame. When we see Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco moving through the club in Goodfellas, or James McAvoy hurrying along the beach in Atonement, they occupy rarely less than a quarter of the frame. In this shot from Playtime, Hulot occupies a small fraction, about 1/50th. A high fractional presence usually leaves us well aware of what matters in the image, with the people and objects Liotta and Bracco pass, for example, never so prominent that we question the centre of the shot. In the example from Playtime, one sees Hulot walking between some of the cubicles and then barely apparent at all, as we might find ourselves following a cubicle in the relative foreground where a secretary answers the phone and hands it over to a colleague. Holding the shot for so long gives us the opportunity to scan the frame and see both what we find pertinent and what the director seems to want to propose is of importance. It is less the specifics of the phone call than the general maize-like world Hulot finds himself in, and that others have familiarised themselves with. In each of these numerous booths, people will be taking calls and doing business. But as in much of Tati’s work, the comedian’s confusion points up as much the absurdity of the modern world as the incompetence of Hulot in dealing with it. The shot isn’t there to be followed; more to be contemplated upon.

Tsai Ming-liang might have little in common with Tati, no matter the occasional humour in Tsai’s work. His films often deal with loneliness and alienation, while Tati’s focus is on the anomalies in modern living. Tati’s characters are usually self-contained, but threatened by changes they lack the wherewithal to master. In Tsai’s What Time is it There?, a young Taiwanese woman is alone in Paris; a young man is solitary in Taipei, and the film moves between these two characters who only fleetingly know each other. The man starts to change all his watches to Parisian time, and in one shot tries to change a clock on a tall building. The camera looks down on the character, who is standing on the roof of the building, trying to use a long gadget to change the hands on the clock face. The camera remains fixed again for around 80 seconds while he tries to adjust the clock’s hands. Fractionally, he takes up about 100th of the frame. While the scene is suspenseful enough, it refuses any of the cutting that might make it more so. We watch the character, but also take in aspects of the city as Tsai conveys the solitariness of his character as much as the determination in the deed. In Stray Dogs, Tsai shows three characters walking along a beach in a two-and-a-half-minute shot that initially shows the camera moving, before offering a fixed frame in the final minute as the film takes in the three characters small against the expanse of sand and shallow water.

In Michael Handke’s Hidden  he opens and closes his film on static shots, as we might wonder what information we should be focusing on. In the initial scene, the camera is trained on a house. We might see it as a shot of little importance as the credits appear over it, but it turns out to be vital to the film as it is footage recorded that the central couple then watch and rewind. At the film’s conclusion, another fixed frame comes with the closing credits, but before they arrive, the viewer will likely scan the image for information far more assiduously than at the beginning. In the shot, the viewer may notice two characters who apparently don’t know each other, briefly in conversation. Nothing in the image guides us to focus on these two figures. It takes place outside a school with numerous pupils milling around. If there  were only about ten people in the frame, we could look at them and recognise the two of import, but there are so many people it is hard to discern them. Once you know where they are, it isn’t a problem, but that is what most filmmakers allow for - moving the camera so that we can follow the action, rather than staring at a screen hoping to find it.

Often, the still shot is useful for contemplation or deadpan humour, and while Tsai and Haneke are more inclined to emphasise the meditative quality of the image, Tati, as well as Aki Kaurismaki and Roy Andersson, play up the humorous, even as the nature of the shot still allows for a more contemplative form of humour than the more readily signalled. This indicates that while we wouldn’t at all want to reduce shots to a given performative function, just as we wish to avoid seeing the long take only in terms of quantitative analysis, nevertheless certain shots are more likely than others to generate a given response. We agree with Stanley Cavell when he says, “it is well to insist that this meaning is a function of this 360 degree track, in this context, in this film. It is doubtless to be expected that all 360 degree tracks enforce some range of significance in common; but it is certain that if there is some range of common significance in this automatism it can only be discovered empirically, after the critical analysis of all individual 360 degree tracks.” (The World Viewed) It could also be claimed that our analysis has far from covered all possible long takes. When Vlada Petric notes in Tarkovsky’s works two commonly used shots — the lateral track and the perpendicular shot — Donato Totaro says “many employ the former but the latter is unique to Tarkovsky’s world.” (Canadian Journal of Film Studies) While it might be important to analyse Tarkovsky’s perpendicular shots, they are so unique to the director that it wouldn’t be useful incorporating them within an article on the general approaches to the long take. On the other hand the crane is so common that it can usefully round up our exploration of the subject.

