http://www.ce-review.org/00/39/kinoeye39_halligan.html

• “Eisenstein makes thought into a despot: it leaves no “air,” nothing of that unspoken elusiveness which is perhaps the most captivating quality of all art…”
  – Tarkovsky on Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneering theory and practise of montage editing
• “Art can never have the interplay of concepts as its ultimate goal. The image is tied to the concrete and the material, yet reaches out along mysterious paths to regions beyond the spirit…”
  – Tarkovsky regarding the notion of the ‘third image’ that one conceptualises when consuming a sequence of shots and ordering them to conceive meaning
• “The speed of the tracking is of the utmost importance here; its slowness strips the camera movement of a narrative function, since the camera movement does not advance the narrative progression of the film in this long take … Having removed it from the context of the film’s narrative, it reworks it as a meditative, perhaps hallucinatory, swell of mobile imagery … It is an existential moment in the film and an equivalent existential gesture on Tarkovsky’s part, the speed of this tracking shot.”
  – Benjamin Halligan, the author of the article, analysing Tarkovsky’s use of slow camera movement as ‘existential’ rather than a device to construct meaning
• “Bazin compared [the long take] to a suspect under police interrogation: eventually the suspect will crack and reveal the truth if questioned long enough. Likewise, if the camera is left running long enough, eventually reality will crack and surrender itself to the camera, and the camera can capture this reality accordingly.”
  – Halligan on André Bazin, a French film theorist who considered long takes to be “segment[s] of life”

I find Tarkovsky’s rejection of Eisenstein’s methods and his insight into the potential of cinema as an art from truly exciting. While I understand the power of the edit and the unique attribute of cinema in being able to convey meaning through a succession of shots and cuts, I also believe that cinema is unique as a medium of movement. I feel as though this is fundamentally what makes it so interesting, and what gives it most of its potential.

With this in mind, I agree with Tarkovsky’s statements. Particularly I am drawn to the ‘unspoken elusiveness’ that he speaks of, which I feel is the key commonality that surges through all art. This, and the ‘air’ that he feels that Eisenstein lacks in his methods, I think directly relates to the capturing of unanticipated occurrences during a long take. A long take inflates itself with this air over time, until eventually it pushes through the screen and the barrier between the viewer and the substance of the image is greatly diminished.

It is this nature of the long take that I am most deeply intrigued by. It has helped me realise that my clearest objective this semester in Ways of Making is to improve my capability as an artistic director. I feel that a productive way to practise this and bring myself closer to it is to coordinate a series of long takes, often repeating the same sequence, noting particularly the idiosyncratic separation that is inherent in these repeated sequences.

I shall leave you with the piece of wisdom that drew me to Tarkovsky’s visions and film philosophy in the first place: