The Long Take In the Digital Epoch

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Hiroshima Mon Amour

By Adam Kossoff.

While discussing Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) Jean-Luc Godard famously argued that, “tracking shots are a question of morality.”[1] The obvious implication being that there is close relationship between the how and what of cinematic representation. This can be taken further in that the tracking shot, which typically encompasses a long take, implies a temporal and spatial relationship of a different ontological status to that of the fast-paced montage of mainstream cinema, one that Godard would have been aware of. Indeed, the status of the long take in the art house tradition, in relation to Bazinian realism, to the auteur-driven filmmaker and to experimental filmmaking, implies an anti-Hollywood position that resists the imaginary centering of the spectator in the midst of spectacle. The long take, at least in the art house tradition and in experimental, avant-garde cinema, is therefore not only a question of morality, but also a philosophical and political repositioning of cinemas’ engagement with its audience. However, Godard was speaking in a different time, the analogic epoch. In the context of the digital epoch has the trust in the moving image, has the possibility of the authentic and the purity of indexicality, on the one hand, or the efforts to create a reflexive, aesthetic, centred around an aesthetics of time and space, the “sculpting of time,” on the other, finally reached the end of the road? Despite the evidence to the contrary, where it seems that the aesthetic ideals of the long take has suffered in the digital epoch, I will ultimately argue that the long take lives on, kept alive by its value as evidence and as an inherent part of protest politics.

My presentation of the epochal rupture between the analogue and the digital epoch is arrived at via Bernard Stiegler’s work on originary technicity (1998). Arguing for a philosophy of technology, Stiegler has forwarded the view that the human cannot be seen autonomously outside of its relationship to technology. Human life is distinguished by, and dependent upon the technological. Derived from the Greek, techné, technics states the machine “as the instrument of man’s production of himself and the world” (Bradley 2011: 22). Human evolution is predicated upon and integrated with the technology we use, whether it’s the carved flint tools of Neolithic times, or the car from more recent times. Epochal evolutionary transformations in human life are therefore often defined by technological change, the Neolithic to Bronze Age or, for my purposes, the analogue to the digital age.

Through his ongoing analysis of originary technics, Stiegler challenges the view that the human is organic, over and above the technical. Further, the technological, the mnemotechnical in particular, embodies a temporality that is central to our experience and understanding of the world we live in. For Stiegler since we experience music, films, and television and so on via the technical there is always a tertiary part to our understanding of time, that which is mediated by technology. So memory resides within technology, whether it is a clay pot or a Hollywood film. Seeing as the long take has frequently been seen as an authentic measure of temporality itself, it is important to understand that there is therefore no such thing as a pure or organic time in the cinema, memory (this includes time and space in constant inter-relation) are constructed via the language of cinema which is in turn always formed by the technological.

Quality v Quantity

What is the long take? Is it a shot that’s slightly longer than the average shot length (ASL)? The famous opening long take in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) is three minutes 22 seconds (long takes in mainstream movies invariably occur in the opening title sequence), while the much-quoted long take in Goodfellas (1990), where the steadicam camera follows Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco into a club through the back entrance, is three minutes five seconds. There are though numerous directors who have used the long take to work against the grain of mainstream Hollywood. Miklos Jansco is noted for his skillfully choreographed long takes. Red Psalms (1972) is 87 minutes long, and consists of 26 shots in all, so its overall ASL is therefore three minutes 30 seconds. Turin Horse (2011), made by Jansco’s fellow country, Bela Tarr, runs at an average time of four minutes per shot, but compared to the balletic, ritualized choreography of Jansco’s work, Turin Horse, shot on a steadicam, has a ponderous, overbearing physicality.[2]

Paris vu par...

