Film Styles: Long takes and Reversing Time

By Alaine Allanigue

Long takes and Reversing Time

Cinema is an art of time and space. The duration of shot affects the understanding of ideas as well as the flow of the story. Causes and effects are basic to narratives which takes place at a certain period of time. The construction and the flow of the story are based on the presentation of a scene consecutively and the plot may show a chronological order from beginning to end. Jay Leyda also stated that the progression of a film had depended on the ‘logical’ development of shots from beginning to end. However, we have the temporal order wherein some events are presented out of the story order. A flashback is simply a portion of the story presented out of the order such as in the film Edward Scissorhands where the grandmother narrates an old story to her granddaughter. But this reordering does not confuse the viewers because of the mental capacity of our mind to rearrange the order in which they are logically had to happen. Time is an element that the spectators also follow. André Bazin made it a major view of his aesthetic that cinema records “real time”. Long takes suggests the recording of real duration which adds up to the realistic element of the film. In the films of Orson Welles, Carl Dreyer and Kenji Mizoguchi, a continuous recording of a shot in several minutes may go on without getting the attention on how long this scene is taking, and it would be impossible to analyze these films without an awareness of how long the long take can contribute to the film’s form and style. The two gay men inside a bathroom, grooming themselves shows one long take in Andy Warhol’s My Hustler.

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The use of long takes can be selective depending on the filmmaker. Like in Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane, the use of long takes is mixed with shorter shots. According to Andre Bazin, Citizen Kane moves to and fro between long takes in the dialogue scenes and rapid editing in the newsreel and other sequences. 

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Alternatively, building the entire film out of long takes is a big challenge to the filmmaker. It also depends on the filmmaker. Such films are Hitchcock’s Rope, a film composing only of eight shots. Each running a full length of a film reel. In the Philippine setting, long takes has also been an ingredient in films of Brillante Mendoza. On the other hand, the statement of unnoticeable long takes can also be differed through intentional long takes of the filmmaker. The long takes of walking in the crowded streets and the continuous shot of camera following the climb of up and down stairs of the characters are abundant in Mendoza’s Serbis. 

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Also, in the Mendoza’s Kinatay, the long take of car ride and road shots depicts the cinematic reality of the film. These dragging moments comprise to the film’s form and style too. Long takes has also been an alternative to editing. Long takes is frequently allied to the mobile frame. In the film Sisters of Gion directed by Mizoguchi, there has been no cutting but the important stages of the film were separated through the mobile frame.

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All of these correspond to the loyalty of the cinema to time. But what if time itself ruins everything? This has been one of the subjects of some films like Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible and Christopher Nolan’s Memento.  Opposite to the basic order of beginning to end, Noé’s Irréversible has given the viewers an experience that the film would be different at the moment you start from the end with a clueless beginning. In the film Irréversible, the film started with two prisoners’ conversation on how they got into jail then sirens howl outside presenting another scene leading to the arrest of Marcus and Pierre from a night gay club, Rectum. Following the scene is the tour of the hell for the audience, world of anxiety and quasi-darkness enveloped with the revengeful emotions of Marcus looking for a guy known as ‘tapeworm’. On screen, the camera takes the audience in a long take, no-cut scene of continuous search for a mysterious guy. Succeeding the scenes are the previous scenes that had happened before until the film has ended into its beginning. 

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Irreversible is a succession of sequence in reverse chronology. Though this film has used long take for every scene composing it, it has also played on the ability of reversing time. The long takes it depicted which corresponds to the real time element somehow contradicts to the form because the time is also reversed suggesting confusion on the question of real time process.

 However, reversion of time forming a circle and endless path has also been an element in some films. In Marker’s La Jetée, a prisoner who was put into an experiment to call past and future to the rescue of the present arriving him to the discovery of his own death has exhibited an exploration of film in time. Peter Wollen’s stated that Chris Marker’s La Jetée was ‘set in the present as past-of-the-future, as well as an in-between near-future from which vantage-point the story is told’.

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In Christopher Nolan’s Memento, a man with anterograde amnesia continues to find the man whom he believes had killed his wife. He depended on his photographs as guides and clues to the suspect.

A backward sequence has also been the main element of the film. The backward storytelling provides opportunity to the spectator to gain certain insights in regards to the structure and comprehension.

In the statement of Michael Tarantino (Stuck in the middle) ‘It’s not so difficult when you know the end’. Reversing time in film has provided the end unfolding in front of the eyes of the viewers. The room for the question of ‘what happened before that?’ arises which again is connected to the nature of time. 

The various ways that a film’s plot may manipulate story order, duration, and frequency illustrate how the spectator must actively participate in making sense of the film.