The Long Take

Critical Approaches

John Gibbs, Douglas Pye, John Gibbs, Douglas Pye

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137585721
• eBook ISBN: 9781137585738
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This is the first book in English exclusively devoted to the long take, one of the key elements of film style. Increasingly visible in contemporary international media, the long take currently attracts a good deal of attention in criticism and commentary. There are also significant strands of film theory in which duration has become a recurrent concern.

In keeping with the approach of Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, this collection is devoted to the detailed critical analysis of specific long takes, explored in terms of how they function within their contexts, how they shape the visual field, the meanings they generate and the effects they create. The Long Take: Critical Approaches brings together essays by established and emerging scholars (all but one essay commissioned for this volume) in an exciting collection that analyses works from a range of filmmaking traditions, from the 1930s to the present day, selected to represent varied long take practices and to explore associated debates.

Table of contents

• The Long Take Critical Approaches
• Introduction 1: The Long Take—Critical Approaches
• Introduction 2: The Long Take—Concepts, Practices, Technologies, and Histories
• Three Long Takes: Le Crime de M. Lange (Jean Renoir 1935)
• The Average Long Take
• Looking and Touching: The Long Take in Five Women Around Utamaro (Mizoguchi Kenji 1946)
• Opening Movements in Ophuls: Long Takes, Leading Characters and Luxuries
• Like Motion Pictures: Long Take Staging in Vincente Minnelli’s Bells Are Ringing (1960)
• Roberto Rossellini Presents
• Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Jon Jost 1977)
• To Be in the Moment: On (Almost) Not Noticing Time Passing in Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater 1995)
• Watching Cinema Disappear: Intermediality and Aesthetic Experience in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) and Stray Dogs (2013)
• 13 Ways of Looking at a Lake
• The Artists’ Long Take as Passage in Sharon Lockhart’s Installation Lunch Break (2008)
• The Search for Meaning in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2011)
• Working Space: Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) and the Digital Long Take
• True Detective (2014), Looking (2014), and the Televisual Long Take
• Index