Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Camera Movement
Camera movement is used to express the giddiness of love in Max Ophüls’s La Ronde ( Roundabout, 1950). EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
use deceptive visual strategies to hide the film’s seven
cuts. The advent of digital video, however, has opened
up new opportunities for filmmakers interested in the
extreme long take, as videotapes can record over two
hours of material. An eighty-six-minute Steadicam shot
forms the entirety of Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov,
2002), tracking through thousands of actors depicting a
series of moments in Russian history. The choreography
of the camera and actors as they move through St.
Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum produces a constantly
changing array of compositions that operate in lieu of
editing. Timecode (Mike Figgis, 2000) uses digital technology
to experiment with duration and simultaneity;
four discrete long takes unspool in quadrants of the
frame, each revealing the simultaneous action of different
characters who eventually meet.
The ability of digital video to produce extended shot
lengths would very likely have appealed to André Bazin, the
first film critic to champion the long take. He celebrated
the photographic properties of cinema and the film camera’s
unique ability to record continuous space and time,
thereby revealing the reality of the world in front of the
lens. Although he recognized that film could never completely
reproduce reality, Bazin argued that technological
and stylistic developments could advance the medium
closer to that goal. In particular, he embraced the ability
of long takes with camera movement, deep space staging,
and deep focus cinematography to maintain the spatial
and temporal unity of recorded events and make ambiguous
the most significant action within the frame. Bazin
thus elevated the work of Jean Renoir (1894–1979),
William Wyler (1902–1981), and others, who frequently
used long takes and attempted to capture the spontaneity,
ambiguity, and specificity of reality as it unfolds over
time.
SEE ALSO Cinematography; Shots; Technology
198 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM