The Velocity of the Long Take

This paper will be presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference on Sunday, March 13 at 8:00am in New Orleans Feel free to leave comments or post questions.

As early cinema developed out of the period of the actuality film and cinema of attractions, and into a narrator system linked to the emerging Hollywood studio, we begin to see the structuring and standardization of filmic space and temporality. This unification of cinematic time and space, according to the research done by Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson came about through the melding of various modes of practices such as division of labor and agreed upon set of stylistic norms on how movies should properly tell a story. In their research, shot duration, in particular, plays an important role in sustaining the realist illusion of narrative time and space. Bordwell et al. note that the majority of Hollywood films (during the classical period) did not exploit short or long takes as a means of narration in order to prevent viewer from becoming aware of the film’s construction of time and space.

But if the management of shot length is to prevent viewers from becoming aware of the apparatuses that create a film’s virtual world, how do we account for the long take that evokes a sense of speed and can even further the experience of narrative immersion? Using the long take as a form of speed, I argue that there is no necessary correspondence or a strict one to one relationship between shot duration, viewership and the concealment of the construction of filmic time and space. This is not to suggest that long takes are not used to disrupt or engage with temporal and spatial continuity in order to evoke perceptions of slowness or contemplation. This style of filmmaking is evident in the works of Gus Van Sant, Bela Tarr and Michelangelo Antonioni, who employ long takes as a means to create a cinema of duration and stillness alternative to traditional narratives.

What I am arguing is that the economic and/or technological mode of production cannot be the single determinant in how meaning is produced from a cultural artifact such as cinema.  As I hope to show in the examples that follow, these filmmakers take technology into their own hands and re-purpose it to meet their artistic vision. I add that the negotiation of the elements which create a film’s story world (such as shot duration) can potentially have a strong impact on a film’s rhythm and speed and overall narrative experience.

The first half of this presentation, I will show some examples of the long take as a form of speed and how these directors and their production crew negotiate and push the limits of the latest technologies to meet their visions. And the second half of the presentation will tackle the theoretical question of shot duration in regards to defining the essence of cinema.

I would like to begin with an example from Joseph H. Lewis’ crime drama, Gun Crazy (1950). The long take we are seeing involves a bank heist, which takes place from the point of view of outlaw and thieves Bart and Annie played by John Dall and Peggy Cummins. To create the sequence, Lewis used a stretch Cadillac and removed all the seats to fit the camera operator and a bare bones production crew.  Instead of following the script, Lewis had both actors Dahl and Cummins improvise their dialogue to enhance the suspense and realism of the scene. 

Lewis stated that the scene was so real that “Off-screen there were people that yelled, ‘They held up the bank, they held up the bank,’ … none of the bystanders [of the town] knew what we were doing. We had no extras except the people the policeman directed. Everything—cars, people—was there on the street” (47). Thus, the Hampton robbery scene illustrates that the long take not only can be re-purposed to create a feeling of immersion and suspense, but also can invoke a sense of speed and velocity.

The desire to move the camera and to create a dynamic cinematic space can be traced back to the silent film period. In Lotte Eisner’s book on German film director and expressionistic pioneer F.W. Murnau, she refers to notes typed by Murnau in which he expresses a wish from “Father Christmas [to create] a camera that can move freely in space” (84). Murnau’s wish would practically come true in the 1970s with Garrett Brown’s invention of the steadicam. Handheld photography had already established itself as a style employed by narrative filmmakers and documentarians. But the Steadicam not only can track its subject with fluidity, but it also run within the profilmic space without the camera obtrusively bouncing up and down. Let’s take a look at the Steadicam in action.

Here, we see Brown sitting in the wheelchair with the steadicam on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Similarly, as we saw with Lewis’ rigging of the stretched Cadillac in Gun Crazy, the wheelchair has been turned into a movable camera support. Even though the Steadicam offered more flexibility in moving the camera through pro-filmic space, Kubrick and his production crew still had to pool their resources in order to build a moving device to capture his vision of fluid moving images in the labyrinth hallways of the Overlook hotel.  

Today, with the emergence of state of the art simulation technologies, films now can incorporate many layers blended together within the frame such as virtual actors, crowd sequences and matted paintings with live action recording. More so, as Lev Manovich notes, “Digital compositing does represent a new step in the history of visual simulation because it allows the creation of moving images of non-existent worlds” (153 Authors emphasis).

Thus, new digital technologies not only allow one to create new and imaginative virtual worlds, but also can be mobile within those specific dimensions. Let’s take a look at the making of the long shot from Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005).

The use of CGI effects become so life-like that the long take in this scene not only gives a sense of urgency and speed, but shows how these special effects conceals the film’s apparatus. This is what Manovich refers to as synthetic realism through the creation of synthetic 3-D images. In the example of the long take in War of the Worlds, special effects are blended with live action to continue Hollywood’s long tradition of narrative realism.

