Admiring The Beauty of 'Long Takes' in Film :Russian Ark

Even if you're not a big film fan, you're aware that films are composed of scenes, and scenes are snippets of narrative that relay events from the previous scenes to progress that narrative.

Long takes are essentially scenes, although they're filmed in a more creative, linear fashion: the long take will not feature any quick cuts or edits, but will simply follow a particular event or person over the course of several minutes; there's even the odd film that goes as far as filming its entirety in one shot, without a single cut or edit. A recent example of a long take in film is the credit sequence in Edger Wright's Baby Driver, in which Baby strolls through the streets as he occasionally dances to the music he's listening to.

Long takes are often pure creative freedom for a filmmaker, but they're far from simple to create. Long takes often require perfect timing and choreography among the actors, extras, and film crew to successfully pull off, and that tends to be the reason as to why they aren't used very often: they simply take up too much time, and time is precious when you're potentially handling several millions of dollars and have a schedule to finish filming by.

The average viewer won't really admire a long take when they see one, and it can quite easily bore the viewer if they aren't aware of the sheer creativity and precise execution it took to create. Scene cuts can often be a quick break for the viewer to acknowledge what they've seen and prepare for the next set of events.

Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón contains one of the most famous long takes in film; it spans over the course of six total minutes, as the protagonist is caught up between two groups fighting. The long take adds to the immersion and sheer chaos of war--especially as a civilian--as the protagonist constantly pushes from one place to another amidst the gunfire. It's a perfect example of how easily something can go wrong; just one extra out of place can send that long take straight to the beginning, wasting potentially hours of preparation.

There's the odd film which has taken long takes a step further: instead of a few minutes, the entirety is filmed in one take, commonly it's referred to as a one-shot feature.

One of the most notable one-shot feature films is Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark. Filmed over the course of several days in the Winter Palace in Russia, it follows 300 years of history within the palace over the course of 96 minutes. How the film managed to successfully film it is beyond incredible given their short amount of preparation and filming time, as well as the fact that the film contains several live orchestras (not to forget the 2000 total extras that participated) without a single error.