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Writing with a Camera: A Take on Long Take Tracking Shots

Dr. Hyperbolus — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:14:21 +0000

Next week, Doc Salvatron and I will be collaborating on back-to-back posts about The Red Balloon, the classic short film by Albert Lamorisse, and the feature film it inspired, Flight of the Red Balloon, by Hsiao-hsien Hou.

This week, inspired by the style of Hsiao-hsien Hou and by a film I watched called Nine Lives, I’m going to talk a little about long take shots in film.

If images and sounds are the words a filmmaker uses to write, then long takes are like run-on sentences — not always grammatically correct, but sometimes the best way to invoke the depth and feeling of a moment. In film, they are the closest thing to a live performance. To pull them off requires great skill, timing and coordination between the director, cast and crew, all working together for an inspired moment of creativity. The best long take tracking shots are both visually dazzling and technically innovative, like a grand magic trick. But most importantly, they serve to tell the story. Here are just a few of the strongest examples:

Touch of Evil (1958) — directed by Orson Welles

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The grandaddy of them all. This sweeping crane shot at once introduces the setting, the main characters, and the key dramatic conflict, all in the span of a ticking time bomb.

Goodfellas (1990) – directed by Martin Scorsese

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This kind of shot is now the standard on television shows today, but Martin Scorsese invented the aesthetic. When he was denied permission to go through the front entrance at the Copacabana, he took a Steadicam and went in the back way instead. What’s remarkable is how they dealt with the lighting challenges of shooting down long corridors and in tight spaces throughout.

Oldboy (2003) – directed by Chan Wook Park

(Note: This long take shot happens about 30 seconds into the video.)

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There’s not really much to the actual shot here — the camera simply tracks back and forth to catch the action — but in an era where most fight scenes are made in the editing room, this one was made in the camera.

The Passenger (1975) – directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

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Here is the rare occasion when a long take tracking shot ends the film. David Locke (Jack Nicholson) lies down on his bed. From there, the camera slowly takes us outside his window, then turns around to reveal he has been murdered. In this way, it sort of goes against the showy nature of the long take technique — using offscreen sound and shot length to heighten tension. Antonioni, no doubt, has been one of the influences for HHH, and his own long take style.

Nine Lives (2005) – directed by Rodrigo Garcia

In Nine Lives, Rodrigo Garcia tells the stories of nine different women — the story of each one filmed in one long take. In this scene, Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) ping-pongs between her parents (Sissy Spacek and Ian McShane) who, while not communicating directly with each other, ask Samantha incessantly about each other. The choice to shoot in one take here makes sense, because it allows the natural tension in the scene to be revealed through the actors.

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An effective long take tracking shot can be a calling card for a director. For that reason, directors today often employ them to demonstrate their filmmaking prowess and style — sort of like stepping in front of the camera and waving to the audience. With advances in technology, long takes can be faked in post-production, by cleverly concealing cuts between shots and errors in shots. While this takes away from the production aspect of creating a great single shot, these techniques still continue the spirit of the long take tradition. Long take tracking shots can be seen regularly in the work of Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michel Gondry, and Joe Wright, who all continue the technical and creative wizardry put forth by Welles and Scorsese.

What are your favorite long take tracking shots?

Are there examples of something like long take tracking shots in other art forms?

Rian Johnson’s Festival of Fakery: F for Fake

Dr. Hyperbolus — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:22:49 +0000

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”

– Pablo Picasso

So what then, is art? The answer to that question today encompasses far more than it ever has — thanks to technology (which more and more helps us to synthesize reality) and the variety of media available to us (books, TV, the Internet, movies, music, radio, comic books, etc.). We have become so good at representing reality that sometimes we use the real to make a fake: should The Daily Show, for example, be considered art? Should this Kobe Bryant commercial? But then, the media themselves, by definition, are also fake: they are the conduits through which we see reality, and not reality itself.

In F for Fake, Orson Welles explores the nature of “truth in art” by telling the story of a highly successful art forger. That’s just his premise though. It’s in the presentation of ideas that makes this a rare, inventive, and truly post-modern film experience.

Collaborating with producer Francois Reichenbach, Welles was supposed to be making a film about Elmyr de Hory, one of the greatest art forgers of the 20th century. But, almost immediately, the film starts to twist and turn. One of Welles’ primary sources is writer Clifford Irving, who had written a biography about Elmyr de Hory. Turns out that, as Welles was editing the film, Clifford Irving was revealed to be a shamster himself — after falsely claiming to have written the autobiography of Howard Hughes. (Irving’s story is told in the movie The Hoax, with Richard Gere playing Irving.) So Welles includes the story of Irving’s hoax, as they together uncover the story behind the fakery of de Hory. Make sense?

That’s not all. Welles touches briefly on Howard Hughes, the super-secretive celebrity billionaire who went all-out for world fame, won it, and then got to be more famous trying for privacy. He talks about himself, and how he unexpectedly found fame through a fake of his own: his radio rendition of The War of The Worlds. Then we follow de Hory through his process of making a fake masterpiece. Elmyr de Hory started out as most artists do: imitating others. Then he made an art out of reproducing the art of others. He couldn’t sell his own art, but art dealers clamored for his fakes.

“If you hang them in a museum, or in your collection,” de Hory tells us, “and if they hang long enough there, they will become real.” And he’s right: it’s revealed in the film that some “prominent museums”, thinking they were buying a painting by Matisse or Madrigliani, had been fooled into buying his clever fake.

In an introduction to the film on the Criterion disc, Peter Bogdanovich describes F for Fake as “an unusual film”. Indeed, the film is an exhibition of filmmaking acrobatics by Welles. As director, he blends several storylines and footage from different formats into a coherent, nonlinear whole. His voice narrates the feature, and he appears throughout — not just as the host and star of the film, but also as a subject.

Throughout F for Fake, Welles uses a device to establish distance between the viewer, himself, and the subject — sometimes incorporating himself into it. He shows a shot from the film (over which sometimes we hear him in voiceover) — then cuts back to that same shot, as seen on a Moviola screen. It’s not a device I’ve seen often in feature documentaries — usually, the filmmaking is not the story; the subject is. But here, the subject is fakery, so the device promotes his theme, the game-like tone of the film, and reminds us that films themselves (especially this one) are all a kind of fake.

There’s a brief subplot at the end of the film that I think leads it astray, involving Pablo Picasso, Welles, and his then-girlfriend Oja Kodar. But maybe, somehow, it was meant to. F for Fake is more than your conventional documentary. It’s a film that poses a lot of interesting questions about what makes art, and what makes good art. The question is not, as Clifford Irving tells us, whether it’s real or fake. “It’s whether it’s a good fake or a bad fake.”

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