Paris vu par…

Overall, the quantitative approach, and average shot length as a measure of the long take, tells us very little about the experiential qualities of the long take itself. Of Jean Rouch’s use of the long take as part of his contribution to the compilation film Paris vu par… (1964), Godard cleverly stated that, “Seconds reinforce seconds; when they really pile up, they begin to be impressive” (1972: 212). Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players (1975) is another film celebrated for its long take aesthetic, one where the idea of “dead space” is central. Sixty minutes into the film the 1952 elections are taking place in Greece. The members of a theatre troupe walk over a railway crossing. The camera pans left to right following an election truck which disappears into the distance and there is a moment of “dead space” when nothing happens, forcing the spectator into a state of reflexive pensiveness, as the seconds pile up. Or as Rancière writes, “An image is not supposed to think. It contains unthought thought […]. Pensiveness thus refers to a condition that is indeterminately between the active and the passive” (2011: 107).[3] We then hear the sound of a car that comes into shot in the distance. Panning right to left, the camera follows the car back to the crossing, now guarded by Nazi soldiers. This shift from one historical period back to another within the same shot undoubtedly represents one of the most innovatory uses of the long take in cinematic history; a historical time situated spatially, overtly mediated by cinematic mnemotechnology.

Being-There

The long take has played a big role in documentary film, with its oft-stated aim of capturing the real. Direct cinema (otherwise known as observational documentary), spurred on by the ideology of transparency and the desire for the real, was facilitated by technological innovations based around 16mm film. The long take can be seen as practically the core principle of direct cinema, a means by which to observe the real more or less unhindered by the subjectivity of the filmmaker’s decision making and the need for editing together fragments of footage. The stated ideology of Richard Leacock, a driving force behind Direct Cinema, was to give the audience the feeling of “being-there.” Consequently observational documentaries were supposed to be filmed by impartial bystanders (flies-on-the-wall) and made with a minimum of cuts and cutaways. Directed by the pioneers of American observational cinema Robert Drew and filmed by Leacock and Albert Maysles, Primary (1960), regarded as the first direct cinema film, is structured around Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey fighting for nomination to lead the democrats in a primary election in Wisconsin. One of Primary’s most famed moments comes with a one minute twenty seconds long take. Using a fast, extreme wide-angle lens, a high-angle over the-head-shot follows Kennedy through a crowd of eager Polish Catholic voters at a rally in Milwaukee and onto the stage to stand in front of the packed hall. Despite the realist demand for an aesthetics of the long take there is a paradox that entirely undermines the direct cinema manifesto of using as few cuts and cutaways as possible in order to guarantee the indexicality of the image and confirm the sensation of “being-there.” For as Warhol showed with the eight hour long Empire (1964), the longer the take the more reflexive film becomes, pushing the mnemotechnology of cinema to the foreground of cinematic perception.

Shoah

Shoah

The long take in Shoah (1985) is used as an interrogative tool, an instrument of truth that attempts to look death in the face. Claude Lanzmann has claimed that his nine-and-half-hour film “is also a physical film and it is necessary to feel the fear” (qtd. in Liebman 2007: 141). The long take can be seen as a central component of the attempt to convey the physical nature of the Holocaust, the “being-thereness” of the real, a narrative that sets out to confront “the impossibility of telling the story” (qtd. in Liebman 2007: 140). Shoah, celebrated as the film about the Holocaust is also notable for its refusal to use archive footage as well as for the director’s claim that he wanted to make an “art film,” not a documentary (Liebman 2007: 160). Lanzmann stated that he wanted to bring the abstraction of history into “the pure present, the very opposite of memory” (qtd. in Vice 2011: 83). This is a euphemism for a claim on the real, for authenticity and the “being-there” (with a vengeance) that Leacock spoke of. Contrary to Lanzmann’s perception of what he was doing, this aesthetic refers to Stiegler’s definition of the flux of temporal consciousness. In other words, all film is archival and the long take foregrounds the mnemotechnical nature of film, engendering time in its passing and a time that has already passed.

Lanzmann always on the hunt for the “physical” doesn’t stop the camera when interviewees start to break down, at least not until they insist. So that he could be interviewed while cutting customer’s hair, Lanzmann set up Abraham Bomba in a barbershop in Israel. As Bomba spoke of his experience of cutting hair before Jewish women were sent to the gas chambers at Treblinka, Lanzmann realized that with only five or six minutes of film left in the camera that the footage might run out a crucial point in the interview. So he re-loaded the magazine and had a full ten-eleven minutes of footage during which he could film the interview without interruption. Having set up the scene “where something would happen,” Lanzmann says: “It was a good thing the change was made quickly because it is after that he starts to break. It was very important. It would have been impossible to ask him, ‘Please cry again…’’’ (qtd. in Liebman 2007: 157). Godard’s point about the morality of the long take is indeed made pertinent by Lanzmann’s ethically questionable filmmaking techniques.

