by BRETT MCCRACKEN

The long take is, in my opinion, the most cinematic of all cinematic devices. It gets to the heart of what cinema is: a series of moving images that captures time as it happens. It has recently been used in gimmicky and show-offy ways (Children of Men, Atonement, etc), albeit to spectacular effect. But the long take is far more than just a tactic for the skillful filmmaker to use and exploit to wow his or her audience. No, the long take is the heart of cinema. Or, at least, it is the heart of cinema’s potential for the transcendent.

Cinema as a medium is unique in its relationship to time, and thus its potential for transcendence has a lot to do with its temporal nature. Of course, this all has roots in photography—itself an art of temporal orientation. Susan Sontag, in her influential book On Photography, spoke of photography as “an elegiac art, a twilight art,” suggesting that “to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

Russian filmmaker/theorist Andrei Tarkovsky believed cinema went even further than the still photograph, and was the first medium to allow man to take an impression of time as it unfolds. He wrote about this in Sculpting in Time:

“I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience—and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer … As he buys his ticket, it’s as if the cinema-goer were seeking to make up for the gaps in his own experience, throwing himself into a search for ‘lost time.’” (Sculpting in Time, 63, 82).

Indeed, I feel this to be true in my own cinema-going. I go to movies to recapture time—that achingly pervasive burden that keeps us so unceasingly busy in our normal lives. In the movies, time is “free.” We need not worry about our own time; all that is required of us is that we cede our imagination to the screen, where time is footloose and fancy free, dancing to and fro in flashback, flashforward, slow-mo, still, etc.

Andrei Tarkovsky

I like how George Steiner, in Real Presences, captures the beauty of giving ourselves over to “performed time,” in this case music: “The time which music ‘takes,’ and which it gives as we perform or experience it, is the only free time granted to us prior to death.”

Steiner points to the expression of time in art as a key to “the other.” Artists, Steiner writes, “tell us of the irreducible weight of otherness, of enclosedness, in the texture and phenomenality of the material world. Only art can go some way towards making accessible, towards waking into some measure of communicability, the sheer inhuman otherness of matter… It is poetics, in the full sense, which inform us of the visitor’s visa in place and in time which defines our status as transients in a house of being whose foundations, whose future history, whose rationale—if any—lie wholly outside our will and comprehension” (Real Presences 14).

In other words, it is the very temporality of art—that creative framing of some aspect of reality, which is always enveloped in time—that most draws us in to it.

But why is the experience of time and temporality so crucial to our appreciation of the arts? Why, for example, will a “one time live concert” always be more moving and memorable than a CD recording that we can freely recall at any whim?

Tarkovsky helps illuminate it a bit in his discussion of memory, which he believes is closely tied to time. “[Memory] sows in man a sense of dissatisfaction. It makes us vulnerable, subject to pain.” The present is elusive—it “slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers,” but the past (through memory) “settles in our soul as an experience placed within time” (Sculpting in Time 58)

Indeed, our lives are marked by a temporality in which much of our existence—even daily, momentary existence—is immediate past. When we experience this very temporality of time, as we do in cinema, we are given a reprieve to sit back, still, above and outside of time. Here we are reminded of just how rare and wonderful the present is, and how its absence (that is, the absence of a world truly outside of time), is evidence of some other, more perfect world.

Long, uninterrupted shots in cinema, I contend, are the best example of how cinema “redeems” time, in a sense. In the long take, the film camera unobtrusively documents the passing of time, in “real” time that resists the temptation to edit out “unnecessary” moments, but rather focuses the viewer to experience the reality of time, as it happens.

Here, we feel time. We feel it as if we were there, experiencing it too. In Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, the luxurious long takes bring us along for a real-time, mid-afternoon soiree in Paris—allowing us the pain and pleasure of an all-too-short reunion that threatens to end before it begins.

But the long take is not always so directly infused with time (in this watching the clock sense) as much as it is an embodiment of reality—that realm of physical, earth-bound being of which time is but one major characteristic.

Theologian Paul Tillich—the rare protestant thinker who dealt seriously with aesthetic theory—might clarify things a bit when he says, “In the proximate, the daily, the apparently small, there is hidden in truth the metaphysical; the here-and-now is the place where meaning is disclosed, where our existence must find interpretation, if it can find an interpretation at all.”

The here and now? Is Tillich really saying that everyday reality, the little moments of mundane being, are the key to metaphysical meaning? Yes, he is, and to my mind there is no better medium for proving Tillich right than cinema—which focuses our attention (or can) on the most mundane of realities.

Here I think of Gus Van Sant’s films—the artsy ones at least. Gerry is the most obvious example. The film—starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck as friends who get lost in the desert—is about 90% long take. There is scant dialogue and little expressive indulgence aside from the fact that the camera is so persistently tedious in its following these men as they silently walk through the barren landscapes of the desert. Many people would call it terribly boring. I look at it differently—as a meditation on time and reality. Where else but in a theater watching Gerry do I sit still and observe the passing of things for 90 minutes?

Long takes are most effective when they serve no real storytelling function. Van Sant is the best at just letting the camera go—serving no plot but rather the humans and landscapes they lazily move through. In Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park, Van Sant’s camera latches on to some physical body and doesn’t let go, following it as it moves quietly down a path, across a field, through a house, or whatever. There is no storytelling here; just time and unfolding materiality.

Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer writes in Theory of Film that moments of raw materiality like this should be allowed, in cinema, to exist independent of the larger narrative, telling stories of their own, which “for a transient moment makes one completely forget the manifest story” (302). When fragmentary moments of reality are allowed to exist outside of the larger story of the film, they have the potential to “open up a dimension much wider than that of the plots which they sustain” (303). The primary function of cinema is to open up reality—through the ambiguity of the image—and to re-focus the spectator on the mundane and everyday elements of life that are typically taken for granted (or lost in the jungle of abstraction and science). Cinema serves to reconnect humanity with its estranged material habitat, urging us to look closer and see the world for the concrete thing that it is.

The idea here is that just by showing/revealing reality, there is vast meaning conveyed to the viewer; there are inherent signifiers in nature that carry profound meaning apart from any symbolic function imposed by the artist/filmmaker. A long shot of blowing grass in a field, or of a flying bird in the sky, for example, can focus the spectator on the being of that grass or that bird as such. There is no need for expressive metaphor via montage in order for some image to mine the “lower depths” of this mysterious world; images left to be what they are—records of the material world—are enough to key us in to the ineffable.

So there you have it: my argument for the long take. There are many other ones too, most of them more practical minded (e.g. the idea that the long take enhances dramatic tension or allows space for cathartic reflection, etc).

Ultimately, I think that the long take as I conceive of it in its pure, non-utilitarian form, is a rare thing in cinema, which—given the commercial constraints inherent to the medium—is probably for good reason. But that just makes it all the more precious.

Brett McCracken lives in Los Angeles where he received his master’s degree in cinema and media studies at UCLA. He currently works full-time for Biola University as managing editor for Biola magazine. He also writes film reviews for Relevant Magazine and Christianity Today. He blogs regularly at The Search.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Film Reviews, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.