Musing on Tarkovsky’s wisdom and thinking about my ambition to grow as a director, or ‘artistic director’ as I suggested in my last post, I have developed more thoroughly a plan for my research in the coming weeks. I intend to produce and examine a collection of long takes, treating them as their own entities removed from their usual position within a film.

In order for my experiment to progress my research I will need to establish consistency, which will prompt me to write a number of scenes or sequences to film, each with a different degree of choreography. That is, some scenes will demand strict movement and participation of the actors, whereas others will be quite loose in their activity. I will then shoot these sequences multiple times and treat each take as a different incarnation of the concept. Comparing the takes, I will note the nuances and the unintended elements they introduce to these takes. In this sense, I shall invite any unintended activity and possibly even follow its lead should it arise and tempt me accordingly.

As a result of conducting this experiment, I hope to increase my ability to notice the elusiveness of the world and, as I mentioned earlier, my proficiency as an artist within the cinematic world.

Finally, I would like to draw attention to another piece that inspired me and prodded me in this direction. The film is Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), which if anything is an experimentation and investigation of long takes as an aspect of cinema. The film is simultaneously a realistic and absurd piece; it merges space, time, sound and reality in such a way that not many films are capable of. The title of the film proposes a central concept to its being as a ‘structural film’ (concerned with form), as the sound and image interplay to extend and somewhat reimagine the notion of a wavelength.

To elaborate, the film’s soundtrack primarily consists of a pitch that gradually inclines as the film goes on – in other words, the wavelength is extended. At the same time, the zoom, angle and focus constantly change, interpreting the static space we are exposed to in different ways. It could be said that the changing frequency is an auditory representation of these fluctuating readings of the space.

I feel that this piece relates to my own research as it treats the long take as something removed from the traditional structure of film. It is, in this instance, a fragment of existence, a thought, a concept, a question, among many other things. Perhaps above all, it celebrates the oneness of everything. At least to me anyway.

See below a link to the entire film.