Tourou et Bitti

Tourou et Bitti

By contrast, Rouch’s filmmaking strategies were designed to overcome the questionable ethics of anthropological documentary filmmaking. In his film Tourou et Bitti (1967), Rouch’s ploy was to get beneath the superficial claim of the indexical real that has beset the documentary form. In a single, ten minute long take, as Rouch walked into a Songhay village in Western Africa, he filmed with a hand-held camera, shot at eye-level as he looked through the viewfinder. According to the village witch doctors it was his continuous filming that apparently induced a failing possession ceremony. Rouch dubbed this invisible contact to the spiritual ancestors that his hand-held camera gave him the “cine-trance.” As a significant instigator of the reflexive documentary, Rouch’s strategy of overcoming the problematic portrayal of the other was to embed himself in the event itself, to be a contingent part of the filmmaking process. For Rouch, the filmmaker could be absorbed into the filmic event, but what he conveyed to his audience was a mediated view of his “being-there.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini used the single-take footage of John F. Kennedy’s death to argue that the long take is “subjective” and always in the “present tense.” The Zapruder footage is 26.6 seconds long, filmed at 18 frames per second and not one long take, but containing two jump cuts. [4] Pasolini argues that, “It is impossible to perceive reality as it happens if not from a single point of view, and this point of view is always that of a perceiving subject” (1980: 3). For Pasolini, the long take, “the primordial element of cinema” (ibid.), lacks the intervention of montage, which allows the present to become past, the subjective to become objective. The long take can only reveal potentiality; it cannot provide perspective or meaning. Pasolini claims that, “as long as he has a future, that is, something unknown, a man does not express himself” (1980: 5). By this he means that editing, the constructed language of film that makes pastness possible and meaning visible facilitates understanding and insight. But the long take is like life itself, its meaning hidden by its continual presentness, for it is death that “performs a lightning-quick montage on our lives” (1980: 6).

Given, the debate and theories surrounding Kennedy’s death, and the way this footage has been subsequently interrogated and scrutinised, we can see a certain point to Pasolini’s argument which reversed the standard reading of the long take as proof of the filmmaker’s objectivity. Pasolini mistakenly thinks the footage was filmed on 16mm, not 8mm, but he is perhaps correct in using it as an example of a long take, for as Barry Salt concluded with his analysis of ASL, the length of shot in the average Hollywood film decreased from 11 to 7.7 seconds in the years 1958 to 1969 (Milliken 2008: 230). Then again, Salt’s so called “statistical style analysis,” fails to include the ASL of the home movie, which is what Zapruder’s footage started life as.

Sleep

Sleep

Pasolini reviled the long take and claimed that he never used it, even though in his first film Accattone (1961) there is a one minute forty second sequence shot of Franco Citti pursuing his estranged wife along the road for money. Pasolini also attacked Andy Warhol’s first film Sleep (1963):

“This, then, is cinema in its pure state […] and as such, a representation of reality from a single visual angle, it is subjective in an insanely naturalistic way: primarily inasmuch as it also is the natural time of reality […] new cinema […] in its intensified cult of reality and its interminable sequence shots, rather than having as fundamental proposition ‘that which is significant is’ […] has as fundamental proposition ‘that which is insignificant.’” (Qtd in Rhodes 2007: 68)

Pasolini was suffering from the same misconception that many others have suffered. Sleep wasn’t shot in long sequence shots and therefore has no “durational equivalence” (Gidal 1989). It was filmed on a 16mm Bolex that could only take one hundred foot roles of film and lasted four minutes each. The film was actually ninety minutes of actual footage looped and slowed down (projected at sixteen frames per second not the twenty four that it was shot at) to five hours twenty minutes hours.

