DailyFilmDose blog has a great collection (with youtube links) of the best ‘long takes’ (ie an uninteruppted shot with no picture edits) in cinema history…
Some I remember vividly eg the start of The Player, that fight scene in Old Boy & the car chase in Children of Men… but others made me want to go rent the DVD & watch them again. Great to see Bela Tarr included – EVERY film of his could/should be on the list…
Funnily enough it reminds me of trying to play ‘who will blink first’ with my nieces & nephews when they were tiny babies – they always win! The same would apply with these clips – the longest take possible when shooting on film is limited by the physical maximum length of a film roll, which Bela Tarr mentions in this interview is 11minutes, but again it raises an interesting difference between shooting film & shooting digital eg HD – a film like The Russian Ark is just one single looooong take… and thats it! Intriging….
