The Long Take, Reconsidered

For a long stretch of the last two decades, the long take functioned mostly as a flex — a way for a director to announce, in a single unbroken shot lasting several minutes, that they were capable of choreographing a scene most productions would have cut into a dozen pieces. Audiences noticed. Awards bodies noticed even more.

The trouble with a technique that becomes a signal of ambition is that ambition, eventually, becomes the point, and the shot stops serving the story it was supposed to be inside of. We have all sat through sequences where the absence of a cut felt less like immersion and more like a director tapping us on the shoulder to make sure we were watching them work.

What is encouraging about this year's festival crop is how many directors are using the long take for the opposite effect — not to draw attention to the camera, but to remove the viewer's ability to look away from something uncomfortable. A single unbroken shot through an argument, a job loss, a diagnosis delivered in a hospital corridor, refuses the mercy of a cut to black. You stay in the room because the film will not let you leave it.

This is closer to what the technique was capable of all along, before it became shorthand for craft. Duration, used honestly, is not a display of control; it is a refusal of control, a decision to let a scene run past the point where editing would normally step in to shape our sympathies for us.

The best of this year's long takes are barely noticeable as long takes at all. You do not clock the absence of a cut until the scene is over and you realize how long you were made to sit with something you would have preferred to look away from. That is the technique doing its actual job, at last.