Perception and Deception

All of the aforementioned films could have been shot on a digital format, retaining their indexical qualities, but would they have been the same viewing experience? After all Alexander Sokurov’s The Russian Ark (2002), one long 87 minute sequence shot was made possible by being filmed digitally, but not apparently treated in post-production.[5] We will see from the example of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013) that in fact Russian Ark could have been constructed of several takes knitted together in post-production to make them look like one long take, and this would probably not have affected the audience’s response to the film in any way, partly due to the fact that there is so much occurring to occupy our minds and our senses in the film that it would’ve been easy to disguise the cuts. However, the other hand, much of the promotion of the film, and subsequent interest in it, was based around this impressive feat of shooting a feature film in one shot. Sokurov’s justification, much like Cuarón’s, was directed towards the supposed realism of the long take (2002). This claim is not connected to the indexicality of the image but the fact that the film occurs in real time and therefore it must be more real. In many respects the physical limits of the 400 foot roll has played a strong part in how filmmakers have constructed and organized the long take, as well influencing how critics and audiences have perceived it. It seems to me that the end of this ten-minute limit has contributed towards the dissipation of the power of the long take, and that the appeal of long take perhaps remains a mythical one. So mythical that it blinds viewers and critics into seeing something when it’s not there.

Wavelength

Wavelength

Michael Snow’s structuralist film Wavelength (1967) remains a significant point of reference for the experimental potential of the long take. Snow’s early statement on the film declared: “The film is a continuous zoom which takes forty-five minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field” (qtd. in Michelson 1978: 197). Falling into a wishful desire for the holistic wholeness of the long take, many a spectator and critic alike have since been convinced that the film consists of a single forty-five minute take, a zoom in from a wide shot of the studio to a big close up of a photo of a some waves out at sea. However, in an interview that was published a year after the film was made, Snow informed P. Adams Sitney that “Ken Jacobs lent me the camera and the Angenieux lens and naturally he did not want me to leave it in my studio. I had to take it apart every time after I finished shooting. I fixed the tripod but I still had to take the camera off. I shot some nights and some days. I’m delighted the whole thing came out the way I wanted it, including the different kinds of stock” (1994: 45).

A close look at the film reveals that there could be around twenty cuts in the film, though it is impossible to be exact as some of the cuts are hidden, or “disguised,” by flash frames, double-exposure and by the diegetic sound of traffic outside the studio. The borrowed lens would probably have been the 20:1 Angenieux 12-240mm. Long as this lens is, zooming across an eighty-foot studio Snow would have hit the end of the telephoto zoom on the medium shot of the photograph of the waves. This would account for the double-exposure and then an apparent jump cut to a big close-up of the photograph, when the camera carries on zooming in for short time.

Rosalind Krauss deems that Wavelength’s “single, almost uninterrupted zoom” (Krauss 1999: 25) meets with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological view of how we conceive of the front and back of our bodies as a single ‘pre-objective’ entity. However, the importation of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the organic body rather undermines her explanation of structuralist film’s relationship to apparatus theory where technology is a major determining factor in the organization of the viewing experience. Similarly, despite what Snow has said about taking the camera apart every time he finished shooting, Annette Michelson seemingly succumbs to the lure of the real in the long take. She saw Wavelength fifteen times, but wrote about the film as if it was filmed in one long take, “the scene of pure movement in time” (Michelson 1978: 175). Michelson quotes Edmund Husserl on the temporal nature of perception being made evident in Snow’s film and in doing so she represses the centrality of technology to structuralist filmmaking. Snow is, claims Michelson, allowing the assertion of time and space to take precedence and “the movement of camera as consciousness” (1978: 175). While on the other hand, challenging the fetish of presence and the experimental film traditions that Stan Brakhage best represents, Michelson also argues that Snow stood apart from the “organicity” which Brakhage so dearly sought in his films, because technology is a crucial part of the perceptual equation of structural cinema.