Conversely, the impression of slowness or fastness does not always have to entail long takes.  Films that use the standard methods of editing can also disrupt the transparency and unity of cinematic time and space through the elements within the frame itself.

The next example is from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). What we are seeing is the pink room sequence where Laura Palmer and Donna Hayward go out with Jacques Renault and his buddies to party. 

 

 

 

To create this effect of an alternate plane of reality, Lynch architects a dreamlike atmosphere using loud trance-like music and the disorientating effect of a strobe light.  To further the feeling of drug-induced and surreal state of mind, the characters’ lethargic body gestures and delayed dialogue deliberately slow down the pace of the scene, thus creating a meditative or even out of body experience as if time no longer exists.  Moreover, the scene itself goes on for a long period of time, which alters the pace of the entire film. This sequence is an example of a scene that does not employ overtly long takes, but is still able to slowdown the time and speed of the film by using the elements within the frame itself.
 

As stated earlier, if the management of shot length is to prevent viewers from becoming aware of the construction of filmic time and space, how do we account for the long take that evokes a sense of speed? Moreover, how do we account for films that employ normal shot duration that derail cinematic time and space such as Lynch’s Twin Peaks?

As it is known in classical film theory, one of the central debates in regards to editing versus shot duration is Sergei Eisenstein’s formalist theory of dialectical montage, and Andre Bazin’s accounts of cinematic realism and mise en scene. These two canonical arguments address the question on how is meaning generated in cinema. Is it editing or is it mise en scene that names cinema’s essence? Although Eisenstein and Bazin’s theories make up a major component of classical film theory, the question of film’s essence or ontology continues to be addressed today.

For example, Lev Manovich considers Eisenstein’s technique of montage used in simulation technologies. Eisenstein’s theory of dialectical montage is the collision of shots and the image it creates within the viewer’s mind.  For example, the juxtaposition of cattle being slaughtered and the rounding up of factory workers at the end of Strike and its metaphor or illusion to capitalism. Manovich, however, notes that the virtual image is there for us on the screen, but the modes of production that create the reality (that is, the processes behind the scenes) are synthesizes via the computer to offer us the illusion of a seamless reality.  In other words, simulation technology arranges the components within a shot and renders them in montage like fashion to create a transparent film image as we saw in the long take in War of the Worlds.

D. N. Rodowick makes a similar argument in his critique of Russian Ark (2002), a film shot in one long take using digital technologies.  He notes “The key to resolving the discrepancy between Russian Ark’s self-presentation and its ontological expression as digital cinema is to understand that it is a montage work, no less complex in this respect than Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film October” (165). 

 

Rodowick notes a contradiction in Russian Ark’s (2002) experiment of the long take because it relies primarily on many digital events which he notes are digital capturing, synthesis and compositing. In other words, the long take in Russian Arc is rendered mathematically via the binary code of computer language; where as traditional photography capture light as it comes through the lens and penetrates the emulsion of the film, leaving a physical trace of reality.

What I think it is important to point out in these theoretical debates in regards to editing and shot duration is not who has the stronger or better argument in terms of defining the essence of cinema, but the tension that has emerged in regards to its very definition. Here, I draw upon Stuart Hall’s model of articulation which entails how the production and consumption of cultural objects are represented and negotiated within the lived practices of every day life.  

Articulation is an operation of meaning-making that does not have any necessary correspondence or a direct one to one relationship between social practices and processes of production. For Hall, articulation is not universally fixed across various discourses. Therefore texts can become a site of a struggle where groups contest and can potentially transform a leading cultural force or dominant ideology.

For example, we can see how the long take creates a cinema of duration, engaging with filmic time and space counter to the dominant mode of classical narration. And, in other instances, the long take is articulated as a form a speed and velocity that attempts to do what Jean Mitry phrases as “forgetting of the frame.” 

 

But Hall points out that articulation cannot all simply be differences or free floating. We need a system or “fixing” to connect to grids of knowledge. What is contingent is how each prior set of signifying practices can influence the process of encoding and decoding of a text such as cinema or television. Using Hall’s notion of articulation, we can conclude that there is no necessary belongingness or a fixed universal essence in regards to shot duration and editing.  But what is consistent is the tension that emerges in its very definition. And that the struggle in defining cinema’s essence will generate different interpretations as in the case of using digital technologies versus traditional film photography.

To conclude, as I hope to have shown, the ordering of cinematic time and space is not directly tied to a hegemonic mode of production, or linked to a grand essence of cinema. In these examples, we have seen how artists mold the current film technologies to meet their story visions. And we have also seen how the orchestration of the elements within the frame can distort normal pictorial time and space as was the case with Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me. Thus, these examples provide a glimpse into how much information is at work in creating a film’s story world (whether its traditional film photography or digital technologies), and how they can potentially create impressions of speed in relation to the construction of cinematic time and space.