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Amongst the most famous is Orson Welles’s opening shot in Touch of Evil, a take that crosses two countries as the camera sweeps up behind the car the characters are driving in, and picks them up again as they exit the States and enter Mexico. The crane long take might be the most flamboyant of all the extended shots, and obviously more so than the static shot. The static frame suggests a limited purview, while the crane has an Icarus quality to it that indicates the filmmaker is reaching for the sun. Part of the brilliance in P.T. Anderson’s opening shot in Boogie Nights is that it combines the crane with the endoscopic, as it initially resembles Welles’s opener. In crane shots, the viewer watches with astonishment as if the director has achieved the ultimate in cinematic suture, in stitching the viewer into the material on the director’s own terms. If suture was used in Psychoanalytic film theory to explain how the viewer was held in place by the film’s representational system, by the refusal to break the fourth wall, shot counter shot, and so on, Jean-Pierre Oudart extended this to include the directorial: “a link is thereby established between the ‘absolute mastery' of the director and the limitless joussaince enjoyed by the spectator.” Explored by Daniel Fairfax in Cahiers du Cinema: the Red Years, Fairfax sees that for Oudart, there is this mastery in Hitchcock and Lang, suggesting that it was more evident than Henderson may have been willing to acknowledge. We would wish to say no more than that some long takes lend themselves better than others to giving this impression, and the crane perhaps more than any other; the static shot far less so. Welles’s flamboyance was taken further by the Russian/Georgian director Mikhail Kalatozov six years later in I am Cuba. This was post-revolutionary cinema, with the Soviets perhaps keen to compete with the Americans in more than an arms race. Kalatozov’s opening shot in the film easily matches Welles’s, and the director even tops it with another shot later on. It is a funeral sequence where the camera lifts itself above the mourners and passes the rooftops, with people standing around looking on, sitting, busy working, before the camera looks down on thousands of people grieving the dead, as the camera moves through the narrow street from on high. It might seem hyperbolic to compare this to the arms race, yet there is something in the crane shot that lends itself to competition, as the static shot does not, a point Robert Altman acknowledges in the opening to The Player, where in Altman’s extended take, he has a couple of characters discussing astonishing long shots, including Touch of Evil’s. Altman isn’t only having the characters discuss impressive shots as though they are competing with each other, he is throwing his own hat in the ring as he films an addition to the long take crane corpus while they talk.

It seems apt to end our discussion (with a brief aside to Brian De Palma) on what remains a shot that is simultaneously technically astonishing and narratively elliptical, while combining elements of different approaches to the long take in the one image: the endoscopic, the circular and the craning. This is the penultimate shot in Antonioni’s The Passenger. Technically, it used “a gyro-stabilized aerial imaging system originally designed for the Canadian military and modified by cinematographer and inventor Ron Goodman for filmmaking use.” (American Cinematographer) Antonioni, describing his vision to cinematographer Luciano Tovoli during preparation, said that he wanted a shot in the film that ‘’transitioned from ‘subjectivity to objectivity,’’’ and that he wanted to ‘‘get to objectivity without any cuts.’’ (American Cinematographer) What this meant in practice was that the camera would show Jack Nicholson’s central character alone in his hotel room, lying on the bed, and the camera would retreat and move towards the window, slowly move through the narrow bars, circle the courtyard, return to the bars of the window, and from outside the hotel see the now dead Nicholson as various characters come in and witness his body - including his wife and his girlfriend. Has he killed himself, or has he been murdered? There are reasons to believe either option is valid: he had become so dissatisfied with life that he took on the identity of another man, and this other man was a gun runner who people would have wanted dead.

Usually, the single take suggests transparency and denies the elliptical. After all, editing is often the art of ellipsis, as it can lose information in the splice. When a filmmaker cuts from a burgeoning couple enjoying a candlelit dinner to the next morning as they eat breakfast together, it is a fair assumption they have made love in the interim. No scene shows they have, but the sequence infers it. The scene is technically elliptical (edited) but unlikely to be ambiguous. Antonioni removes the technical feature of the elliptical as editing, and allows it to return as a feature of the long take. There have been other films that have defied the expectations of the coherence of the long take through temporally surprising us, in films by Philippe Garrel, Angelopoulos and Terence Davis. In Davis’s Benediction, the poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon is in an Edinburgh hospital for recovering WWI soldiers, and the camera pans from his bed to a scene of troops screaming in pain, which clearly indicates the recent past and another location. Antonioni’s shot has an aspect of this: indeed, one might say that Davis, etc., reverses the Antonioni claim about moving from the subjective to the objective: with Davis moving from the objective fact of Sassoon in a bed in Edinburgh, to his subjective recollection of events. It isn’t so much that Antonioni’s shot moves from the subjective to the objective; more that it moves from the connotative to the denotative, and creates confusion as it occupies a place between these two semiotic registers. As the shot shows us Nicholson lying on the bed, the camera starts drifting away from his body over to the window, without any apparent motivation. We might read it as a shot reflecting his indifference to being in the world: a symbolic, connotative meaning in the immediate absence of a denotative, narratively clear one. But as the shot continues, we see in the courtyard people coming and going, observing those who we may retrospectively assume have killed him. The shot would then be returning to a denotative function even if the scene remains elliptical and ambiguous.