In a variation of Pasolini’s critique of the long take, Peter Gidal, guru of structuralist-materialist filmmaking, continually sought to foreground the filmmaking process as a technological form and was entirely antagonistic towards the mimetic properties of film as it embroils the spectator in an ideological process they have little or no control over. Challenging the idealism of experimental filmmaking, Gidal argued against the “common misunderstanding” that the avant-garde film fetishized “one to one relations, in a way which presupposed endless films made up of simple unedited shots” (Gidal 1989: 1). Gidal opposed experimental filmmakers “for whom durational equivalence often seemed to be a primary ethic of filmmaking” (1989: 2). In particular, he points the finger at fellow structuralist-materialist filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice, querying Le Grice’s criticism of Wavelength as a “retrograde step in cinematic form” because it fractured the potentiality of the long take through its edits and through its underlying narrative form (ibid.). With films like Room Film 1973 (1973), Gidal was, in contrast, more concerned to “explore the heterogeneity of film process” (ibid.) challenging the way classical cinema seeks to “efface the marks of the editing splice” (1989: 3).

Into a New Epoch

Children of Men

Children of Men

Moving on into the digital epoch, Children of Men (2006) portrays a dystopian world where humans are infertile and newborns a distant memory. The core plot revolves around an internecine struggle for the baby of a woman who has mysteriously managed to conceive. As with Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Russian Ark and latterly Gravity, the release of the film was accompanied by the promotion of the film’s complex use of long takes. Even the DVD, released a year later, featured an extra, Under Attack, extolling the ingenuity of three of the most complex the long takes in the film. The director, Alfonso Cuarón, members of the crew and the actors all describe the challenge of devising these long take scenes, whether in front of the camera of behind and we are led to believe that these “virtuoso” long takes, as one critic referred to them, were indeed long takes (Stevens 2006).[6]

Battle of Algiers

Battle of Algiers

In the pre-title scene after the central character leaves a cafe a bomb explodes from inside. Although this appears to be one “long take,” one minute thirty seconds long – seemingly inspired by similar scenes from the Battle of Algiers (1966) – it was filmed over a period of two days in two shots which were then digitally knitted together to make it look like a single take. The second “long take” occurs when the main characters are driving the pregnant woman to safety but are ambushed in some woods by a bunch of wild new-age types. Filmed from the point of view of a camera inside the car, this “single” take is nearly four minutes long. It was made possible by an extremely complex rig built into the roof of car, took two months to plan and eight days to shoot and was filmed on three separate locations. It is, in fact, six shots knitted together to make it look like one long take. The third “long take,” or sequence shot, towards the end of the film is a six-minute action sequence with the film’s hero running through a refugee camp in Bexhill-on-sea and elsewhere, made to look like a war-torn Belgrade, to save the mother and her baby. It was constructed of five shots on two locations. One of the cuts is fairly obvious as spots of blood spattered on the lens suddenly disappear when the camera, following the hero’s gaze, tilts up a staircase. Although, of course, the blood-spots could have been digitally removed within a continuous shot.

Children of Men

Children of Men

On the DVD extras the director Alfonso Cuarón rather predictably forwards the idealistic view of the long take, arguing that that the long take was used to make it “look raw” and “real,” apparently without the use of CGI and green screen. Rather triumphantly he exclaims, “They said it would never work, it was impossible – it was sweet!” Cuarón’s celebratory tone ignores the crucial formal aesthetic of the long take, “seconds reinforcing seconds,” the feeling of time slowed-down, excessively so in the films of Chantal Akerman and Angelopoulos, amongst others. The “long takes” in Children of Men are action-packed sequences, where the experience of time in the state of passing is negated and the dead space that we see in Angelopoulos, or the promotion of the “insignificant” that Pasolini dislikes about Warhol is obviously negated. Another of the DVD extras features Slavoj Žižek’s take on the film when he argues that the film is the “best diagnosis of ideological despair of Late Capitalism.” In response one might argue that the end of history is reflected in the manipulation of time through the digital knitting of several shots to make them look like a single long take; that is the digital can only contain the memory of its manipulation, not its external relations to the indexical. Žižek goes on to say that, “Only films like this will guarantee that cinema as art will really survive.” (This comment is cut with a shot of the boat named “Tomorrow” that appears out of the fog at the end of the film).

