Shot Length/The Long Take

Bottle films, unlike contemporary Hollywood films, use different editing techniques in order to immerse the audience in the films narrative. In her essay The Action Sequence (2011) Lisa Purse cites David Bordwells writings on contemporary editing.Bordwell suggests that due to the inexpensive nature of editing “todays films are on average cut more rapidly than at any other time in US studio filmmaking”. Later in her essay Purse references Geoff King who talks of Impact Aesthetic, a mode of filmmaking characterised by: objects being hurled towards the camera, shaky cam, loud noises and quick paced editing. This mode of filmmaking immerses the audience  by assaulting their senses- it’s designed to unsettle yet entertain viewers in a similar fashion to riding a rollercoaster at a theme park would. The experience is more reliant on cheap filmic thrills as opposed to thought provoking narrative.This paradigm shift has meant that many contemporary films do not have a narrative punctuated by moments of action, instead the narrative is derived from many fluid action sequences. This unfortunate trend of rapid fire editing can be attributed to the Western Worlds broader media environment, where advertisements, ‘flash’ Facebook videos and paragraph length articles dominate. Bottle film in its very nature subverts this type of film making. Instead of maintaining audience interest through quick cutting it instead uses the confines of its single location. The genre requires a slow edit in order to draw the audience into its space. In the creation of my piece I discovered that the single location setting when mixed with the long take creates an unparalleled sense of realism that is reminiscent of being at the theatre. In editing my Media piece I discovered that the scenes shot as long takes were the most interesting because a) the actors have more to do, they didn’t have the opportunity to quickly turn off and on a character like in a short take B) There was more information in the frame, at times all actors were doing interesting things and C) The long take grounds Bottle Drama in realism, when the camera is fixed in the one shot for a long time the viewer gets a fly on the wall perspective which has the effect of making the viewer feel like they are really there and that the scene is actually happening. Unlike other genres where the quick cut is often used to disorientate the viewer within the filmic space, the long take in Bottle film subversively presents “space and time uninterrupted by the cinematic cut” which, in a day and age where the correlation between film and theatre gets exponentially smaller, is far more interesting.