The long take, a shot of some duration, was not an aesthetic choice when it was first used. Filmmakers in the early days of cinema had no choice but to shoot their works in one continuous take, until the film ran out. Even as it became technically possible to have cuts in films, the finished product would often still look more like a stage drama, with a static camera stringing together a series of narrative sections. Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) demonstrates an early use of long takes, albeit ones that tended more toward the theatrical than the cinematic.
Take-Off (1:14)
- Film:
- Trip to the Moon, The, 1902
- Director:
- Georges Méliès
- Source:
- 2002 Kino Int. Corp
- Annotated commentary by:
Larry Engel- This clip appears in:
- - Long Take
- Mise-en-Scène
In the early 1940s, the long take began to assume a more important role in the discussion of film aesthetics. The film critic and theoretician André Bazin has written about cinema’s unique ability to capture “reality,” through invisible cutting, the use of the long take, and deep focus. Bazin’s theories offered an alternative to the montage theory proposed by the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s, who favored extensive editing of their films. Two directors whom Bazin cites often in his writings on the long take and deep focus are Jean Renoir and Orson Welles. Throughout Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), for instance, there are a number of examples of deep focus combined with the long take.
Negative Review (0:42)
- Film:
- Citizen Kane, 1941
- Director:
- Orson Welles
- Source:
- 2001 Warner Home Video
- Annotated commentary by:
Richard Peña- This clip appears in:
- - Deep Focus
- Long Take
A number of films today make use of the long take. Others through the years include Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), which, through editing, creates the impression of an entire film taking placing during one take, and Mike Figgis’s Timecode (2000), which shot digitally four ninety-minute takes concurrently.