The shot is astonishing for technical reasons, but also for what it says about film form, how it captures an aspect of Antonioni’s broader project, which is that film is a framing of action and event. This may be a fact of all live-action cinema, but one that is often ignored or deliberately denied. Offscreen space is irrelevant or anticipatory: we needn’t concern ourselves with what we don’t see unless it is soon to become important. Brian De Palma is famous for his sinuous long takes in Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars, Blow Out and Sisters. Whether the shot is extended or otherwise, De Palma is indebted to and extends Hitchcock’s interest in the unmotivated shot, as Schrader defines it. He often moves his camera without feeling obliged to follow his characters’ actions, and this gives his camera a freedom we shouldn’t confuse with the freedom Antonioni insists upon. In The Fury, he opens a scene with a high-angle crane of a beach in Chicago that then dips down and follows two bikini-clad girls as they chat, all the while taking in various other characters passing them. As the shot continues, they pass a person conspicuously out of place: while most of the other characters we have seen are in beachwear and usually young, we see in front of them a person with glasses, a dishevelled suit and lank hair, who in turn becomes our central character briefly, as he then goes on to make a phone call about one of the girls. She has telekinetic powers. The man in the suit is so conspicuously out of place in the environment that we expect him to become part of the narrative. All the other characters who have passed in and out of the frame remain of no importance, and though there will be viewers who might recognise a friend in the scene, might find one person briefly in the shot they find attractive or interesting, and wish we could see more of them, De Palma films with an awareness these are figures in the frame who can pass outside of it without creating an expectation of their presence beyond it. Antonioni’s method includes that possibility, which is then often denied. It might be the lady picking up rubbish in the park or a couple of nuns walking down the street in Blow Up; it might be people in the church in The Passenger, or a stranger on the street in La Notte. This doesn’t mean someone might not prove relevant later, and one of the best examples of this comes in The Passenger. Early in the film, we will notice Nicholson passing Maria Schneider. She is reading a book, and while we can say for sure that this is Maria Schneider, we cannot say with certainty that this is the same character whom Nicholson later sees in Barcelona, and with whom he has an affair. She makes no reference to the moment in London, and neither does he: though the shots indicate Nicholson has very much seen her, and her glance up indicates she will have noticed him.

There will be many characters in the film and in other Antonioni films who have been given as little or as much attention as Schneider is in London, but they remain insignificant to the story, as Antonioni will often momentarlily focus his attention on someone and leave you wondering why he does so, since, in most films, a shot may often enough follow a character (the motivated shot) it can also follow the action (unmotivated shot). But when it seems neither to follow the character we expect, or the action we anticipate, it indicates the illogicality Schrader invokes. This is a special kind of irrationality predicated on what we expect from most films, and what we expect from what the frame includes, and what the frame leaves out. If De Palma gave no more attention to the character in the suit, it might seem odd, and Antonioni pushes this type of oddness into the uncanny, including within his often relatively empty frames, information that may or may not be pertinent to the story he tells. The shot might ostensibly contain less information than many an image, as various commentators have invoked Antonioni’s capacity to suggest the camera's independence of plot and story — to show constantly what it wishes to show by proposing what is not shown, as the film moves away from the story or the plot.

This becomes the uncanny threat, and few have pushed it further than the Italian director. While interviewing Antonioni, Renee Epstein reckoned: “As we sit stationary in our seats staring into the world of your film, so your camera fixes itself on a particular space, seemingly unconcerned with the movements of the people operating within that space. The camera no longer has a subordinate relation to character or plot. It becomes a character with a dynamic power of acting upon the audience.” (Film Comment) De Palma’s camera may appear more flamboyant than most, but next to Antonioni’s it remains relatively contained by plot and story. He pushes far into the unmotivated shot, but not into the irrational one. In the penultimate shot in The Passenger, it initially appears illogical, then Antonioni makes it indeterminately unmotivated. When the camera moves towards the window and witnesses the events outside it, this might no longer be irrational, but only if we insist it is a function of the story. Even if the viewer accepts it is, then one still has the problem of why the camera has rationally followed the action outside the window, but remains irrational when it doesn’t return to the room to witness what happens to Nicholson. Andre Bazin proposed that the long take could show an action in its entirety, as he offered a scene in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. “For Flaherty, the important thing to show when Nanook is hunting the seal is the relationship between the man and the animal and the true proportions of Nanook's lying in wait. Editing could have suggested the passage of time; Flaherty is content to show the waiting, and the duration of the hunt becomes the very substance and object of the image. In the film this episode consists of a single shot.” (NewWaveFilm.Com) Antonioni shows that the long take can be used without ellipsis being avoided: it all depends on what is within the frame and beyond it, and how the filmmaker reverses the expectation of the paramountcy of what is inside it as opposed to outside of it.

We have noticed in most of our examples — whether circular or lateral, endoscopic or craning — that the filmmakers have followed Bazin’s notion that the long take is marvellous for showing us more. Antonioni, along with others who have usually proposed the fixed frame to indicate offscreen-space, or to test the limits of what we can see in the onscreen image, probably asks more questions around the long take than any other filmmaker with this shot from The Passenger, and it is why we have chosen to end the article on this sequence without at all undermining the numerous examples we have offered in the course of this piece.