Cutting The Edit: The Science and Art of The Unbroken Shot – Victoria – Out Friday
Out in cinemas this week is Sebastian Schipper’s film Victoria, a 134 minute story of a young girl over the course of one night in Berlin. The most remarkable thing about the film is that it is shot in one single unbroken shot with not an edit in sight.
The notion of shooting a film in one take is nothing new – Russian Ark is famed for being one remarkable tracking shot taking in 300 years of Russian history involving 2,000 actors, three orchestras and not one solitary edit. Yet the idea of an unbroken shot is always one that tends to raise a few eyebrows. Editing is often key to cinema and many films are ‘found’ in the editing process while some even have been saved. An edit can transcend space and time like no other tool in few other mediums, with arguably the most famous one being the match cut that links the dawn of man to the space age near the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Unbroken shots however almost have the opposite effect; time becomes real and unbroken shots themselves take on a whole new meaning.
In Scorsese’s Goodfellas there is the famous scene in which Henry Hill and Karen make their way through the back door of a nightclub into the kitchen and to the very front of the room. It is used to demonstrate the character’s journey, a metaphor of the way Hill has risen to the top through a unconventional (and illegal) methods.
Another character’s journey demonstrated through a famous tracking shot is that of Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s 1978 classic Halloween. The edit at the end of the shot is a well-known disturbing twist in which the murderer is revealed to be a six year old boy. Yet what is more disturbing is that Carpenter puts us the audience in the mind of the killer and we are a part of his journey to becoming a murderer. The opening of Halloween is actually comprised of two unbroken shots thanks to the edit in which Michael puts on his clown mask but it’s designed to look continuous.
During this shot though, Judith Myers becomes the first victim of one of the rules of the slasher film – don’t have sex – but the elapsed time of the continuous shot can be called into question. Judith and her boyfriend go upstairs, get undressed and have sex before he gets dressed and makes his way down the stairs in just one minute and twenty seconds. Even for hormonal teenagers, that’s extremely quick. We can therefore assume that Carpenter has, within the confines of the continuous shot, condensed time somewhat. It’s an unusual technique and one that is perhaps explored more overtly in Birdman.
The entire film in that instance is designed to look like one continuous shot. It isn’t, of course, and equally does not take place in real time but Innaritu’s film is an expertly designed technical achievement and interestingly became the first best film Oscar winner to not receive a best editing nomination for 34 years (and this fact alone shows how highly thought of the editing process is in some film circles). Yet the purpose of Birdman’s look is perhaps to serve as a reminder that in other artistic mediums, namely the theatre which Birdman is primarily about, there are no visible edits at all. While the stage lights and curtain break up the action, time is often condensed right in front of you, albeit often in the dark. And Russian Ark, which has no cuts, invisible or other wise, condenses three hundred years of history into under two hours although thanks to the floating camera, that has a more dreamlike quality and the moves into each separate room are in many respects a substitute for edits themselves.
This brings us to Hitchcock’s 1948 masterpiece Rope. The technicalities of making a feature in one take back then were impossible so but Hitchcock hid many of the edits, much like Inniratu over sixty years later. Rope though takes place in real time and crucially, nothing really happens in it. The murder occurs barely on screen at the very start and the tension in the film is over the question of whether the body will be discovered. Yet Hitchcock uses the long takes not only to demonstrate the real time aspect of the film but to create something of meta tension. Hitchock reportedly felt that Rope was an experiment that didn’t work and the long takes was little more than a stunt, but by filming in such a way, the actors started to get visibly nervous knowing that one mistake would result in a re-set. The on-screen tension is in many ways, very real.
While Hitchcock may have only experimented with unbroken shots, a director who has made them a trademark of his work is Steve McQueen. Hunger’s central scene, the moral heart of the film, is a seventeen minute shot between Michael Fassbender’s IRA activist Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham’s Catholic priest. The pair represent two sides of the same coin, trying to achieve a similar goal but at odds with the moral complexities of the hunger strike. By setting the camera in between the two of them and not cutting, McQueen positions the audience as a neutral, giving each argument the exact same viewpoint and allowing the viewer to come to their own conclusions about the titular hunger strike.
In Shame, McQueen tracks Fassbender’s sex addict Brandon on a night run through New York while his sister is having a one night stand in his apartment with his married boss. This is an early indication of where we are heading with Brandon– at the films climax we follow him into the night again, this time driven by his own desires and with very dark consequences.
And in 12 Years A Slave there is a gut-wrenching four minute shot of Edwin Epps whipping Patsey to near death. We don’t want to watch but the lack of editing offers us no comfort or break from the horrors on screen. The evils of slavery had been somewhat forgotten until 12 Years A Slave was released and McQueen is demonstrating how we as a race should never forget or turn away from them. Similarly, last year’s quite remarkable film The Tribe has many unbroken shots, one of which shows an abortion. Although we can (fortunately) see next to nothing of what is physically happening, the lack of a cut is what makes the scene so uncomfortable – we can cover our eyes or turn away but the camera itself is unflinching and there is no end in sight. A similar practice occurs is Gasper Noe’s Irreversible.
Going back to McQueen’s Hunger and we come to the very similarly themed and equally brilliant Stations of the Cross. The films is made up of fourteen scenes, each filmed in an unbroken shot and each representing the lead character Maria’s journey which mirrors the fourteen stations of the cross that Christ encountered on his path to Golgotha. The breakdown is very deliberate with the camera itself almost marking each station while the action in front of the camera brings out the themes and tells the story.
Yet for all the artistry and meaning behind unbroken takes, there is often another reason for their use – money. Many of the films discussed herein were shot on a low budget and the sheer logistics of filmmaking mean long takes can be a godsend to filmmakers. In Joe Wright’s Atonement there is a remarkable unbroken shot lasting over five minutes on Dunkirk beach, but Wright claimed in an interview that part of the thinking behind it was to save on money and time.
For all the set-up that was required in front of the camera, the shot, once successfully captured, completed a large section of the film. Unbroken takes can be set in real time but also captured in real time, a real godsend in low budget filmmaking (in contrast to some big budget set-pieces which are sometimes accused of being over edited). I once produced a short film call This is How that was written and designed to be one unbroken shot. This meant it could be made very quickly and subsequently for absolutely no money, a key part of the ethos we have at Outward Film Network. As it goes, This is How was nominated as one of the ten finalists for ‘One shot movie’, which celebrates the art of the unbroken shot.
And the art of the unbroken shot is something that really should be celebrated in cinema. It shows a sense of daring that manages to, in equal parts, break a key convention of filmmaking yet equally celebrating in so many ways the artistry of the craft.
Written by Phil Slatter
VICTORIA HITS CINEMAS TOMORROW
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