Long take
Encyclopedia
A long take is an uninterrupted shot in a film which lasts much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of films in general, usually lasting several minutes. It can be used for dramatic and narrative effect if done properly, and in moving shots is often accomplished through the use of a dolly or Steadicam
. Long takes of a sequence filmed in one shot without any editing are rare in films.
", which can refer to the framing of a shot, and "long cut", which can refer to either a whole version of a film or the general editing pacing of the film. However, these two terms are sometimes used interchangeably with "long take".
When filming Rope
(1948), Alfred Hitchcock
intended for the film to have the effect of one long continuous take, but the cameras available could hold no more than 1000 feet of 35 mm film
. As a result, each take used up to a whole roll of film and lasts up to 10 minutes. Many takes end with a dolly shot to a featureless surface (such as the back of a character's jacket), with the following take beginning at the same point by zooming out. The entire film consists of only 11 shots. (For a complete analysis of Hitchcock's hidden and conventional cuts in Rope, see David Bordwell's text "Poetics of Cinema", 2008).
Andy Warhol
and collaborating avant-garde
filmmaker, Jonas Mekas
, shot the 485-minute-long experimental film
, Empire
(1964), on 10 rolls of film using an Auricon camera via 16mm film which allowed longer takes than its 35 mm counterpart. "The camera took a 1,200ft roll of film that would shoot for roughly 33 minutes."
The length of a take was originally limited to how much film a camera could hold, but the advent of digital video
has considerably lengthened the maximum length of a take. A handful of theatrically released feature films, such as Timecode
, Russian Ark
, PVC-1
, and La casa muda
are filmed in one single take; others are composed entirely from a series of long takes, while many more may be well known for one or two specific long takes within otherwise more conventionally edited films.
's film Werckmeister Harmonies
is 149 minutes long, and made up of 39 shots. Thus its ASL is 223.7 seconds.
The ASL is a relatively recent metric, devised by film scholar Barry Salt
in the 1970s as a method of statistically analyzing the editorial patterns both within films and across groupings of them. Noted practitioners of ASL studies include David Bordwell
and Yuri Tsivian. Tsivian used the ASL as a tool for analysis of D. W. Griffith
's Intolerance
(ASL 5.9 seconds) in a 2005 article. Tsivian helped launch a website called Cinemetrics, where visitors can measure, record, and read ASL statistics.
Steadicam
A Steadicam is a stabilizing mount for a motion picture camera that mechanically isolates it from the operator's movement, allowing a smooth shot even when moving quickly over an uneven surface...
. Long takes of a sequence filmed in one shot without any editing are rare in films.
Background
The term "long take" is used because it avoids the ambiguous meanings of "long shotLong shot
In photography, filmmaking and video production, a long shot typically shows the entire object or human figure and is usually intended to place it in some relation to its surroundings...
", which can refer to the framing of a shot, and "long cut", which can refer to either a whole version of a film or the general editing pacing of the film. However, these two terms are sometimes used interchangeably with "long take".
When filming Rope
Rope (film)
Rope is a 1948 American thriller film based on the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton and adapted by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions...
(1948), Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
intended for the film to have the effect of one long continuous take, but the cameras available could hold no more than 1000 feet of 35 mm film
35 mm film
35 mm film is the film gauge most commonly used for chemical still photography and motion pictures. The name of the gauge refers to the width of the photographic film, which consists of strips 35 millimeters in width...
. As a result, each take used up to a whole roll of film and lasts up to 10 minutes. Many takes end with a dolly shot to a featureless surface (such as the back of a character's jacket), with the following take beginning at the same point by zooming out. The entire film consists of only 11 shots. (For a complete analysis of Hitchcock's hidden and conventional cuts in Rope, see David Bordwell's text "Poetics of Cinema", 2008).
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
and collaborating avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
filmmaker, Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema." His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America.-Biography:...
, shot the 485-minute-long experimental film
Experimental film
Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...
, Empire
Empire (1964 film)
Empire is a silent, black-and-white film made by Andy Warhol. It consists of eight hours and five minutes of continuous slow motion footage of the Empire State Building in New York City. Abridged showings of the film were never allowed, and supposedly the very unwatchability of the film was an...
(1964), on 10 rolls of film using an Auricon camera via 16mm film which allowed longer takes than its 35 mm counterpart. "The camera took a 1,200ft roll of film that would shoot for roughly 33 minutes."
The length of a take was originally limited to how much film a camera could hold, but the advent of digital video
Digital video
Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal.The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.- History :...
has considerably lengthened the maximum length of a take. A handful of theatrically released feature films, such as Timecode
Timecode (film)
Timecode is a 2000 American experimental film directed by Mike Figgis.The film is constructed from four continuous 90-minute takes that were filmed simultaneously by four cameramen; the screen is divided into quarters and the four shots are shown simultaneously...
