I’m always going on about the effectiveness of a well-applied long, uninterrupted take, so here’s another example to support my case. It appears in a fabulous British feature that was directed by Joseph Losey, called The Servant (1963). Photographed in black and white and 1:66 aspect ratio by the legendary Douglas Slocombe, BSC, this example appears at the 1:03:40 mark and continues for a full four-minutes, forty-seconds – an eternity in terms of how most filmmakers think today.
While not appropriate for every movie, playing an extended scene without cutting is an amazing stylistic and narrative technique. When executed tastefully, it calls no attention to itself and doesn’t imply any staginess. Instead, it allows the actors to do their thing in real time, which can make the mundane riveting. There’s also the opportunity to relay enormous amounts of information to the viewer elegantly and economically. This approach was more common during the studio days, falling out of favor only as audience attention spans declined. Nowadays, I suspect our culture has retreated so far from this aesthetic that we’ll never see it used on the same scale again. That’s a loss for everyone.
Please don’t counter with the stupendous, one-hundred-nineteen-minute, single-take achievement realized by Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC in 1917. That was an admitted one-off whose reason for being occupies a category of its own. The Servant represents a different way of thinking through which the consistency of temporal continuity says something powerful about the characters who play the scene. Pay special attention to how the smallest of camera moves compliment the blocking. They guide your eye to what’s most important in the frame and allow the actors to create their own coverage. Very, very clever…
Props to Joseph Losey!
I always loved continuous takes, but I love them when they are meaningful and they don’t drag the attention to themselves, like in this example. For me, they must have a storytelling purpose and not being an exercise of style; if the audience pays attention to the cinematography rather than the story, I’ve done a bad job. Professionals and experts should be the only one noticing these cinematography skills, but the audience should get lost in the emotions of the scene. Cinematography is a “stealth in-your-face” job: it’s in front of your eyes, but you should not see it.
I love the uninterrupted takes especially when they have some of those, as I call them, the “Scandinavian (or Norden) reaction dialogues” where the camera points at the reaction of a character, rather than framing the person talking (think of the model scene in “Triangle of sadness” or Detective Richard Lu’s interrogation in Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park”.)
A good single take often has those moments and, if done well, it can really pull you inside the emotional flow of the scene, juggling between those who talk and those who listen.
Great scene! When a continuous shot is done well, you don’t notice the lack of cuts. I remember watching Orson Welles’ “Macbeth” and after watching one scene I had to stop and rewind because I then realized that there hadn’t been any cuts, it was so fluid — and the staging involved a hill and steps, etc. It’s nice when a cut means something dramatically or symbolically rather than cutting because the staging couldn’t show what was important, or cutting out of fear of audience boredom.