Nevertheless, the long takes in Children of Men certainly raises a number of questions that indicate a turning point for the long take. This is confirmed by Cuarón’s follow up film, Gravity. That is, in the age of the digital the cinematic long take can no longer be seen as a measure of authentic and continuous time, as a mnemotechnical form. Discussing the opening sequence, one long 13 minute take, the special effects supervisors confirm that:

“It’s pretty much all animated – in that scene only their faces are real. Pre-viz also allowed us to work out ways of splitting the shots up so that they might seem like a 13 minute shot, but they’re actually built out of, say, 30 shots that are ten or 20 seconds long […]. Whenever they turn away from the camera, or you see a glove or a hand go over and you don’t see their faces? That’s a cut. [—] On the opening sequence there are 17 joins or something like that.” (Franklin 2014)

This time round Cuarón and his team didn’t seem so eager to pretend that the long takes really were long takes, but when he asked about the appeal of the long take he replied that he likes them because they convey “real time” and that, “In Gravity the use of tracking – of long extended takes – was partially because we wanted to film it like an Imax-style Discovery Channel documentary. You don’t have the luxury of cuts when you’re in space. The camera is there; you’re just observing. And isn’t it amazing how Earth looks from out there?” (Roper 2013).

Brad Stevens writes,

“What we have now is a form of postmodern aesthetics in which the unreliability of the image matches the unreliability of every other element making up the cinematic text […]. If we can no longer accept that mistakes or intentions might be genuine, our only remaining option is to view everything as false. The digitally manipulated long take might well be postmodern cinema’s defining gesture.” (2014)

This would be consistent with my argument so far, but now I will change tact and look at the long take’s digital potential. Whatever one’s reservations about the claim on the real in Children of Men or in Gravity, in the digital era it is possible to believe that the long take lives on and can still be seen as a continuing attempt to show the collective in action. It is no accident that the defining films of Jansco, such as Red Psalms (1972), use the long take to portray a strong sense of the collective in the context of Hungarian national identity and its struggle against post-war communism (a striking ethnographic presentation of Hungarian peasant collective identity through their traditional Socialist songs).

In the digital epoch, the unadulterated long take is an intricate part of any collective struggle against the forces of oppression. Crowd scenes, protests and violence, are now captured in long take on mobile devices and cameras and uploaded to social media transmitted globally as ongoing evidence filmed in real time. Obviously the need for urgency and the difficulties of accessing editing software contribute to the fact that much of this footage has been conveyed in single takes without a commentary. Hidden Camera Captures Syrian Security Violent Suppression of Protests provides a single example.[7] A hidden camera films out the back window as a crowd of people protest and chant anti-government slogans and then suddenly turn and run from the police. The camera records away, staring out through the windscreen as the car slowly reverses and then goes forward, following the ebb and flow of the crowds (the sound is also crucial here) who are being chased by the police. This is unpredictable history in the making, tied to the unfolding of time within the long take itself. This “being-there” of the digital footage is largely undermined when it’s shown on television news. Edited with a commentator’s voice added, often shown with the proviso that the footage might not be what it claimed, having been impossible to verify, making it something a lot more controlled, informational and detached from the heat of the moment.

Bicycle Thieves

Bicycle Thieves

Alain Badiou defines the event, Pasolini’s “potentiality,” as a situation that is unpredictable and outside of any truth-bearing definitions or theory, “which compels us to decide a new way of being” (2001: 41). Badiou’s event is that which Pasolini argued against: a presentation rather than a representation. Or as Bazin wrote in his essay on Bicycle Thieves (1948), “The events are not necessarily signs of something, of a truth of which we are to be convinced, they all carry their own weight, their complete uniqueness, that ambiguity that characterizes any fact” (1967). To a certain extent the long take can capture the event, revealing a re-orientation of a group of people, actively contributing on an ongoing, day-to-day basis. To return to Stiegler: “Because calendarity and cardinality form the elementary tissue of our vital rhythms, belief systems and relations to the past and to the future, to control the future mechanisms of orientation will be to control the global imaginary” (Stiegler 2003, emphasis in the original). The long take with its claims on authenticity and the real, rendered ever more dubious in the epoch of the digital and CGI, is perhaps paradoxically now utilised by those engaged in protests around the world who have found a new use for the long take, as a local and a global mnemotechnical tool for collective participation that is, in its originary state, embedded in the event itself as a process of re-orientating the political.

