The Long Take – Filtering Information

The long take is an interesting tool when it comes to narrative. It brings film closer to its theatric roots by discarding cutting, yet also distances itself in the fact that it often omits large portion of the sets information. The long take gives an incredibly unique sense of perspective in all the films that utilise it and I found the attempt to make a one minute film without a cut to be an incredibly difficult thing to engineer.

Before beginning the workshop I was well aware of the preparation that goes into a long take. When you completely discard the ability to ‘fix it in post’ you end up with an unmatched necessity to carry out a perfect performance. This sort of take also restricts the time and set of ones filming. Not only are we stuck in real time, whoever or whatever is holding the camera must have the dynamic ability within the set to follow the information of the take without disruption. With this in mind we were set to the task of making a one minute film without cuts, the theme of which being ‘misunderstanding’.

Straight away it was clear that this task sought to engage us with how a take of this kind interacts with information, how it creates and excludes information. When you are working with a shot of this kind everything that occurs within the shot must be pre-emptively planned as you cannot decide later how information is displayed to the viewer. Misunderstanding is created by intentional omission of information, making the audience assume the situation is something other than it is. It also necessitates an exact point in which the omitted information comes to light and the audience must revise their hypothesis of the scene. This task sought to make us dictate exactly what information was delivered to the viewer, and when. Manipulation of both time and space would be paramount to getting this concept right.

Screenshot from The Shining (1980) – Stanley Kubrick

With this in mind my group pondered what narrative we could undertake given the limited set, characters, props, and time we were allocated. A natural effect of the long take, as punctuated by directors such as Stanley Kubrick, is a building of suspense. As the scene drags on one becomes hyper-aware that at some point it must come to an end. The lack of cut builds a sense of climax for the eventual end of the shot, as it must surely be something of importance. With this in mind we developed the shot as the tracking of an unknown woman by an unknown viewer. The concept was that longer the camera followed her, the more tension would be built for an eventual confrontation. This tension-building gave itself nicely to the concept of this woman being stalked.

The stalking action also lends itself well to the long take due to the movement of the camera often becoming something like a perspective shot. The audience follows characters, looking around at their interactions as though we are there following them. This effect is often developed because, the longer the shot, the harder it is to utilise tracks or dollies to follow the action. Necessity humanises the cameras movement. It was in this feeling of perspective that we chose to hide our information… that we chose to create our ‘misunderstanding’. We could naturally create a point of view from a ‘stalker’ that, with cautious movements and ominous music, would suggest to the audience that the woman was in imminent danger.

Just before the moment of ‘attack’ we made one final illusion. The long take must work incredibly hard to exclude camera and crew from the shot, but in this case we chose to actually utilise the crew to allude to our ‘stalker’ character. The position of the sun made entering the courtyard the woman  sat in impossible without a shadow of the cameraman appearing, and so _____ pulled the camera into his chest at this stage to give the appearance that it was a large man who was encroaching on this girl. Whilst unplanned this helped the narrative keep up false pretences until the moment of climax in which a rotation of the camera took it out of first-person perspective and revealed the ‘stalker’ to simply be a friend, releasing the tension at last.

For the limitations we faced I am proud of what we managed to produce. More than anything this activity made me ponder the construction of information within a shot and the dynamics of camera movement. As someone who naturally cuts quickly in the majority of my work this was a real exercise in pacing real time information and planning how the narrative would unfold. It has given me insight into the choices I make whilst filming that I rarely glimpse as someone who puts her weight so heavily on post-production. The long take is an exercise that defines the directors who attempt it due to the detail and precision needed in its construction… which is why I think it was imperative to attempt it this early in my journey as a creator. A long take makes you assess with scrutiny every portion of information you want to express to your audience, which is an important activity to partake in as, no matter where I go, I should never lose sight of what it is that I am trying to say.