Anne Billson
Long takes make the viewer an active participant rather than a passive sponge, encouraged to scour the frame, or worry about what might enter into it.
As the rhythm of commercial movies has speeded up, long takes have increasingly become associated with slow art movies, and for many years tended to bring out the worst in me. During a shot of townsfolk tramping down the street in Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (a film famously composed of only 37 shots) I nodded off, had a little dream and woke up again – only to find the townsfolk still tramping. Bruno Dumont's L'humanité opens with a widescreen shot of a horizon, bare but for a couple of trees; a man appears on the extreme left, and you realise with a sinking feeling the camera is going to stick with him till he's toiled all the way over to the right. I started giggling before he was even halfway across.
But rewatching Omar Sharif's slow approach on camel through the desert in Lawrence of Arabia, I'm struck now by David Lean's timidity – how much more involving it would have been if he hadn't cut that long shot up into bite-sized pieces, and instead had let it play out in real time. No such restraint from Gaspar Noé, who in Irreversible refuses to cut away from Albert Dupontel smashing a man's face in with a fire extinguisher, or from Monica Bellucci being raped in a pedestrian tunnel, a take that goes on for so long the viewer passes through shock into boredom and then annoyance – always a risk with ultra-long takes, though, judging by the rest of Noé's oeuvre, it could be precisely the reaction he was setting out to provoke.
I daresay we're now so accustomed to machine-gun editing that the "subliminal" shock image of the demon face in The Exorcist doesn't seem seem so subliminal any more. But it's in horror movies that I really enjoy seeing long takes, especially the sort of dread-inducing camerawork of John Carpenter or Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Long takes make the viewer an active participant rather than passive sponge, encouraged to scour the frame, or worry about what might intrude into it. Like Smiley's spies, you're constantly scrutinising facial expressions, or on the lookout for movement that shouldn't be there.
Flurries of violent cutting obscure rather than delineate the action; the effect is impressionistic, which has its uses, but is now so prevalent I sometimes fear that generations of filmgoers will soon be incapable of tolerating longer takes, the same way high-heel wearers can no longer walk in flat shoes because their tendons have shrunk. Maybe, as suggested by the late cultural theorist Theodore Roszak, they've become so addicted to the flicker of film passing through a projector, the fix on its own is no longer potent enough. They need hyper-rapid editing as well.
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