Adam Kossoff is an artist, filmmaker and writer. His work, both gallery based and single screen, addresses and questions the relationship of the moving image to differing spatial and technological contexts.

References

Antonioni, Michelangelo (1994), The Architecture of Vision, (ed. Marga Cottino-Jones), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Badiou, Alain (2001), Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso.

Bazin, André (1967), “Neorealism and Pure Cinema: The Bicycle Thief,” The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, What is Cinema, Vol. 2., Berkley: University of California.

Bellour, Raymond (1987), “The Pensive Spectator,” Wide Angle, Vol. 9, No. 1, p. 6.

Bradley, Arthur (2011), Originary Technicity, The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.

Downing, L. and Saxton, L. (2009), Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters, London: Routledge.

Franklin-Wallis, Oliver (2014), “An oral history of Gravity’s incredible, 13-minute Space Shuttle Impact Scene”, British GQ, 28 February.

Gidal, Peter (1989), Materialist Film, London: Routledge.

Godard, J-L. (1972), Godard on Godard (ed. Tom Milne), London: Secker & Warburg.

Liebman, Stuart (1990), “Seminar with Claude Lanzmann, April 11th 1990,” Shoa, DVD notes, London: Eureka.

Michelson, Annette (1978), “Toward Snow,” in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, New York: Anthology Film Archives.

Milliken, C. (2008), “Movies and Counterculture,” in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1980), “Observations on the Long Take,” October, No. 13, Summer, pp. 3-6.

Rancière, Jacques (2011), The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso.

Rhodes, John David (2007), Stupendous Miserable City, Pasolini’s Rome, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rhodie, Sam (1985), Antonioni, London: BFI.

Roper, Caitlin (2014), “Why Gravity Director Alfonso Cuarón Will Never Make a Space Movie Again”, Wired, 10 January.

Sitney, P. Adams (1979), Visionary Film, The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978. New York: Anthology Film Archives.

Snow, Michael (1994), The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, Toronto: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Stevens, Brad (2004), “Faking the Long Take”, Sight and Sound, 16 April.

Stevens, Dana, (2006), “The Movie of the Millennium”, Slate, 21 December.

Stiegler, Bernard (1998), Technics and Time; The Fault of Epimetheus, California: Stanford University Press.

___ (2003), “Our Ailing Educational Institutions”, Culture Machine, Vol. 5.

Vice, Sue (2011), Shoa, London: BFI.


[1] Though Jonathan Rosenbaum has written: “Just for the record, it was LM [Luc Moullet] and not Godard who first observed that morality is a matter of tracking shots […] in the course of his remarkable ‘Sam Fuller sur les brisées de Marlowe.’”

[2] For a direct comparison see Kevin B. Lee’s visual analysis.

[3] Rancière lifted the idea of pensiveness from Raymond Bellour who argued that the spectator is made to feel pensive when a film is interrupted by a still image or photograph (Bellour 1987: 6).

[4] Perhaps Abraham Zapruder, the famed amateur author of this footage, was re-winding his Bell and Howell camera during the first short ellipsis?

[5] André Bazin first introduced the term plan-séquence to describe the long take that covers a whole scene, but there isn’t a term for a whole film that consists of one long take containing a whole host of scenes.

[6] While Michael Joshua Rowin has written: “Cuarón’s long shots and long takes engage in a clearly sought aestheticism, rendering disaster exciting to the eye (and manna to cinephiles).”

[7] At the last count it had been watched by 44,284 people, but it has recently been removed due strange copyright issues. At the risk of undermining the harsh realities of political struggle, and ongoing consequences geopolitical conflict, one could say that it’s a “Godardian” shot.