, Russian Ark
Russian Ark
Russian Ark is a 2002 Russian historical drama film directed by Alexander Sokurov. It was filmed entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum using a single 96-minute Steadicam sequence shot...
, PVC-1
PVC-1
PVC-1 is a 2007 Colombian drama film directed by Spiros Stathoulopoulos. The plot was inspired by a true story about a pipe bomb improvised explosive device that was placed around the neck of an extortion victim. This directorial debut premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2007...
, and La casa muda
La casa muda
The Silent House is a Uruguayan Spanish-language horror film released in 2010 and directed by Gustavo Hernández. The film is inspired by real events that took place in the 1940s...
are filmed in one single take; others are composed entirely from a series of long takes, while many more may be well known for one or two specific long takes within otherwise more conventionally edited films.
Sequence shot
A sequence shot involves both a long take and sophisticated camera movement; it is sometimes called by the French term plan-séquence. The use of the sequence shot allows for realistic and dramatically significant background and middle ground activity. Actors range about the set transacting their business while the camera shifts focus from one plane of depth to another and back again. Significant off-frame action is often followed with a moving camera, characteristically through a series of pans within a single continuous shot. An example of this is the first scene in the jury room of 12 Angry Men, where the jurors are getting settled into the room.Average shot length
Films can be quantitatively analyzed using the "ASL" (average shot length), a statistical measurement which divides the total length of the film by the number of shots. For example, Béla TarrBéla Tarr
-Life:Tarr was born in Pécs, but grew up in Budapest. Both of his parents were close to theatre and film: his father was a scenery designer, while his mother has been working as a prompter at a theater for more than 50 years now...
's film Werckmeister Harmonies
Werckmeister Harmonies
Werckmeister Harmonies is a 2000 Hungarian film directed by Béla Tarr, based on the novel The Melancholy of Resistance , by László Krasznahorkai...
is 149 minutes long, and made up of 39 shots. Thus its ASL is 223.7 seconds.
The ASL is a relatively recent metric, devised by film scholar Barry Salt
Barry Salt
Barry Salt is an Australian film historian.Salt was a ballet dancer and member of the Ballet Guild Company of Melbourne in 1955 and 1956, the Western Theatre Ballet of London in 1957, and the Ballet Minerva of London in 1966.Salt holds a Ph.D in theoretical physics and taught the subject at Sir...
in the 1970s as a method of statistically analyzing the editorial patterns both within films and across groupings of them. Noted practitioners of ASL studies include David Bordwell
David Bordwell
David Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film , Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema , Making Meaning , and On the...
and Yuri Tsivian. Tsivian used the ASL as a tool for analysis of D. W. Griffith
D. W. Griffith
David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial and groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance .Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera...
's Intolerance
Intolerance (film)
Intolerance is a 1916 American silent film directed by D. W. Griffith and is considered one of the great masterpieces of the Silent Era. The three-and-a-half hour epic intercuts four parallel storylines each separated by several centuries: A contemporary melodrama of crime and redemption; a...
(ASL 5.9 seconds) in a 2005 article. Tsivian helped launch a website called Cinemetrics, where visitors can measure, record, and read ASL statistics.
Directors known for long takes
- Chantal AkermanChantal AkermanChantal Anne Akerman is a Belgian film director, artist, and professor of film at the European Graduate School. Akerman's best-known film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , exemplifies a dedication to the ellipses of conventional narrative cinema.-Early life:Akerman was born to...
- Robert AltmanRobert AltmanRobert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
- Paul Thomas AndersonPaul Thomas AndersonPaul Thomas Anderson is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He has written and directed five feature films: Hard Eight , Boogie Nights , Magnolia , Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood...
- Michelangelo AntonioniMichelangelo AntonioniMichelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian modernist film director, screenwriter, editor and short story writer.- Personal life :...
- Alfonso CuarónAlfonso CuarónAlfonso Cuarón Orozco is a Mexican film director, screenwriter and film producer, best known for his films Children of Men, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Y tu mamá también, and A Little Princess.- Early life :...
- Brian De PalmaBrian De PalmaBrian Russell De Palma is an American film director and writer. In a career spanning over 40 years, he is probably best known for his suspense and crime thriller films, including such box office successes as the horror film Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables, and Mission:...
- Carl Theodor DreyerCarl Theodor DreyerCarl Theodor Dreyer, Jr. was a Danish film director. He is regarded by many critics and filmmakers as one of the greatest directors in cinema.-Life:Dreyer was born illegitimate in Copenhagen, Denmark...
in his sound films - Bruno DumontBruno DumontBruno Dumont is a French film director. To date, he has directed five feature films, all of which border somewhere between realistic drama and the avant-garde. His films have won several awards at the Cannes Film Festival. Two of Dumont's films have won the Grand Prix award: both L'Humanité and...
- Michael HanekeMichael HanekeMichael Haneke is a German born Austrian filmmaker and writer best known for his bleak and disturbing style. His films often document problems and failures in modern society. Haneke has worked in television‚ theatre and cinema. He is also known for raising social issues in his work...
- Hou Hsiao-HsienHou Hsiao-HsienHou Hsiao-Hsien is an award-winning film director and a leading figure of Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement.-Biography:...
- Alfred HitchcockAlfred HitchcockSir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
- Miklos JancsoMiklós JancsóMiklós Jancsó is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter.Jancsó achieved international prominence from the mid-1960s onwards, with works including The Round Up , The Red and the White and Red Psalm .Jancsó's films are characterized by visual stylization,...
- Jia ZhangkeJia ZhangkeJia Zhangke is a Chinese film director. He is generally regarded as a leading figure of the "Sixth Generation" movement of Chinese cinema, a group that also includes such figures as Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Yuan....
- Mikhail KalatozovMikhail KalatozovMikhail Kalatozov born Mikheil Kalatozishvili was a Georgian/Russian film director. Born in Tiflis , he studied economics before starting his film career as an actor and later cinematographer....
- Kenji MizoguchiKenji MizoguchiKenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His film Ugetsu won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and appeared in the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll in 1962 and 1972. Mizoguchi is renowned for his mastery of the long take and mise-en-scène...
(see description of Mizoguchi's long take mastery in David ThomsonDavid Thomson (film critic)David Thomson is a film critic and historian based in the United States and the author of more than 20 books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.-Career:...
's Biographical Dictionary of Film) - Max OphülsMax OphülsMaximillian Oppenheimer — known as Max Ophüls — was an influential German-born film director who worked in Germany , France , the United States , and France again...
- Otto PremingerOtto PremingerOtto Ludwig Preminger was an Austro–Hungarian-American theatre and film director.After moving from the theatre to Hollywood, he directed over 35 feature films in a five-decade career. He rose to prominence for stylish film noir mysteries such as Laura and Fallen Angel...
- Jean RenoirJean RenoirJean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
- Jacques RivetteJacques RivetteJacques Rivette is a French film director. His most well known films include Celine and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and the cult film Out 1....
- Martin ScorseseMartin ScorseseMartin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
- Alexander SokurovAlexander SokurovAlexander Nikolayevich Sokurov is a Russian filmmaker. His most significant works include a semi-documentary, Russian Ark , filmed in a single unedited shot, and Faust , which was honoured with the Golden Lion, the highest prize for the best film at the Venice Film Festival.- Life and work...
- Andrei TarkovskyAndrei TarkovskyAndrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky was a Soviet and Russian filmmaker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director, widely regarded as one of the finest filmmakers of the 20th century....
- Béla TarrBéla Tarr-Life:Tarr was born in Pécs, but grew up in Budapest. Both of his parents were close to theatre and film: his father was a scenery designer, while his mother has been working as a prompter at a theater for more than 50 years now...
- Rob TregenzaRob TregenzaRobert Tregenza is an American cinematographer and film director. Besides shooting his own projects, Tregenza has also worked as a director of photography with other directors, including Alex Cox and Béla Tarr Robert Tregenza (born November 14, 1950) is an American cinematographer and film...
- Tsai Ming-LiangTsai Ming-liangTsai Ming-liang is one of the most celebrated "Second New Wave" film directors of Taiwanese Cinema, along with earlier contemporaries such as Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang...
- Apichatpong WeerasethakulApichatpong WeerasethakulApichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul is a Thai independent film director, screenwriter, and film producer. His feature films include Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, winner of the prestigious 2010 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or prize; Tropical Malady, which won a jury prize at the 2004...
- Orson WellesOrson WellesGeorge Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
- Joe WrightJoe WrightJoe Wright is an English film director best known for Pride and Prejudice, Atonement and Hanna.-Early life and career:...
- Quentin TarantinoQuentin TarantinoQuentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
- M. Night ShyamalanM. Night ShyamalanManoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan,known professionally as M. Night Shyamalan, is an Indian-born American screenwriter, film director, and producer known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots that climax with a twist ending. He is also known for filming his movies in and around...